Exhibition Insight... Broached Goulder
Broached Goulder Chaise Lounge, 2019.
Broached Goulder
Words by Broached Commissions.
Images courtesy of Broached Commissions.
I want to kill anyone who thinks they own me…I am always grateful for those who genuinely invest in my practice…I have done so much more (creatively) than those family members who taught me, and done so much less (volume) than the three generations of Goulder’s who came before me…My Pop taught me to upholster like a 18th C artisan with tacks, hessian and horsehair fibre.
I loved the attention to detail and the materials. I came to hate the forms of every piece of furniture we touched...A family tradition does not equal excellence. It delivers coherence and proximity and, in the best of times, intimacy. Many of my family members should never have been furniture makers, but they continued the line. From them I learnt that passion is overcoming apathy…To continue the family business, it was essential that I left it…I shaped my body to the craft; I embraced the crafted object as sacred. For this Broached collection, I tried to relax the body and tickle the object…The CNC robot can create a more intimate work than the craftsperson can.
So, who is the craftsperson = Embouchure; the craftsperson is someone who holds their body in a certain posture to create a certain affect. This collection is a performance; of history – it is a memoir, of my skill – how I hold my body. The body lifts the weight of history, which for me and my family line is clear...I will show (myself and…) you something forgotten. A layer of manual industrial memory. An exorcism of artisanal skill…In the 1930s, my family supplied the most fashionable large department stores of Sydney with locally made furniture. Ninety years later, I am a solitary artisan supplying the wealthy with symbolic objects of refinement…For three generations my family competed in the marketplace based on price and quality. I have abandoned that game. My career has been focused purely on excellence of craftsmanship. Now the robots and algorithms are catching up with the solitary privileged space once occupied by the craftsman…What is left for the artisan is storytelling; combining forms and materials in a manner that conveys a unique subjectivity – a wild, broken, joyful, enormous human experience, stitched together with love…This is where we’ve always wanted to be: vulnerable, barely sustainable, but highly visible and symbolically meaningful. ***
GOULDER ON GOULDER written by Lou Weis
Broached Goulder Freestanding Mirror, 2019.
Broached Goulder designed by Jon Goulder for Broached Commissions is a collection of limited-edition furniture that recounts, through artisanal making, a deep connection between a fourth-generation Australian furniture maker and the generations that came before him.
As a young teenager, Jon Goulder did not hesitate to leave school in Bowral and join his family in the factory in Mittagong, New South Wales. By twenty, Jon had lovingly embraced his grandfather’s, father’s and uncle’s tuition. Yet, standing at the benches with three generations of Goulder furniture makers, he realised no career was to be had - not a passionate and enjoyable one - reupholstering broken down Victorian antiques.
Jon trained at the Canberra School of Art under the late George Ingham. His adult aesthetic sensibilities were forged during this period. The beaten-up Victorian chaise lounges were pushed to the corners of his creative consciousness, never to be returned to until now.
Broached Goulder is a synthesis of technical innovation with traditional techniques, such as upholstering using coconut fibre and hessian. The result is a collection that combines deep memory with Jon’s contemporary practice, defined by a passion for testing the boundaries of hand-crafted form.
Whilst Jon abandoned the idea of growing the family business, or one resembling it, he maintained fidelity with the artisanship inherent in the Goulder line. His practice is defined by an obsessive drive of one-upmanship; against the CNC machine, against the hacks amongst his peers and indeed a few in the Goulder line, but most importantly against his own heightened fear of mediocrity. Jon is propelled by a deeply personal and professional perspective to make every piece a step forward in craftsmanship. Water formed leather and hand-carved timber are two elements that define the bespoke qualities of this collection.
Broached Goulder provides a unique opportunity for Broached to trace the trajectory of Australian furniture manufacturing through the unusual intergenerational experience of one highly skilled furniture maker.
The Goulder family started in the early 20th C, supplying furniture in volume to Sydney’s large department stores. A century later, Jon is the sole remaining practitioner; a studio-based artisan, creating bespoke works based on commission. A model based on volume has been inverted, over a century, to one based on artisanship. Jon’s teenage intuition to leave the family workshop was an unconscious recognition of the larger economic condition, which was seeing huge swathes of manufacturing move offshore. The romance that surrounds the artisan can also be a simple, pragmatic business decision.
Broached Goulder Credenza, 2019.
To kickstart the research and design development process, Broached Commissions asked Goulder a series of questions; what does it mean to be a fourth-generation maker if you are making in a totally different way? What is the burden of inheritance? When working in a workshop filled with men, what was learnt from your mother?
Jon’s mother believed in the primary importance of education. Having faith in this belief enabled Jon to leave the workshop but not the practice, to find an intellectual purpose for his practice - at Canberra School of Art - to ensure the Goulder capability was continued, even if entirely reinvented.
How to recreate the memories of childhood without representing the forms that so repelled Jon, was a central question of the design development process. The woven panels of the Credenza and woven upholstery of the Chaise Lounge, by prolific textile artist Liz Williamson, represent the memory of all the fabrics that hung along the walls of the Goulder workshop.
The Maharam leather in the collection has been supplied by Kvadrat Maharam and has been used in highly complex and varied ways: as woven pieces to form the intricate sliding doors of the credenza and the chaise lounge, then as a robust water formed skin backing a standing-mirror and finally as a laminated structural form in the console.
Every piece riffs on a different design period covered by one or another member of the Goulder family and these styles have been synthesized with Jon’s contemporary craftsmanship. The bird's mouth join creates a linking mechanism between many of the objects, each using Australian materials supplied by Tasmanian Timber.
This collection is a highly personal reflection by a mid-career designer-maker, at the peak of his powers, on the starting point of his practice. Broached Goulder is the man reconnecting with the boy from Bowral.
Jon Goulder in his Adelaide workshop.
Creative Direction by Broached Commissions
Established in 2011, Broached Commissions was founded as a creative studio whose purpose is to commission designers to produce ambitious, finely crafted collectible design pieces with the capacity to reflect on or disrupt the traditions of design. Through a series of highly researched and thematically rich collections, Broached has cemented a position that is unique in the landscape of Australian design. Broached operates like a film production, starting with a strong narrative and a script, which designers are given as a framework to inspire the creation of forms that relate to the history of design and its impact on the present. The main obsession of the studio is the history of globalisation and the migration of visual culture. Broached is also fascinated by the role design plays in giving form to power.
Designed by Jon Goulder
Jon Goulder has walked the fine line between a professional role as a mentor and running a private studio practice his whole adult life. Whilst many of his peers sustain themselves through part-time academic work, Jon has been a long time nomad, moving from Sydney to Perth and now Adelaide to fulfil senior roles in craft organisations as a creative director whilst simultaneously growing a studio practice defined by commissions and royalty-based contracts with manufacturers. In 2018 Jon broke with his long-standing career within the institutional sector and set up a studio inside the Adelaide office of Snohetta Architects Australasia, to whom he provides senior design and production consultancy. This has enabled an integration of his highly sensuous design and craftsmanship to influence architectural thinking within the studio. He now has for the first time in a long time, his own machines and space to work from. Jon has won several design prizes and his work is held in permanent collections by many local state and national museums and art galleries including the National Gallery of Australia.
Weaving by Liz Williamson
Liz Williamson is an established Australian textile artist whose research practice reflects a long-standing interest in the history and construction of woven structures. Her practice is wide-ranging including designing for industry, weaving works for exhibition and studio production, teaching workshops and curating. Since 2001, Liz has been engaged with artisan groups in Asia as an advisor and for the production of her Woven in Asia range of wraps and scarves. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is represented in major public collections in Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum. In 2007, Liz was selected for the prestigious Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft series, an award acknowledging her 30 years contribution to the craft and design sector through her practice, education and advocacy. Liz is currently an Associate Professor at UNSW Art & Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Leather formed motif by John Warwicker
John Warwicker is a long-standing collaborator of Broached. On top of creating graphical work on various projects, John has been an unlimited source of knowledge and inspiration over the years. John is co-founder of a multi-award winning, multi-disciplinary studio, Tomato. John has a spirit of continuous and restless enquiry which underpins his commercial and artistic practice. His work continually explores language, its placement and subsequent resonance in the world. He is a long-standing member of the Tokyo Type Directors Club and has authored six books, including One Thousand Fathoms Deep, which was winner of the All Japan catalogue competition in 2017.
Graphic Collages by Jesse Draxler
The graphic language for Broached Goulder was created by Los Angeles based artist and illustrator Jesse Draxler. Jesse's collages deal with fragmented identity, portraits so distorted they are more a depiction of vibration than of identifiable facial features. We saw this as a perfect fit for this collection, which has as its focus on the reverberation of a tradition through four generations. Draxler’s works commenced by analyzing all of the material ingredients of the collection; Goulder family archival documents, timber, leather and fabric.
Broached Goulder Freestanding Mirror, 2019.
Workshops details.
*** Jon Goulder approached Broached to assist in creating a memoir in the form of furniture objects – a love song to the three generations of Goulder furniture makers and his inheritance of this tradition. Our process is akin to filmmaking. We start with a script and the designer then manifests the story in the form of an applied arts collection. As the story of Jon Goulder evolved, we started to see him both as an individual, enacting a collection that represents reflection and crises, and an enactor of a broader historical context: the evolution of the place of manufacturing in Australia across the 20th to early 21st C. The resulting essay was not our usual lengthy piece of prose but a series of quips about Jon Goulder, his relationship to the family history and his present way of practicing his craft. The text is written by Broached from Jon’s imagined first-person perspective.
Broached Goulder is showcased at JamFactory Adelaide from 28 February - 3 May 2020.