Windgate-Lamar Fellowship
2023
What happens between the raw and the cooked? When natural materials are abstracted by industrial processes, what is lost? What is gained? My work slips into the veil between the primeval forest of craft fantasy and the industrial world that surrounds us constantly and invisibly. Through an investigation of the alloy of material and form, my practice investigates and exposes the sleight of hand performed by the lumber industry, dwelling with wood-as-tree and following the course of materials from silviculture to the consumer product.
In my practice, I define craft as the investment of time into materials. In both the reflective time of research and contextualization and the active time of studio practice, I seek to understand how this investment of time, often figured as attention, comes to bear on the appearance and connotations of materials. Frequently my work focuses on details that are otherwise overlooked, from my initial investigation of surface incident in commercial goods to my current preoccupation with traditional processes and their co-evolution with industrial ones.
My material of choice is wood in all its forms: tropical hardwood to local sticks, OSB and mulberry bark, dimensional lumber and handmade plywood. These materials are vital to me and throughout my work I seek to express their vitality, awakening the viewer to the strangeness that lurks beneath even the most familiar things.
Theju Nimmagadda is an artist born, raised, and educated in Providence Rhode Island, graduating from RISD in 2023 with a BFA in Furniture Design. His work focuses on the way wood is used in the constructed world around us, investigating and exposing the sleight of hand performed by the lumber industry, dwelling with wood-as-tree and following the course of materials from silviculture to the consumer product. Theju uses the framework of furniture to tell this story, taking advantage of its unique intractability in order to present material in a way that is legible, tangible, and emotional for viewers. He is also heavily influenced by the way he created in his younger years in the videogame Minecraft, and now uses the game as an Auto-Cad program in order to model pieces, as well as to seek inspiration from the way material, construction, and the earth as we know it is portrayed through this simulation.
Selected works
67 Broadway St, Asheville, NC 28801
(828) 785-1357 | info@centerforcraft.org
Gallery Hours: Tues–Sat, 10–6 get more info
Gallery Hours: Closed — Reopening Fall 2019
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