Whalebones, bikinis and a throne: New Zealand design history in 110 chairs

Chairs are ubiquitous – pull up a pew, take off a load, please be seated – but how often do we really consider what we’re sitting on?

At Auckland’s Objectspace, 170 years of New Zealand’s seated history has just gone on show. The Chair: A story of design and making in Aotearoa features 110 pieces of furniture, sourced from more than 50 lenders and three public institutions.

There is the whalebone chair (curiously, both the oldest and newest piece in the exhibition) and an ergonomic office chair that created $3.2 billion in sales revenue.

There’s Garth Chester’s bikini chair – infamously described as “filthy-minded furniture” by a woman who demanded her husband return it to the store – and a chair purchased by a canny collector who recognised it as a commission for Dunedin’s Larnach Castle.

The random sighting of three Carin Wilson plywood library chairs will make it into a book of the exhibition scheduled for release in February.

Kim Paton, Objectspace director and exhibition curator, says this is not a definitive history of chairs, “but what is thrilling is that idea that you can take one object type and if you set your parameters, a period of time and a place, you can use that object as a lens”.

Chairs tell stories of class and status. In Objectspace’s meeting room (chairs by Simon James) Paton flicks through hundreds of images, pausing on a photograph of a hard, high-backed wooden hall chair from the turn of the 20th Century.

“Visitors would sit waiting to be received into the house. These chairs would have your family shield or crest on them. But these New Zealand settlers were here to start from the beginning. The chair stayed blank. How potent is that of an expression of what they were doing?”

Paton’s research traversed the studio furniture movement that began in the 1980s – “a period of intensely fine woodworking that led to lots of experimentation” – and the formation of national body the Furniture Group. She found local iterations of international designs, like John Crichton’s hammock chair (“an object has ancestry, nothing is entirely new, nothing is its own island”).

She chased up catalogue listings from the “artiture” shows that spawned the likes of fashion designer Marilyn Sainty’s cocktail chair with its recycled milking-machine hose arms. And, repeatedly, she found stories of local designers unable to capitalise on their skills because of manufacturing logistics.

“Michael Draper had this outdoor dining chair that was hugely popular, but he reckons there were about 1000 of them, maximum.”

Who was Chrissy the Queen of Wellington who sat on the large wooden throne emblazoned with her name? How many people staying at New York’s modernist Paramount Hotel knew that Auckland artist Diana Firth designed its lobby stools? Did an ancient whaler really sit on a chair made from whalebone vertebra, found in Russell in 1944, and dated back to the 1800s?

The latter is represented in the Objectspace exhibition via a very modern 3D printed replica, made in collaboration with gallerist Michael Lett, after Auckland War Memorial Museum declined a loan request for the original.

Paton says around 35 chairs were sought from Auckland and Te Papa museums’ collections. Just six pieces were released. Issues included Objectspace’s lack of humidity control and the staff resources required to assess and crate chairs for shipping.

“There are gaping holes in the show because of those declined requests,” says Paton. “I was amazed at how many chairs we couldn’t find. Or that we could find just one of, and that one resided in a museum collection.”

The one that really got away? “It’s called the Ena Suite . . .”

Paton pulls up another image. Designer Demos Gougoulas was an architecture student “super obsessed” with the brightly coloured, geometric sensibilities of Memphis Design. With an engineering faculty friend, he made a sofa and two chairs for a tanning salon. That, in turn, led to a commission for a bedroom furniture suite – currently split between Auckland and Te Papa museum collections.

They were the only chairs Paton found “with an articulation of Memphis that was made in New Zealand”. And, she says while museum staff advocated on Objectspace’s behalf, ultimately, it was a no to the loan.

Does New Zealand need a national design museum to house pieces like this? That’s a whole other story, but: “Auckland Museum has disbanded its Applied Arts permanent gallery. Te Papa has one of the most significant collections of colonial furniture and I think many of the pieces have never been put on display. There’s definitely a lot to be interrogated there . . . the protection of an object in perpetuity is great, but that does not mean it gets seen by the public.

“When we realised that, actually, it was going to be a process of really digging and following our noses, it revealed this amazing breadth of work – lots of it unseen or almost forgotten about . . . it’s been grassroots and crowd-sourced, one by one.

“Quite quickly, I ended up with around 220 on a list.”

What is a chair?

“There are lots of famous designers and architects quoted on how hard the chair is to make; the complexity of its role in supporting the body off the ground in what is actually an unnatural position, is a challenging design feat.”

Paton’s original plan was to consider not just the seat, but also the act of sitting.

“That would give you the chance to explore domestic environments in more diverse cultures – chairs are, essentially from the European tradition. It’s interesting to think about the floor, or mats or raised platforms and, broadly, notions of how we sit and what sitting means in a domestic space.”

Eventually, she realised she needed an anchor – “a restricted object typology” – but even that plan was thwarted.

“I thought we’d have chaises longues and stools and it became a pragmatic issue of space. Very loosely, for this show, a chair means a seat with a back. But there are chairs with three legs and two legs. You could make an entirely separate stool show with the amount of stools we found that were deeply interesting!”

Paton researched museum collections and magazine archives, interviewed furniture experts and consulted the small handful of books available on the subject, including Ernst Plischke’s 1947 Government-funded Design and Living.

“He argued you could take a chair from any period in time and it will tell you something about the way we’ve lived and what we valued in our culture . . . you see the formality in the chairs and these earlier links to nobility and class . . . and the way in which domestic spaces have changed until it’s ‘how do you almost lie down while standing up?’” (For the record, there are no La-Z-Boys in the show. “No! They weren’t made in New Zealand.”)

Paton says it has been “enormously complicated” drawing together dozens of objects from different makers.

“You start somewhere and then there is just this incredible unravelling,” says Paton who, along with the wider Objectspace team, spent months chasing down single chair sightings and responding to public messages that came in via a chair “tip line” initiative.

“You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Take, for example, the Pacific Lashed Chair, made by David Trubridge (famous for selling the rights to his distinctive “body raft” to Italian design house Cappellini) some 34 years ago.

“He’s an absolutely avid sailor . . . you can see the influence of the boat, you can see the influence of Pacific culture in there and if someone showed it to you and said it was made today, you wouldn’t blink.”

Paton found an opinion piece written by Trubridge in 1987: “He’s lamenting, ‘I can see the fine woodworking, but where is the appreciation for contemporary furniture?’ And he was right, to a degree.”

Determined not to fixate on a mid-century story “which is often where we end up migrating to in terms of design culture in New Zealand” Paton says she was forced to confront her own bias.

“I don’t have a great affinity with the Colonial era. Socially, politically, culturally, it casts a really difficult shadow over what we continue to wrestle with today. But it’s also kind of bleak.”

Aesthetically?

“Yes! But I just lacked imagination. There are quite a few chairs, for instance, from the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s that are attributed to women makers. Definitely the most exhilarating chair I saw has this chip carving on it that is so beautiful.

“To look at it and imagine a woman carving that in 1890 . . . I can’t get myself there, I can’t imagine it, but it’s so powerful.”

Paton says when she started the project, people asked if she would find enough locallymade chairs. She met “many enamoured chair-lovers” but confesses she was not one herself.

“I’d like to call myself one now. I think it holds a particularly specific and special place in the hierarchy of domestic objects. It doesn’t matter if you couldn’t care less what the interior of your home looks like, it’s likely you’re going to have some chairs in there.”

The Chair: A story of design and making in Aotearoa shows at Objectspace, Auckland, until March 3, 2024. A book of the exhibition will be released in February.

Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and works as a senior reporter across its news and lifestyle sections.