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Jim Rose’s Steel Furniture Designs, Influenced by Shakers and Quilting

In 1989, Jim Rose graduated from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago with a background in sculpture, jewelry and casting. In the mid ‘90s, Wisconsin-based Rose and his wife took a roadtrip to the East Coast, and along the way they stopped by some Shaker museums to check them out. Those visits completely changed Rose’s creative direction.

Rose was struck, as many have been, by the “Craftsmanship, quality of materials, integrity of design” of Shaker furniture, he said in an interview with American Craft magazine [PDF]. Upon their return he began heavily researching Shaker furniture and started to produce his own.

Rose, however, didn’t use wood, but instead used recycled metal from scrapyards–because that’s what he could afford. That then grew into an aesthetic in its own right, and for the next seven years he created hundreds of Shaker-inspired pieces from repurposed steel.

Then came the next evolution: Rose had taken note of quilting. Quilting became popular in America during colonial times, when fabric was dear and it was important to repurpose fabric scraps into something useful. Rose applied the same philosophy to his own work, bringing multicolored pieces of metal back from the scrapyards, then cutting them up and arranging them into patterns that suited his eye.

“I’m at the mercy of what I find at the scrapyards,” Rose said.

You can see more of his work here.

http://www.core77.com/posts/70050/Jim-Roses-Steel-Furniture-Designs-Influenced-by-Shakers-and-Quilting