Do not go gentle | Designwork 09 | Melbourne Design Week
Sophie Gannon Gallery
17 May 2025 – 07 Jun 2025
In my design practice, I scavenge discarded timber furniture from kerbsides and online posts, disrupting their accelerated cradle-to-grave journey in which households are just a brief waystation between forest and landfill. I reconfigure the salvaged parts into new forms that reject their categorisation as waste, aiming to reveal the ongoing vitality of wood’s materiality and challenge notions of furniture as inert objects to be acquired and discarded without consequence.
Soundings is informed by research into how lichens communicate—sending out pings across a void to find kin and form new territories.
Three of the works — 'Crustacean', 'Gambol', and 'Locomotion Table (After Muybridge)' — explore liveliness through gesture and implied motion. They resist passivity by stepping out of their original symmetric and fixed forms, reminding us that wood is living cellular material.
The 'Radius Chairs' address the overwhelming volume of waste, condensing five chairs worth of parts into one. The slats arc like tree’s growth rings, and the backs form a trunk-like column, remembering trees.
Ashley Eriksmoen - 2025
Ashley EriksmoenSoundings 1 2025Salvaged wood furniture, acrylic and milk paints, oil finish85 x 95 x 2.5 cm$2,500.00
Ashley EriksmoenSoundings 2 2025Salvaged wood furniture, acrylic and milk paints, oil finish103 x 112 x 2.5 cm$2,800.00
Ashley EriksmoenLocomotion Table (after Muybridge) 2025Salvaged wood furniture, acrylic and milk paints, oil finish57 x 100 x 100 cm$4,200.00
Ashley EriksmoenRadius bench (1) 2025Salvaged wood furniture, oil finish105.5 x 90 x 50 cm$6,600.00
Ashley EriksmoenRadius bench (2) 2025Salvaged wood furniture, oil finish110 x 75 x 75 cm$6,600.00
Ashley EriksmoenCrustacean 2015-25Salvaged wood furniture, milkpaint, acrylic paint69 x 137 x 44 cm$3,500.00
Ashley EriksmoenGambol 2025Salvaged wood furniture, oil finish103 x 59 x 40 cm$3,500.00
Ashley EriksmoenWe are all nest builders making meaning with sticks (1) 2021Salvaged wood furniture, acrylic and milk paints, oil finish103 x 59 x 40 cm$3,500.00
