What Are You Working On Now? Oona Robertson
A research trip to a Sahara strip mall with Mak and Hue (1), 2024.
What are you working on now? is a Couch in the Desert series where we ask artists what they are making and thinking about in and outside the studio.
Oona Robertson
I say I am a furniture maker and a writer because those are the two things I have worked at the longest, but I am also at times: a maker of space, a producer of events, an art handler, an editor, a fabricator, a photographer. It can be hard to find throughlines in all the things I do but if I step back a little and look from the side, I see some shapes forming:
I love tangible things and do not exist well in virtual worlds. Material, texture, warmth, and tone are things I notice in the world and am drawn to in my own work and the work of others.
Most of what I do exists in the space between people, in relationship to, in the making for, and in collaboration. I am not the kind of writer who craves a cabin in the woods. I only feel like writing in the aftermath of interaction, investigation, and experience. I want to make everyone’s dining room table, to solidify the gathering we do.
Oona Robertson, Johanson Table work in progress, 14" x 11" x 18", walnut, 2024.
Sometimes I think of my multifacetedness in a negative light, that I’m doing too much or being scattered or fragmented, and I have been looking to friends who are similarly dexterous, with their hands in many pockets of this city’s creative pockets, for inspiration and validation. That said, I think we should all value our rest more and get paid by the government to be creative, so we don’t have to hustle so hard. Sometimes I think my best contribution to the creative world would be to just make dinner for you all. It would be a beautiful life’s work, to cook for the artists I love, but I am too much of an idea man to not at least sometimes attempt my own creations.
Oona Robertson, Johanson Tables, stained oak, year unknown (original) and walnut, 2024 (redesign).
Here are two of the many things I am working on right now:
On the furniture side, I am currently researching accessible, human-centered design and beginning a project making beds for sick and disabled people designed for their individual bodies, beginning with myself. In the process, I am looking at historical standards-for example how standard chair and table heights are set for the body dimensions of a white man—and studying subversive design and dreamscapes and imagined crip futures.
In researching history and the future to get at something in the present, I am thinking about legacy and adaptation in relation to this project. I recently redesigned and rebuilt a side table my great-grandfather made long before I was born. It made me think about conversations that can be had within and against our histories. I don’t know if he and I would have shared any life values or woodworking techniques, but in making it I could ask questions of his hands, and in making different decisions than he did I could both acknowledge and adapt my own inheritance. These are some of my lines of thinking with the bed project as well. Acknowledging the inaccessibility of this place and time, how sick many of us have been made, and how futures where we can fully live exist and then taking the material steps I can now to show a version of that future.
I often find my future to be unimaginable because I have lived the majority of my life in physical pain and am constantly working with the limitations of my body and pressing on both my limitations and my dreams to see if there is anything that can move a little. In making beds for myself and others who spent much of our time in them, I am seeing if I can build the world I want to live in from the body outwards.
A research trip to a Sahara strip mall with Mak and Hue (2), 2024.
2. On the writing side of things, I am currently writing a column called The Other Strip for Desert Companion, in which I visit strip malls in Vegas and act as a kind of tour guide for people who are less inclined to explore. It’s been fun to contradict the car culture of Vegas by wandering around these little enclosed strip mall worlds with friends, tasting and experiencing, and talking to people about their spaces.
What I like most about having a work in progress is that it changes the way I experience my everyday life. As I drive down the boulevards of Vegas I now crane my neck to look at every passing strip mall sign. Attention brings pleasure to that endless stretch of Sahara I take to get home. It’s like tuning my senses towards something and discovering a new way to feel in the process.
A research trip to a Sahara strip mall with Mak and Hue (3), 2024.
Oona Robertson (1993) is a writer and furniture maker.
See more of Oona’s work on her Instagram.
Images courtesy of the artist.
Published by Lyssa Park on Sept 29