Martyn Simpson - Studio Furniture

This body of work emerged from an increasing interest in craft and design, which has always been latent in my painting and particularly my sculpture. The sculptural works began to suggest utilitarian forms such as cabinets and shelves; it was only a small step to pursue this on its own terms.

The series is guided more by style and aesthetics than utility and consists of several improvised pieces – not drawn or planned - which share the same side profile. As a body of work, these objects serve as a series of prototypes, or variations on a theme, however, each individual artefact is finished as a stand-alone piece of furniture. The forms are derived substantially from brutalist architecture whilst the method of production follows the tradition of one-off studio furniture.

All the pieces are handmade in a small workshop using European oak and the construction is limited to mortice and tenon, mitre and butt joints, which are fundamental and direct means of joining two planes.

photographs by David R Watson

These sculptural pieces occupy a place within my output that bridges the gap between the paintings, such as the OSB series, and my furniture. Whilst they are resolutely autonomous objects, they draw their form from the language of architecture and design. Further to this, the scale is implicitly domestic, with planes that sit at the level of tabletops and chairs for example. The heavily worked surface, whilst deriving from my paintings, in this instance refers to the complex patterns found in decorative inlays and intarsia woodwork and dematerialises the emphatically blunt, interlocking modernist forms.

Excerpt from catalogue essay for Vivid, Richard Salmon Gallery

Martyn Simpson’s Sterling Lasso: Earth Glaze (2001) consists of carefully painting alternate flat areas of gloss paint around the pattern of laminated chips of sterling board, each of these remaining as linear strips after this operation is completed, and becoming rhythmical lines, the result having some connection to the fractured brush marks of a post-Cubist nature. These boards are then installed leaning vertically against the wall. It is Simpson’s sense of architecture, here, which makes these pieces work, in that they become an intervention within the space. Simpson’s preference is for the work to be constructed from readymade building materials, using everyday materials such as the ubiquitous standardised size of the sterling board and gloss paint. Their relationship to walls, doorways and archways, entrances and exits lend them a confrontational air, which adds to their sense of being displaced.

David Ryan, 2002

Produced by outlining and filling-in the fibres found in sheets of ‘Oriented Strand Board’ (a very cheap building material that I have used in previous work), these paintings yield a dense opticality that hints at pictorial depth whilst remaining resolutely flat. Coming close to the haptic, they are meticulously crafted and could be described as visual textures; uniform in effect yet composed of non-repeating units.

This group of paintings takes on a domestic scale and treats each painted board as a raw material to be cut and articulated away from a single flat plane. Each work could be seen as a maquette for a larger work or collectively as ‘conversation’ or ‘chamber’ pieces.

The use of shelves also reinforces the ‘object-ness’ of the paintings, allowing their relationship to the wall to shift subtly. This is a development of the earlier large pieces where whole boards were leaned and propped against walls, windows and in doorways.