#HTE

Wonderfully Inventive Objects, Furniture Details and a “Tree Crutch” by Hank Gilpin

It’s amazing how accidents and coincidences can lead to careers. Hank Gilpin was a photography major at RISD who needed to choose an elective: Glass, Clay, Wood. He wanted Glass but the course was already full. Lacking interest in the others, he flipped a coin and got stuck with Wood. “I was thinking I’d make a box and get my three credits,” Gilpin told the Providence Journal.

Well, the teacher turned out to be legendary Danish Modern designer/builder Tage Frid. Frid’s reputation as an influential educator held, Gilpin was hooked and “the deal was sealed.”

That was fortysomething years ago and Gilpin, who’s now famous in his own right, has amassed an impressive portfolio of truly unique furniture and object designs, all in wood and primarily crafted with hand tools. His work is bewilderingly diverse, unabashedly experimental, beautifully crafted and impossible to categorize within a single style. I’ve picked out some of my favorites here so you can see some of his inventive forms and details:

Even one of his few steel pieces is for, and references, wood:

And who makes a “tree crutch?!?”

Intriguingly, Gilpin started out by going to lumber suppliers and buying only the wood that they were having trouble selling—i.e. the most unpopular, gnarliest, most difficult woods to work with. He then forced himself to work around their constraints. I believe that this approach, where you are forced to solve problems imposed by nature (as opposed to projecting your own will onto uniform sheet goods) is what has helped develop Gilpin’s unusual style; in a sense, nature is his collaborator. In the video below, where he explains his approach, you’ll see some truly unique objects and details that could only have come from having such a powerful and capricious partner.

See more of Gilpin’s work here.

I was turned on to Gilpin’s work by reader Stan VanDruff, who took the time to add some helpful feedback over at our post on Daniel Moyer’s workshop tables. Thanks Stan!