This piece is a project from Junior level furniture studio, named Hágoónee, a Navajo word for Goodbye. The brief was to make a small cabinet with references to a historical piece of furniture. I’ve always been inspired by Native American art and design through the wide variety of styles and forms from Eastern to Western United States. Taking aspects of both construction and aesthetic, I redesigned a traditional Western Native American Cedar Bentwood Box. Western tribes would use these boxes to store and protect all that they owned. They took great pride in these boxes, decorating them with abstracted motifs, bright in color. I wanted my piece to inform the same function of a container to place valued objects, while linking design cues, without necessarily connecting them directly. I wanted to challenge form and intrigue the user with use of materials as the Western Native Americans did in their time. In order to keep from copying forms directly, I exaggerated the bends on the boxes using a kerf bending technique. Each box is constructed with a plywood substrate wrapped in a walnut veneer. It has steel details including the doors/drawer pulls, hinges, and of course the legs. The doors and drawer face are hardwood walnut with a hand cut paper graphics embedded in epoxy. The graphics are a stylized version of what the Western Native American carved in to the cedar that was used at the time; I believe this version helps to make the piece more contemporary and adds a sense of ambiguity. Finally, the inside of each box is painted red to bring attention to what one would find emotionally valuable, accentuating the function.
