Janine Wang - Philadelphia, USA

Woodturning Weekend Conversations

For some reason my parents never controlled the way I sat. Sitting is a learned thing—that stiff right-angled-lower-case-h-shape we associate with chairs, the thing our teachers yelled at us to do in school—to sit, and to sit still.
Instead, I sprawled out on the floor, squatted on my heels as I arranged Legos or poked mud with a stick, and climbed on the backs of sofas as I saw my cat do. At the dinner table doing homework, when my brother and I were too short for the dining room chairs, my parents did not chide us to sit still; They dismantled the chairs and added 2x4s underneath the seats, and arranged little step stools to tuck beneath our dangling feet.
As I sit here and type, my legs cross-legged in my studio chair, my tools in easy reach in a perimeter all around me, I know the world is malleable. It’s not always something we have to suffer through, and bend backward to the rules of. I’ve never gotten the feeling that the wide world was built for me. Personally as a woman, in just the field of seating alone, I have drowned in so many cavernous bus seats with curves in all the wrong places, and have never been able to tip back a tip-back high end office chair built for heavier, bigger men. In fact the one I am cross-legged in right now is supposed to be one of these. I cannot do it.
I believe that good furniture creates good positive behavior, and this involves more than a relationship held at a distance. It’s not just pictures we can see online, or what we read about, or what we are told.
Furniture is a direct interface with the world. And how we choose to furnish our lives is an empowering, beautiful way that every person gets to paint their own values on the environment.
Making furniture lets me spend time reevaluating the types of furniture we have in our homes, why they look and act the way they do, and what kinds of tools and skills I have to respond with. My work exalts freedom, familiarity, and unrestricted comfort in the environment.
I hold a MFA in furniture design from RISD, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cooper Union. I am currently living and working as a woodworker in Philadelphia.

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