DESIGN
                                                                       

To begin the table, I started out sketching ideas of shapes that would best facilitate conversation for eight people. I looked at squares, circles, trapezoids, ovals and ovoids. Nothing felt right.

I went back to my old sketchbooks and started looking,

I found  a recurring theme, its the slightest curve. Think of a blade of grass or stalk of wheat yielding to the softest summer breeze. I see it everywhere, it catches my eye and often stops me in my tracks. It’s recurring in nature: a gentle wave, the curve of a worn stone, the profile of a leaf. I also see it in the human form.

Laying out the curve

As I drew and focused on that curve, the shape of the boat - particularly a pram, a Norwegian pram to be exact - emerged in the design I wanted to pursue.

I liked the idea of a boat and the connection to the boats that are depicted in the paintings of Herbjorn Gausta, a Norwegian immigrant painter and a cousin of my mother. 

Herbjorn Gausta, Vesterhiem Collection

Last summer I spent just over a week in Rauland, Norway, at the farm of my ancestors, along the shores of Lake Totak.  There are wooden boats along the shore, that are slowly rotting back into the earth.

When I think about those boats, and my family rowing in them to fish or go across the lake to visit neighbors, I can’t help but feel a connection.  I hear the stories, I look at how boats defined and connected the community around the lake and took families to church.  The boat was the vehicle to physically bring people together, so to have that same shape of a boat define the table seemed like a good fit in bringing people together At the Table.

Lake Totak  Rauland, Norway.