Shoveling Hay
This is my friend Mick Sheridan. Mick is an upholsterer based in West Wales.
A few years ago, Mick made a beautiful series of small stools and benches inspired by traditional vernacular farmhouse furniture. They are made in local oak, with lovely spoke-shaved legs. Here below left is his fireside stool upholstered in my Totley fabric and artfully styled with a copy of Ronald Blyth’s Components of the Scene ‘borrowed’ in 1986 by Mr P from the Tonbridge School library. Below right is Mick’s little three-legged milking stool upholstered in my Mendip.
Most of Mick’s work is re-upholstery projects like the handsome pair of mismatched chairs below left and the sweet little Welsh stick chair below right made by Brecon-based chair-maker Gareth Irwin.
But alongside his upholstery day-job Mick has always nurtured a more anarchic creative side. Below left is one of his many bus-shelter seats - a little telephone stool re-upholstered in crimson, and now available to passengers on the A40 at Churcham in Gloucestershire. And below right the ‘Subbuteo Pitch Chair’ - a special edition bus-shelter chair made for the World Cup 2018.
In the bottom row below is one of Mick’s ongoing series soft furnishings inspired by neolithic standing-stones. And dotted amongst these are the archaeological finds from his re-upholstery excavations ‘behind the sofa cushions’ - treasures he finds when stripping old furniture for re-upholstery, all carefully documented and catalogued.
I really like his esoteric approach to his work - we could all do with more play in our jobs!
So when Mick got in touch with me last year, and asked if I would like to throw some ideas around for a project he was working on to rescue abandoned street furniture and breathe new life into these relics I was intrigued to see what would transpire.
Below is the very dilapidated chair Mick found on a Swansea pavement - abandoned to the elements and in a very sorry state.
After some musing I sent Mick this image of a Ditcher’s shovel from the wonderful collection of vernacular objects at Compton Verney…
… along with these images below of hay-carts - on the right - from a farm near Blythburgh in Suffolk, and on the left; a book jacket from the iconic Shire book series.
I had a vague thought of a wooden shovel-shell around a pile of upholstered hay… something along the lines of my little maquette below - expertly fashioned out of brown paper tape, corrugated card, pins and yarn…
After stripping the frame back to its bare wooden bones, Mick re-shaped the legs with a spoke-shaver and carved the arms with a dimpled texture to get the twiggy feel of the brown-paper tape model. A new wooden back and large mis-match wings were fashioned from an old wardrobe door. Inside the new frame Mick added a little secret pastoral scene of a sheep and manger - a future archaeological find for a future fellow upholsterer…
Mick stained and finished all the timber in Jacobean walnut - something between treacle and marmite. All the other materials are from his studio off-cuts.
The Hayshovel Chair is an eccentric, irreverent piece of ‘outsider’ furniture, re-designed ‘on the hoof’, and it’s been great fun to watch the journey unfold.
Mick and I will be chewing the fat about the work and the journey at the Art Workers’ Guild next month, as part of their program of events for London Craft Week. Hope you can join us.
Tickets are £5 and all the proceed go to the Art Worker’s Guild. For more details please see the link here.