Jack Larimore Meditates on The Lives of Trees and Humanbeings

by: Robin Rice

Jack Larimore’s sculptural furniture will never self-effacingly nestle into a corner. It boldly seizes space but, at the same time, it projects an odd sense of fragility, a poignant hint that things in general are somewhat provisional. Smallish storage objects balanced on six, eight or more splayed hypertrophic legs and felt-wrapped chair seats in the form of root balls verge on the anti-utilitarian, but Larimore maintains that “everything [I make] is functional. If it’s a vessel on six legs, I think it’s highly functional. It’s trying to glorify function. What’s more important: a plastic cup or a golden chalice?”

Larimore’s most recent body of work grows in part out of his experiences as Resident Furniture-Maker in the 2000  International Turning Exchange. He remembers making a piece named Finally Learning About Wood.  It was about the sensibility of “not going to the lumber yard but to the woods” for wood. “Turners are so much more connected to wood than some of the furniture makers I know.”

The week Larimore spent with turners Rolly Munro and Graeme Priddle (New Zealand), George Peterson (America) and Mike Scott (Wales)and Resident Scholar and turner, Chris Tyler (Nova Scotia) went all too quickly.  “Part of the attraction is to have that collegial experience of hanging out together and talking about life and stuff. I’m a natural collaborator in some ways. I’m not a turner per se; I do turnings in my work but I have not spent a lot of time at it. So, I did find myself observing—not so much to develop a mastery of any technique — more just absorbing how the process of turning differs from my process: seeing how they worked the woods and how they were beginning with stumps.”

The two New Zealanders Munro and Priddle did very intricate work, while Peterson used a chain saw and torch. “Even though [their styles] were dramatically different, in every case, there was an intimacy with the material, a sensitivity to the moisture content and the way that you can use that to your benefit; a sensitivity to other characteristics of wood, like the ability of wood to burn creating a [new] surface. I was moved by the new possibilities that I found for my work.”

Larimore’s interest in wood qua wood is evident in his frequent use of scrap wood, usually anathama to furniture-makers, and in the simple finishes he chooses. He was intrigued by what happened when George Peterson burned the surface of his rugged, expressive sculptures. “Nothing you can put on the surface of wood is more interesting than torching it,” he says. As it blackens the wood, the flame causes sap to flow. Larimore began torching his own highly refined forms. He treated the six extravagant elliptical legs of The Queen Is Trapped by Her Own Excess  in this way, later sealing the charred surface to preserve it. 

A redundancy of legs or feet, embodies the kind of vulnerability which infuses much of Larimore’s work. Three legs are usually considered the minimum needed to keep a piece of furniture stable. More than four hints that the piece needs extra support. The six long radiating legs of the “Queen” are further braced by metal tie rods at the base. The title refers to the queen termite, who grows too large to leave her nest. In Larimore’s presentation, the larva-like queen, constructed of rounded segments, each alternating white oak and ash, is a functional and metaphorical vessel, balanced — not trapped but marooned — on her excessive legs. 

A wood-eating queen constructed of wood seems canabalistic, though termites, like the rest of us, are what they eat. The thoughtful viewer may consider a subtext comparing the immobile many-legged queen with the more ambulatory but less stable two-legged human. Is there an element of parody here? Perhaps a wood-worker is the most self-conscious termite species of all. Larimore deliberately courts an ambiguity in which natural processes confront made ones and function co-habits with purely sculptural considerations.

He grew up on a farm with a happy conviction that he could “do stuff” with tools. His first, not entirely satisfying career as an environmental planner ended in the early 1970’s when he took a leave of absence to fix up a house in Philadelphia. He enjoyed this, moved in, and became a contractor. The house, fortuitously, was around the corner from Richard Kagan’s gallery on South Street, the first gallery in the US devoted to studio furniture. There, Larimore became familiar with the work of artists like Wendel Castle, Jere Osgood, Steve Madson and Bill Kaiser. “I had a few tools and started goofing around. I decided I was a furniture-maker after getting into the Philadelphia Craft Show [one of the best in the nation] a couple of times in the early 1980’s.” Gratifying sales convinced him that he could afford his métier.

From one perspective, Larimore approaches function as subject matter, which enables him to comment on some of the arbitrary —or not so arbitrary— features we take for granted in everyday objects. From a complementary perspective, he utilizes the forms of functionality as templates for the expression of ideas about culture, nature and humanity. “Most of my work finds interplay between ordered life and instinctive life: me trying to figure out how I fit in nature.” A low round table, Long Life Pine illustrates the limitations of the human capacity to control nature. The top is a grid pieced from salvaged pine. “It’s had a few incarnations already,” Larimore muses. “Who knows how many chapters there are in this tree’s life?”

A dozen chunks circling the perimeter of the table descend into flat-sided wedges cut at a 45° angle. Each of these stark angles concludes in a small human foot cast in bronze. Eleven green-patinaed feet step forward, balanced on the ball of the foot with the heel elevated. The twelfth rests on a literal ball, a polished brass sphere. Cycles of life are suggested by repeated forms. The circling feet trace a rhythmic dance-like cycle interrupted by that out-of-step one, precariously treading where it can find no purchase. To Larimore, it suggests “that part of me that wants to always take the hard way.”

Resembling both the termite “Queen” and the twelve-footed “Long Life” table, another recent work, River of Love or Tears, is a torch-blackened chest supported on eight exaggerated asymmetrical legs. Each descends as a metal rod and ends in a blond paddle shape of Douglas fir. The whole is a single organism but an ambiguous one. While rods extending upward from the broad paddle or tear-drop shapes literally support the boxy top structure, these legs can also be read visually as downward meandering rivulet pathways: a deliberately contradictory message which Larimore says “came out of this whole business with Iraq.” Order and disorder, reason and irrationality, love and pain permeate this river.

The idea began with the chest, a “cube of cubes” constructed from salvaged pine. Bronze narrow-fingered leaf-like hands extend from many cubes. Each has six digits: two opposing thumbs. “I’m hoping for human development here,” Larimore suggests. These wishful, impossible hands reach out as if from a blackened coffin, not with the authentic urgency of hope, perhaps pleading, perhaps despairing. However, the hands have secrets: a few are handles opening drawers carefully disguised in the flat grid of alternating grains, making this, too, another functional sculpture, though its usefulness is hidden. “If this [object] is yours, you know about the drawers and others don’t.”

Regarding the contradictory title of the piece, Larimore says, “If you don’t believe there’s a River of Love, you have to believe in a River of Tears.” Nevertheless, he is hopeful. “You have to believe that there’s some good to the other side of dark times.”

Endure the Dark is an animal-like oval table with pointed sistroid ends. Six nimble blond legs express startlement. Their braced gesture recalls the fragile forest creatures in Franz Marc’s World War I paintings. The headless conical body is mostly torch-blackened pine descending to a belly of light wood with a delicate trailing umbilicus or sperm tail, the image of a vessel that is still capable of giving life — unscorched.

In a more botanical vein, the seats of Natural Desire, are made in the form of root balls, each wrapped with strips of industrial felt. White, flat carved and sandblasted shoots of bleached ash are wedged between the massed felt roots. The chair backs are composed of paired sliced leaf-shaped sections of paulownia: one burnt black; one unscathed. Each chair back is further ornamented with a pair of tiny metal hands frozen in stiff arcane gestures. Larimore says that a comfortable way of sitting on the chair is to straddle it facing the leaves. “It’s meditative.”

As you examine the leaves, you may notice a knot hole or an irregularity. “Typically,” Larimore says, “a furniture-maker goes to a hardwood lumber store and seeks the timbers with the least amount of defect. But if you consider a tree, the ones with the most defects are the most interesting.” For example, a burl, often selected for its beauty, is a defect caused by trees being under stress or disease. “These are timbers who have a life, and I really mean who have a life, not that have a life. Defects are part of life, like the wrinkles in my face. I’m sorry; that’s just the way I am.” Since participating in the ITE, Larimore has become more aware of who he is as a wood-worker and of his sympathetic response to diverse materials, including metal. He does see wood as “the enemy” to be conquered or controlled. “For me, the craft of furniture-making is a matter of manifesting life into an object.”