Fire, Pencils & Gold

We're doing a lot of re-organising and rethinking of the space we work in at the moment. It was subject to a massive redesign ten years ago but is starting to feel a bit stale (lockdown helped with that!) and this corner in particular has never been quite right.

We've worked with Spencer Jenkins before on projects around the studio and the house, and when we realised it was shelving that we needed - for all the reference books, novels, catalogues and such, housed for years in repurposed wooden apple crates - we asked him. He loves wood, works in steel and willow, and creates natural forms and shapes which look simple and easy, but he'll pore over a line for for days on end, perfecting it.

We'd been admirers of the work he's done in scorched larch, taking the wood and burning its surface till it reaches a deep, satisfying black. We chose chunky larch sections which were cut and planed to fit the totally asymmetrical and wobbly corners of the room (the studio is L-shaped).

Once this was done - not a fast stage, it should be said, Spence is something of a perfectionist - the larch is burnt using a blowtorch and a steady hand. You can see the really gnarly, delicate-looking surface of the larch, which truly looks as if you've turned up to a house fire hours too late. And it smells like that too, if you get your nose right in there - an oddity exciting smell, proper 'charred'.

After the charring, comes the vanishing - but sensitively done, so as not to obliterate the textures of the burning with a brutal slathering of shiny. Wet here, the varnish soaks in to 'fix' the burnt surface:

Burnt only on the underside and the sides, leaving natural larch exposed on the surface where the books would sit, from here the shelves were brought to the studio where it was over to me. We'd come up with the idea of filling any natural cracks and splits with gold. 

Inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi, mending precious time-served items with gold and honouring their long service rather than throwing them away or trying to hide the breaks, I first photographed the shelves placed in situ and drew lines as organically as I could over the edges, many times over, till I hand line that neither told a story nor suggested any deliberate sequence, taking my cue from Spencer himself and the notion of a totally random break or split: harder than I first thought! 

In fact, it took me two weeks to arrive at a set of 'cracks' I was happy with, and even then, I changed them as I worked. 

I tested the infill of gold with the samples that Spencer had made for us, in the process of assessing how much to burn into the wood, by Dremelling the splits in and applying both gold leaf and two gold acrylics. The idea was to fill with actual gold, via melting and pouring in, or alternatively using a rod that's melted in (NOT the correct technical term) but after research this proved both financially and technically very difficult to achieve without the input of a jeweller and specialist kit, so we decided on 23ct gold leaf - the quality of leaf above which no oxidisation takes place, and suitable for outdoor use as well as indoor.

IN THE MEANTIME...the empty space where the old crate shelves were stacked was looking sad, so it was given a fresh coat of ECOS white paint, and I added a set of coloured pencils to it! I sketched them out on paper with felt tips in what felt like the right colours, squatting and holding them up against the corner, until they were right.

Feeling like a big child it was massively freeing to paint something large-scale on the wall - we haven't done that for AGES - and I added some pencils which were sharp, a snapped one, a blunt one and some sharpened with a knife - like a real pencil collection.

Once this was done it was time to gild. Gilding requires the surface to be smooth, sealed and dry, before a coat of size - a type of glue which doubles as a varnish, and remains sticky for a few hours - is applied, followed by the leaf itself. Every crack was Dremelled in, slowly and with a non-blinking steady hand, brushed clean with a stiff brush, and then sealed with a PVA solution. When dry, a layer of Stuart Semple's 'Goldest Gold' acrylic was applied, chosen for being the truest, richest gold I've ever come across.

The acrylic acts as a sealant, and ensured that should any area not be completely covered by the gold leaf, all you'll see is the convincingly-gold acrylic edge. I highly recommend his very special gold!

And then the gold leaf.

A time-consuming process (if it wasn't already!) the leaf is applied with a dry brush over size applied anywhere from an our beforehand. As long as it's still sticky, you can start gilding. A little section of VERY flaky gold leaf is picked up on a dry brush, and pushed into the crack, tamped down carefully with the same dry brush - never with fingers.

Despite a surprisingly modest spend on the 23ct gold, I ALMOST left the acrylic exposed, such was its goodness and glitter. here's the acrylic on the left, and some of the gilding on the right. There's just more...goldness to the gold leaf!

Finally, the completed shelves were fixed in place over the pencils, burnt, gold edges facing into the room, and the books have been making their way onto them this week; stylishly re-organised for the first time in years!

We're grateful to Spence for his painstaking work, carried out in a distanced, awkward masks-and-googles-on way in the middle of a lockdown, and for the opportunity for another collaboration. The next project is already underway, and we already know there'll be more after that!

You can explore more of Spencer's work on his Instagram account.

The joy of commissioning your mates.

We've got some extremely gifted mates, and there's nothing like the feeling of asking them to make something for you which employes all of their skills, plays to their strengths and makes you the thing you need while maybe, hopefully, testing them a little bit.

I don't get to collaborate all that much in my day-to-day work - with art directors yes, via email and phone, and if we're doing something on a wall, some help there too. But pooling your ideas and desires to make a new piece of furniture, a garden sculpture, something stitched for the home, or even the architecture of your new home and studio, is quite different, and the pressure's on someone else to deliver - which can be really refreshing!

Spencer Jenkins, who lives with artist partner Alisha Miller in Warwickshire, has been a friend for the best part of 20 years and during that time has eased his creativity into a unique space which embraces woodcraft, weaving, alchemy (I mean, the man pickles oak you know?) and complex self-supporting structures coaxed from nature's shapes using patience, pondering and drawing. Carved and steamed wood forms complex, thoughtful and reaching pieces; they're aspirational, comfortable and sometimes challenging, but they're all uniquely Spencer, and are commissioned by the RHS, Gardener's World, Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court, Vertigo Records, gardens and institutions the length and breath of Britain...and Black Sabbath.

We have long needed a big sofa to go into the room on our top floor; a long, pointy room which along with the rest of the house is on a skewed rhombus; not a right angle to be found. Pretty much all furniture and storage has to be custom made, and the top room - my studio for ten years - has additional challenges as it is at the top of a winding, steep, narrow, staircase - you can't get anything up there without huge struggle, least of all a sofa. And we need a sofa - the whole of the ground floor is studio and office, middle is sleeping and washing, which means the top floor has finally become our dedicated TV, movie and film space. When we finally put pens/mice down and chill, we need to feel work's over for the day.

The studio as it was. There's just a big telly there now!

This 'thing to sit on' needed to be wide, deep for Leigh's long legs, and capable of being assembled on-site. No flat backs or right angles. We briefed Spence on all this, Leigh driving the direction with his idea around a metal park bench with slats, like this one he saw on a trip to New York:

Spencer started with drawings of 50s-inspired space rockets, all Festival of Britain angles and aspiring points:

His cardboard and wire maquette was extremely cute too:

This blog will massively simplify the many processes Spencer undertook, and what can't be communicated is the incalculable amount of thinking, problem solving and man hours that went into this beast. But we shall begin here; once all feeding-back and chipping-in and discussion had concluded, Spencer enlarged his drawing of the profile of the sofa and laid it on the ground of his workshop, starting to lay the metal bar over the top:

after which it was a case of 'Let Bending Commence!' (which by all accounts was Bloody Hard Work). For those into detail, the metals are a hybrid of round solid steel bar, hollow steel tubing and flat steel bar:

This centre strut was created to make a frame for the wooden slats which would form the sofa:

The sofa's four dainty feet began to emerge, delicately en pointe where they would meet the new black sheep's wool carpet:



and suddenly, the final form of the piece made itself known at full size:

At this point there was the opportunity to powder-coat the structure, which had been done to slick effect on some of Spencer's other commissioned pieces. We thought about it, but were so enamoured of the texture of the metal and the polychroming of the welded areas that we decided to leave it, the evidence of its construction, and seal it in with lacquer.

Spencer picked up on this and experimented with varying levels of heat treatment along the bar:

Perhaps a little giraffe-like, the effect was appealing, and the colours gorgeous, but we felt it yelled a bit over the simple, clean lines of the structure:

Here are the arms being made, in Spencer's Hellraiser-esque bending improvisation:

Once the wooden arms, metal feet, legs and back - in one piece - were created to bookend the structure, the wooden slats were cut and shaped, one at a time. Calculating the spacing was crucial, so that gaps were consistent. This is Ash, and the arms are made of steamed ash (to allow the bend):

And quietly, towards the end of July, the finished 2m wide construction appeared in Spencer's workshop. We couldn't wait to go and bounce on it; Spencer couldn't wait to get it into our loft and out of his space! It had occupied huge chunks of his brain and workshop for months on end, and although he was pleased, I think he was happy to...

...take it apart and build it again. Because of course, the constructed version in the workshop had to be disassembled and taken up to our loft room, one section at a time, and rebuilt there.

Sorry Spence.

Our beautiful sofa is now upstairs on its black sheep's wool carpet, with only a light, little table and big telly for company (oh and my massive book cover archive which I've yet to decide what to do with). The next step is getting removable upholstery made, but meanwhile it's home to our small but growing collection of Japanese-inspired textiles - a Dan Kitchener cushion and throw, a Tenugui print by Nomoco (currently being adapted into a large soft cushion by my Mum, resident guru of the needles) and a grumpy, squishy Gudetama who's in a constant state of judgement - along with three other creatures and assorted bung-it-all-on-there blankets and soft things.

It's a nice place to be, and it's a one-off - we've told him already, but here's a large and fulsome public thank you to Spencer for his problem solving, inventiveness and dedication during a period of total Sofa Rocket immersion. 

It's great to commission a mate.