In 2017, studiovoll, was a mental space I made within my art practice for researching ideas of use and what it is to design.

After an apprenticeship in 2018 with Toshio Tokunaga in Hyogo, Japan, studiovoll became the sole focus of my practice. My perspective had shifted from what it is to use to how it is to live– what roles natural furniture plays in our lives. Research into ecosystems, soil biology, permaculture, and observations of the natural world around us help hold the connections needed to see a new kind of furniture that can be made because of our surroundings. My time living and working with Tokunaga-sensei and his family in rural Hyogo prefecture made me realize that the possibility of furniture is no different than a fallen tree rotting in the forest.

Some oaks have been known to live for a thousand years or more. Eras of their life have been recorded in 300-year mythologies by ancient cultures and stored in their own hardwood rings. “Three centuries he grows, and three he stays Supreme in state; and in three more decays.” (John Dryden b.1631). The closer to death an ancient tree gets the more life it supports, the more relationships it has with its surroundings, its seasonal birds, its chemical signals, nutrient collaborators congregate in microscopic root communities, cavities; broken limbs, house new residents, soil, and even new trees, all are further bodies of the tree. Winds wring mold softened trunks, felling giants. Their homes open to more life in death than in life.

I choose to write studiovoll in all lowercase, all one word because it cannot be a design project or a furniture studio. The work must grow from fragments of land. In doing so, may we learn how central we are in its and our collective health.

studiovoll is my sense of how to live in an era of both death and regeneration.

Part of this regeneration is an untying of our conclusions.  If you are an English speaker, we do not have the necessary vocabulary or even grammatical structure to support the more than human world. A living plant is prescribed as he, she, or it. In order to reconnect with these systems with which we have co-evolved with for hundreds of thousands of years, our contemporary vocabulary needs to re-coalesce around what older cultures grew in great detail– an ever deepening awareness and relationship with the living breathing world.

I want the work done through this studio to expand what it is to live and have a true involvement in the whole of our environment.

Austin Voll

2023