ON EDGE (AMIEU)
Guarded Display Cabinet
Silky oak, silky oak veneer, silver ash, silver ash veneer, glass.
One of the four major and one minor display cabinets in the AMIEU project. As such they are obliged to deal with the relationship between the displayed object and the display furniture. They were designed and made in parallel with Lueckenhausens interest in the Wunderkammer (cabinet of Curiosity) theme. On Edge has three cabinet spaces with lockable glass doors. The ziggurat provides a number of usable surfaces and the inserted guardian form, another, larger, surface. The cabinet not only bridges one dimension with another and one plane with another but also explores the links and the breaks between the external and the internal. It becomes part of the continuum of containment and the delineation and categorization of space that is central to the experience of the built environment.
The complementary tension between these elements is commented on by the choice and placement of the materials. The guardian form is separated from the cabinet by the use of a contrasting timber, Silky Oak, which is common to all the related guardian forms in this body of works. A material and subliminal link is reintroduced for the viewer however by using Silky Oak in the inner lining of one of the glass fronted sections, whereas the body of the cabinet is Silver Ash, and having the rear part of the guardian form made in Silver Ash, whereas the front is Silky Oak