Exhibition Insight... French Exchange

French Exchange: Reflections on the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarships

Words by Caitlin Eyre

In celebration of the partnership forged between JamFactory and Domaine de Boisbuchet, French Exchange highlights the creative achievements of the five previous recipients of the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarship. Through the development of new work, the artists offer their reflections on how undertaking the renowned Summer Workshop Program has impacted their individual creative practices in the years following.

Nestled in the lush countryside of Lessac in southwestern France, Domaine de Boisbuchet is Europe’s prime destination for innovative, hands-on workshops in architecture, design and art. The organisation was founded some 30 years ago by design amateur and expert Alexander von Vegesack, who purchased the expansive 150 hectare grounds with the vision of creating a space where design and education could flourish on a grander scale. With a focus on the integration of nature and the handmade, Boisbuchet’s renowned annual Summer Workshop Program sees innovative and inspiring designers and architects from all over the world flocking to the Domaine’s campus to provide a series of week-long hands-on workshops across a range of materials and processes. The courses draw a considerable international contingent of craft and design professionals and students seeking new ways of thinking, designing and making within their creative practices.

Since 2017, JamFactory has partnered with Domaine de Boisbuchet to provide an accomplished JamFactory Associate with the opportunity to travel and participate in Boisbuchet’s Summer Workshops Program. The JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarship is generously funded by JamFactory’s Medici Collective Program and has to date seen five JamFactory Associates undertake this unique professional development experience. Working across a diverse range of design practices, the previous recipients of the Scholarship include Andrew Carvolth, Gretal Ferguson, Luca Lettieri, Jake Rollins and Dean Toepfer.

French Exchange: Reflections on the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarships celebrates the partnership forged between JamFactory and Domaine de Boisbuchet and highlights the creative achievements of the five Scholarship recipients in the years following their summer abroad. The exhibition features recent work by Carvolth, Ferguson, Lettieri, Rollins and Toepfer, and offers their personal reflections on how their experiences at Boisbuchet and the subtle shifts in thinking, designing and making have impacted the trajectory of their creative practices. In collaboration with JamFactory, French Exchange was designed by interior, spatial and object designer Claire Marwick-Smith, who coincidentally has also undertaken Boisbuchet’s Summer Workshop Program. In homage to the ingenuity and resourcefulness that Boisbuchet imparts on its Workshop participants due to the material limitations of onsite place-based making, the exhibition displays have largely been compiled from repurposed materials sourced and scavenged from JamFactory’s Studios. As an immersive touch, the exhibition also features a soundscape inspired by the sounds of Boisbuchet that was composed by singer/songwriter Mat Morison.

EXHIBITORS

Photo courtesy of Domaine des Boisbuchet.

ANDREW CARVOLTH

Andrew Carvolth is a designer and craftsperson. He undertook JamFactory’s Associate Program in the Furniture Studio from 2017-2018 and was the recipient of the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarship in 2018. He currently serves as the Studio Head of JamFactory’s Furniture Studio. In addition, he is the co-founder of both Mixed Goods Studios, an independent Adelaide-based craft and design studio, and One Two One Two, a curatorial and exhibition platform.

In his craft and design practice, Carvolth merges traditional materials and furniture-making techniques, primarily timber and cast metals, with experimental making processes to explore Australian vernacular design. This approach, which often leads to limited edition, collectable design and functional art, also grounds development of commercial design outcomes.

As a furniture maker, ‘the chair is the challenge’ was an adage that Carvolth frequently heard in his formative years. He has since spent considerable time refining his approach to the design and making of objects with this statement in mind. There are many considerations within the typology of a chair: material, form, function, aesthetics and historical context. With a focus on celebrating materials and process, in French Exchange Carvolth presents a survey of five chairs that have been crafted in years following his residency at Boisbuchet that highlight a liberation from typical craft conventions.

“My time at Boisbuchet released me from any ideas of creating objects that stood as monuments of prodigious skill and allowed me to focus on how my considered approach could celebrate materials and process,” Carvolth says. “I found a new context in being a craftsperson there… I was caught in a stampede of high-spirited creative people and we ran off the cliff into a world of curiosity and exploration, wide eyed and smiling all the way.”

GRETAL FERGUSON

Gretal Ferguson is a contemporary silversmith and jeweller. She undertook JamFactory’s Associate Program in the Metal Studio from 2018-2019 and was the recipient of the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarship in 2019.

With the material process an integral part of her conceptual motivation, Ferguson embraces the arduous nature of silversmithing and uses the hours of necessary hammering to explore the work both aesthetically and conceptually. The physical exertion and commitment required in her practice allows Ferguson’s work to unfold slowly and organically in a way that would be impossible if the process was quick and less laborious.

Made in true Boisbuchet style, Play With Your Food is cobbled together from unfinished objects found in Ferguson’s studio that have been reworked o fit their new purpose with accoutrements stealthily acquired from around the JamFactory building. Essentially a collection of separate reminiscences distilled in metal, each object is staged, imbuing it with character in a futile attempt to embody an indescribable experience.

“Although it’s hard to articulate what I have gotten out of my time at Boisbuchet, it’s an experience that becomes an implicit part of you and your creative development,” Ferguson says. “At a time when I was questioning my practice and my place within my craft, the freedom that Boisbuchet afforded me outside of conventional industry structures and expectations disrupted my linear trajectory through silversmith, a craft that barely exists in the modern world. This freedom emboldened me to let go of more entrenched, traditional ideas in silversmithing and forge my own path.”

LUCA LETTIERI

Luca Lettieri is a multidisciplinary artist and designer. He undertook JamFactory’s Associate Program in the Furniture Studio from 2018-2019 and was the recipient of the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarship in 2019. In his art and design practice, Lettieri investigates relationships, connections and dependency as depicted through a series of abstract sculptural assemblages. Spanning a vast array of mediums including steel, stone, glass and ceramics, Lettieri’s colourful works draw inspiration from southern Italian folk art traditions and the inherent tension between natural and manufactured materials.

In the body of work presented in French Exchange, which spans sculpture and functional lighting, Lettieri incorporates steel, sandstone and blown glass in a contrasting interplay of natural and manufactured materials. Lettieri first started experimenting with crude, ad hoc glassblowing moulds at Boisbuchet using found objects such as metal grates to create texture and form in his work. Paying tribute to this experience of utilising found objects, the glass diffuser mould for Lettieri’s lighting was crafted from discarded polystyrene which was turned on the lathe, shaped by hand and sandblasted to produce a soft and organic textured surface.

“The quintessential Boisbuchet experience of utilising found materials combined with handmade objects to make works on site has made a big impact on the way that I approach my multidisciplinary practice. Boisbuchet introduced me to the notion that material and machinery limitation can help foster more interesting outcomes by encouraging unconventional pathways, forcing problem solving and reducing the pressure to produce perfect outcomes. This freedom in the making process has been something that has quite organically become part of how I approach making furniture and sculpture.”

JAKE ROLLINS

Jake Rollins is a designer and artist. He undertook JamFactory’s Associate Program in 2016-2017 and was the inaugural recipient of the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarship in 2017. With a career in furniture, lighting design and making, Rollins combines waste materials, future thinking and metaphors of reusability to reimagine the built environment. In addition to his practice, Rollins currently serves as the Production Manager of JamFactory’s Furniture Studio.

Interested in the overlooked, Rollins seeks to do away with established design materials and methods, instead setting out to reimagine the world from first principles. In his Golf Weave body of work, Rollins riffs on the very building blocks that make up the world, atoms and their bonds, to create functional objects from a ubiquitous found material – the golf ball. Rollins has crafted numerous functional chairs using this unique method and, by proving their capabilities as static objects, is excited for what the future might hold for Golf Weave.

In the spirit of his time at Boisbuchet, Rollins has taken what he has learnt in his craft practice and applied it to a completely new and outrageous design challenge: creating an entry for the Red Bull Billy Cart Race. What is a billy cart, but a chair with wheels? His vision: a monocoque of golf balls hurtling down a track in the middle of Melbourne, 30,000 cheering and jeering fans, baying for carnage. What a challenge! Golf Kart has been brought straight off the race track to the gallery floor, fresh from its maiden voyage with the dings and dents to prove it.

“In three short and intense weeks, I took every skill I had learned at JamFactory and applied them to a set of unusual and whimsical making challenges that completely opened my eyes to the value of pure uninhibited exploration,” Rollins says. “All of a sudden, there was something to be found everywhere. Given the time and the space, we were able to make do with very little and this is something I have retained in my practice over the last 5 years and beyond.”

DEAN TOEPFER

Dean Toepfer is a furniture and lighting designer. He undertook JamFactory’s Associate Program in the Furniture Studio from 2017-2018 and was the recipient of the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarship in 2018. In addition to his multifaceted design practice, Toepfer currently serves as a Product Developer for JamFactory and is the co-founder of Mixed Goods Studios, an independent Adelaide-based craft and design studio.

Delivering a bold aesthetic that is both alluring and practical, Toepfer is committed to producing high quality and functional designs with an emphasis on detail and originality. His interests lay in the exploration of material, shape and form, both in terms of their individual characteristics and in experimenting with the ways that they can interact and coincide with one another.

Stepping outside of the often commercially driven confines of product design, in French Exchange Toepfer utilises a series of light sculptures created from repurposed parachute silk to explore light, structure and how this can be presented within a more experimental exhibition context. Created without a preconceived or intended outcome, the inherent materiality of parachute silk was the driving force behind the development of the Ombre series and produced the unexpected emergence of rich and vibrant colour gradients. As such, these artworks are a homage to Toepfer’s time at Boisbuchet in an invigorating environment built on curiosity and creative kinship.

“To create without an intended outcome can be quite freeing and result in unexpected and new directions,” Toepfer says. “As artists or designers, our creations are formed by our lived experiences and subjective realities, and it can be difficult to delineate from our past projects or current influences. My time at Boisbuchet helped me to deconstruct my creative process and to view it through a different lens — to not be so focused on an intended outcome and to be more open and unconstrained in the exploration process.”

French Exchange is showing at JamFactory Adelaide in Gallery One from 9 December 2022 - 5 February 2023

FEATURESGuest User24 November 2022French Exchange, Exhibition Insight, Furniture, Sculpture, Metal

Exhibition Insight... French Exchange

French Exchange: Reflections on the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarships