Seat of state

This chair, titled Seat of state, is by sculptor, furniture-maker and arts educator Gay Hawkes. Hawkes is an inter-disciplinary artist working in the seaside village of Dunalley on Tasmania’s east coast. It is made of horizontal scrub (Anodopetulum biglandulosum), a dense, contorted layer of springy resilient growth native to Tasmania’s cool temperate rainforests. For this work, Hawkes sourced a large piece of horizontal scrub, found in January 1982 already felled by foresters clearing a track.

The timber was used extensively in colonial Tasmania for the manufacture of rudimentary bush furniture and equipment by settlers. For this work, Hawkes references the archetypal ’Jimmy Possum chair’, a style of furniture popular in late colonial Tasmania, made around the town of Deloraine and similar in form to Irish stick chairs. As with the Jimmy Possum chair, Hawkes has made use of the rough, naturally forming solid pieces of timber, constructing the chair without the use of nails. This sculptural piece of contemporary furniture demonstrates Hawkes’s passion for bush carpentry and her belief that furniture can encompass a conceptual element and reflects her deep connection with  Tasmania.

Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design