Hand-Held
2007
Ikea PS Ellan chair, twine, rope, steel, copper, & brass wire
Dimensions Variable
The hand-held object has changed the ways humans behave. What is it about them that is so fascinating to us? Inspired by the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey when an ape learns to use an animal bone as a weapon to defend a local watering hole from another tribe of rival apes, the objects in Hand-Held recite one of the most basic questions about design: what can we make to better ourselves? Fashioned out of a readily available house-hold item—an Ikea chair—these objects resemble ancient tools and weapons, yet imbue a contemporary feel stemming from the chair’s form and material, an inject-molded polypropylene and wood-composite mix. Slightly menacing but oddly ambiguous, the “primitive” infused with the contemporary, Hand-Held raises for today the very questions the ape asked himself way back when: what are these objects, and what will they do for me?