Faye Toogood’s Cairn Chair transforms solid oak into an evocative meditation on time, craft, and human touch, balancing sculptural presence with ergonomic intimacy in contemporary collectible design.
Created for Friedman Benda’s Assemblage 7: Lost and Found II exhibition, the piece is a striking meditation on materiality and form. Carved from solid English oak, the chair recalls ancient stone markers, its weighty presence evoking the passage of time. Through the meticulous hand-carving of its surfaces, Toogood transforms a functional object into an artifact—both a seat and a silent witness to history.
The chair’s form is a study in contrasts: its architectural solidity meets an ergonomic sensitivity that embraces the sitter. With four robust legs anchoring a deeply sculpted seat and sharply inclined backrest, Cairn balances monumentality with human-scale tactility. Its shellacked surface—a nod to 18th-century British furniture craftsmanship—amplifies the natural grain of the wood, layering warmth onto its rugged contours. This play of texture mirrors the conceptual depth of the work, a dialogue between the raw and the refined, the found and the shaped.
By naming the chair after the ancient stone cairns that punctuate the British landscape, Toogood situates her design within a lineage of human mark-making. There is an archaeological sensibility at play—each cut, each polish, each curve revealing rather than constructing. It is a piece that speaks not just to utility, but to a larger conversation about design as cultural memory, about how objects carry meaning across generations. In Cairn Chair, Toogood reaffirms her position at the vanguard of contemporary design, where sculpture and furniture collapse into a singular, resonant statement.
