The late works of American artist and designer Wendell Castle have gone on display at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, showing the evolution of his signature stack-lamination technique.
Castle, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 85, is known as one of the pioneers of American art furniture, combining his training in both industrial design and sculpture to make one-off functional pieces.
The Suspended Disbelief exhibition showcases the late work of Wendell Castle. Photo by Jean Pierre Vaillancourt
The Carpenters Workshop Gallery solo exhibition Suspended Disbelief displays works the designer created between 2011 and 2015.
The period saw Castle return to the biomorphic style and stack-lamination technique that had characterised his most famous works of the 1960s and 70s, augmented with new ideas and technologies. Castle's work is mainly made of laminated wood
Stack lamination involves glueing planks of wood together to make a large block, which Castle would then carve into. The artist built the blocks with an idea of the work he was going to carve in mind, so he could build up the approximate shape in cross sections.
With his later series of works, he added another element: digital technologies such as 3D modelling, scanning and laser cutting. These allowed him to achieve ever more elaborate creations because he could obtain accurate cross-sections of 3D models in a way that he couldn't from 2D drawings, and cut them equally precisely.
His signature forms are org...