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Academic summary

With the artistic research project «Skapornamentikk/Ornamentskap” I look at the roles given to tacit knowledge and theoretical reflection from the perspective of furniture design. With an alternating workflow between 1) woodcarving and cabinetmaking in the workshop and 2) writing self-critical reflections that vandalise the work from the workshop, I challenge my own understanding of what constitutes knowledge, form, and the form knowledge takes, both tacit and explicit; embodied and theoretical. The project at large tries to rediscover the role of ornaments, eradicated from modern design thinking and ethics, on the grounds of being superfluous, unnecessary, and primitive.

I view ornaments as deposits of an ornamental desire. The desire is believed to be an expression of a meta-physical longing – a dream of unity – a force trying to connect things that do not have causal connections. Within the four cabinet-projects, I work with the question of how and why artistic practices should contribute to knowledge production. My project is a personal journey in a borderland between theory and practice, and the wasteland between art and design, done both on behalf of myself and the students I have taught. Here, the ornament seems to function as a key to cope with the complex interplay between the abstract, the concrete, and the current, in both a practical and a theoretical sense. The project argues for an updated understanding of the ornament and how this can give access to a hands-on and playful exploration of metaphysical relationships as an intermediary and necessary entity between all these pro/positions, including between the modern, the traditional, the old, the contemporary, and the prospective.

The project material is comprised of four pairs of cabinet-projects and self-criticisms. The criticisms are aesthetical investigations as the cabinets are.