The Windsor Limbers Up – FineWoodworking

Aspen Golann’s exuberant interlaced Windsor chairs are an expression of fidelity—to the centuries-old tools, techniques, and forms of the traditional continuous-arm chair and, equally, to an artist’s appetite for innovation and pure beauty. When Golann visited Boston’s North Bennet Street School in 2016 and saw the elevated level of period furniture making being taught there, “everything seemed completely and impossibly out of my league,” she says. “But I like doing things that are too hard for me.” A former art teacher, she had always loved making art, but art alone didn’t suit her as a career. It was, she says, “when my sculptures became usable that I finally cared and saw a place for myself in the creative field.” As a queer woman, and often the only woman in a woodshop, Golann sometimes felt like an outsider early on. “It could be lonely and hard to be authentic,” she says. In a piece such as this, with its lariat-like crinoline stretchers and a whiplash arm in white oak that was partly steam-bent and partly bent-laminated, Golann continues to prove that she not only belongs in the field but helps lead it. “My goal,” she says, “is to make furniture that is both personal and historical—celebrating and subverting the history of American decorative arts.”

Photos: Kate Benson

Aspen Golann is an artist, teacher and woodworker whose work explores gender, power and history through the language of American Furniture.

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