My contribution to the exhibition The Learned Society of Extra Ordinary Objects, Curated by Clarke and Clerkin, for Somerset House.

I’ve always thought these folding chairs were a really fantastic bit of engineering, not exactly pretty, but so good at doing what they meant to do. Strong, comfortable, super flat folding, cheap, and a stack of sixty on a trolley can be pushed around easily by one person. I think they were designed (in the 1960's?) by Samsonite, an American firm that started out making folding tables & chairs before they got into suitcases, they now seem to be made (under licence?) by a few companies.

I've used them in a few projects over the years, but their use was always limited by the available  colourways; grey frames with the plastic seat & back in burgandy, petrol blue or grey, I’d always wondered why they didn’t make them all e.g. one shade of dark grey, and through being a bit more neutral they would work in more instances. Nowadays they are made in all-black and all-white, which means they have nailed a big part of the wedding / banquet market. Whilst looking for some white ones for a project recently, I discovered a firm that specialises in the hire & sale of folding furniture for events, who were selling used ones returned from the 2016 Rio Olympics. I thought - Bingo, this is perfect we can have used ones, even better! The webpage showed one of the 58,000 they had for sale from the Rio Olympics, with the world champion swimmer Michael Phelps passing behind, kind of almost as if he was eyeing up the chair. It turns out he’s won more medals than any other Olympian and is nicknamed Flying Fish. So that’s some endorsement for a folding chair. I bought six chairs for the project and one extra, which is the one featured here. It's quite possible this could be the very one Michael Phelps had his eye on.

(2017)