Usually, producing wooden furniture or art decoration involves steps like find right trees, chopping them down, cutting them in different shapes then assembling them together. However, Derbyshire-based furniture designer Gavin Munro tries to something unconventional – make the tree just grow into certain types of furniture like chair. In the other word, using strategic sculpting and grafting to cultivate the trees during its growth and harvest “furniture” directly from the tree. After a lengthy years-long trial in his mother’s garden and a sturdy proof-of-concept, Full Grown was born. Here is some detailed information about the project:
In essence it’s an incredibly simple art. You start by training and pruning young tree branches as they grow over specially made formers. At certain points we then graft them together so that the object grows into one solid piece – I’m interested in the way that this is like an organic 3D printing that uses air, soil and sunshine as its source materials. After it’s grown into the shape we want, we continue to care for and nurture the tree, while it thickens and matures, before harvesting it in the winter and then letting it season and dry. It’s then a matter of planing and finishing to show off the wood and grain inside.
Although Full Grown’s first prototype willow chair has already found its way into the permanent collection at the National Museum of Scotland, personally, I still don’t like the idea. For me it just look like we keep torturing the trees during their growth and it makes me really uncomfortable. But it is only my personal feeling and apparently, the project looks very attractive to some people and it also successfully launched on Kickstarter.
