queer loveseat

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.

an opportunity to share identity intimately

The intersex-inclusive progress pride flag is the most up-to-date pride flag which attempts to encompass the lgbtqia+/ queer community, having been made in 2021 by Valentino Vecchietti of intersex equality rights uk.

As stated by Alex Green, “flags are political symbols, borrowed from the vocabulary of nationalism, with similar overtones of citizenship, belonging, and border. They represent what the historian Benedict Anderson called ”imagined communities”- self-constituted entities, united less by shared experiences than by shared beliefs in shared experiences.” according to Elliott Tilleczek, a ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto who is researching queer activism, “flags as symbols facilitate sociality between strangers, inviting community between people who may never actually meet.” Tilleczek argued that expanding the symbolic range of the pride flag, for example, can have real-world effects, enhancing intra- and intercommunal bonds by creating a sense of belonging.

The queer loveseat is the second piece of the collection, which represents what is shared with intimate guests in a comfortable environment and materializes as a loveseat. This piece represents the transition space through which strangers become acquaintances having bonded over experience and identity and incorporates the progfress pride flag as its embedded symbol. The form itself is inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s visually flattened chairs, one in particular with an inset purple glass circle, as well as the woven and bentwood flattened silhouette seating of the Wiener Werkstätte.

The piece was constructed using anigre, stoneware clay, and velvet upholstery.

moodboard

sketches

models

process

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