WSD students participate in Museum of Vancouver exhibit project

Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Wilson School of Design (WSD) students took part in a project to turn decades-old mahogany wood from Central America into chairs exhibited at the Museum of Vancouver (MOV).

Chairs made for the exhibit, Future Makers: Chairs by New Designers, will be available through an auction until Sept. 17. 

Students started the project after developing a concept and design for the chairs, while reflecting on the origins of the mahogany wood. 

“It is a pretty interesting, complex story. It has so many roots in colonialism and extractivism, but then also it made its way to Stevenson, where it was being used by traditional ship builders,” says KPU student Michael Walmsley, who worked on the project. 

The partnership between the university and MOV started when Viviane Gosselin, a curatorial lead for the exhibition, reached out to KPU Product Design Program Chair Iryna Karaush after the museum received planks of mahogany wood as a donation. 

“Mahogany is a beautiful hardwood that you can no longer buy in stores. So the idea of using it to build risers, display cases, or walls didn’t make sense to me,” says Gosselin, who is also a director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of Vancouver. 

“It was more a question of how we can uplift this wood and share it with the creatives in the city.”

The course that was built around designing the chairs covered topics including circular economies and the origins of the wood, among others. 

The course also involved designers from Sustainable Arts and Green Ecosystems (SAGE), a MOV project that gathers partners and experts to develop better sustainable options in designing exhibits. 

“This is how one of the designer firms, Propellor Studio, started working and providing some feedback to the artists,” Gosselin says. 

One of the chairs Walmsley designed as part of a team, along with students Lorena Lutz and Kenny Nguyen, is called “Linkage Chair,” which reflects on the idea that the wood is founded in reciprocative cycles. 

“A tree doesn’t grow in a vacuum, a tree is supported by its entire community, and it’s all of these connections that allow it to grow and flourish and eventually create this beautiful material that was used to create a beautiful chair,” Walmsley says. 

While designing the “Drift Chair,” Walmsley wanted to address the idea of mahogany wood arriving in Vancouver, initially intended to be used by ship builders. The design of the chair depicts motifs from old ships, playing on the nautical theme surrounding the wood’s story, Walmsley says. 

“Our ability to sail the seas allowed not only European settler colonists to arrive in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and unfortunately, colonize those countries … but it also then allowed for this mahogany to be transported to Stevenson,” Walmsley says. 

Funds collected from the chair auction will support the Asociación de Comunidades Forestales de Petén (ACOFOP), an Indigenous-led association in Guatemala that uses and develops sustainable practices to support forest preservation and reforestation.

“We’re past the halfway point [in the auction]. It’s going really well and strong, but we hope that more people will keep bidding on these beautifully crafted, uniquely designed chairs,” Gosselin says. 

Being aware that the wood is associated with deforestation in Central American countries, the museum contacted the Guatemala consulate to help find Indigenous-led reforestation programs, she adds. 

“[MOV] is really about being mindful of all aspects of productions of an exhibition, including material selection,” she says, adding that the museum also purchased one chair and put it in its permanent collection. 

Walmsley says during the course, he learnt a lot about woodcarving and formed a supportive and collaborative environment with other students and the instructor. 

He adds that he hopes people attending the exhibition will see that sustainable and reclaimed objects can be more beautiful than mass-produced or brand-new objects. 

“Even if there are some imperfections and flaws [in the wood] … in my opinion, [they] make it more beautiful and add a story and a complexity that you don’t get from something that’s made from virgin materials,” Walmsley says. 

Gosselin says the students were able to embed notions of decolonial work and found a strong way to come up with the design for the chairs.

“Most of us think of chairs as purely functional, but the students pushed that idea further — they showed that a chair can be sculpture, it can be functional, and it can tell the story of the material’s history,” Gosselin says.

For more information, visit www.bit.ly/movexhibit.