proverbial armoire

aesthetic seduction: symbolic furniture to expand queer design

With more than 400 attacks on LGBTQIA+ rights and creative expression in state legislatures during 2023 alone, furniture represents an ideal cross-platform between queer and hetero-normative households that can spark dialogue on identity, community, belonging, and finding common ground. The thesis collection, Aesthetic Seduction, seeks to address this by furthering the Glasgow School and Viennese Secession’s goal of redefining the gendered and ethnic politics of objects and space by utilizing their language and methodology to incorporate queer iconography into symbolic furniture as a means of expanding queer design and generational inclusion.

private storage; reclaiming the closet

The pink triangle symbol originated as Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany, and increased persecution of minorities, including Jewish, gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens. Homosexual male prisoners were forced to wear pink triangles, lesbians- black triangles, and queer Jews- pink triangles over an upside-down yellow triangle- forming a representative star of David. Despite the history of genocidal, sadistic, and cruel hatred, the pink triangle was reappropriated during the pre-liberation period of queer activism as a graphic for the silence=death aids campaign.

The proverbial armoire is the last piece in the collection, which represents the truest self that is only revealed in privacy and manifests as an armoire. The armoire serves as private storage for the most intimate objects while nodding to and reclaiming the metaphorical closets of queer history. The form itself was inspired by a drawing for a spoon by Joseff Hoffmann of the Wiener Werkstätte, as well as postmodern revivals of the secession style.

The interior fabric panels were designed to incorporate the triangle motif along with the figure of Sappho. Inspired by the Weiner Werkstätte’s bountiful examples of goddess figure marquetry, particularly in case goods, which were references to times of Jewish/ Hellenic acculturation. Sappho, a classical literary figure, was the originator of Sapphic, or lesbian poetry, as well as arguably the first “lesbian,” as the term was named after her, as she hailed from the Greek Isle of Lesbos.

Erving Goffman, a celebrated Jewish sociologist of the twentieth century, in his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, proposes that in social life, we are all performers. “Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look, ”says Goffman. This is an extension of the masks that closeted queer people have had to wear throughout history to ensure their safety. The proverbial armoire aims to not only reclaim the proverbial queer closet but to also provide a physical space to put away the mask and embrace the self.

The piece was constructed using maple, white oak, purpleheart, and stoneware clay.