RISD Museum adds Criogriff to it’s collection
Criogriff is the work of Ashley Eriksmoen MFA 00 FD. Composed of recognizable components from salvaged office furniture, disassembled and reassembled in a configuration that renders the chairs nonfunctional in terms of receiving an animated human body, the work morphs into a sort of sculptural entry hall table or sideboard with multiple shelves/surfaces, a removable box, and horn-hooks for bags and coats.
The name Criogriff, speaks to the idea of mutation as realized in mythological hybrid creatures. Here a natural creature crio, which is ram in Greek, is combined with griff, or griffin, another hybrid creature formed from the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle.
Eriksmoen’s work applies gesture and posture to an inanimate object to invite familiarity and connection; it utilises salvaged timber from abandoned furniture; it rejects archetypal furniture forms and presents unexpected solutions for function. The piece suggests its "genetic" lineage of having once been trees, and then chairs, and then waste prior to a reconfiguration as a hybrid form.
Criogriff comes to the RISD Museum from the ground-breaking exhibition Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking, held at the Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, October 2019-January 2020. The exhibition featured 43 female artists and makers, including President Emerita Rosanne Somerson, and broke the Center's opening night attendance record with nearly 1,300 visitors.
About Ashley Eriksmoen
Eriksmoen was born in Orange County CA, and currently lives in Australia, where she is Head of the Furniture Department at the Australian National University School of Art and Design. She studied at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka CA in the Fine Woodworking Program and then attended RISD, where she studied under Rosanne Somerson and earned an MFA from the Furniture Design Department in 2000. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Geology from Boston College.
She sees herself as a designer/maker with a practice straddling contemporary studio craft and critical design. Her research centers on issues of sustainability and natural resources, and explores design through the use of abandoned timber components. She is a strong believer in the power of contemporary craft and design as a means of tackling pressing environmental and societal issues and has organized projects and exhibitions such as the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) Witness Tree Project in her home town of Canberra, which distributes the wood of age-old trees to artists and designers for use, rather than chipping the wood into mulch.
