The structure or function of the piece is always the starting point in the story I'm telling. On furniture I often work to blur the boundaries, turning chair legs into trees and clock towers, back slats into surfboards. Or... a stool seat becomes a bird nest with eggs in it, so if you sit on it you're incubating the eggs! And then the stool legs are the trunks of the trees holding the nest...
I work with the negative spaces too (like the back slats of a chair) and challenge your eye to fill in the missing pieces, so the effect is a continuous scene. That is a kind of trompe l’oeil I love to play with , fooling the eye to fill in what is missing!
For boxes I like to play with reality a little—so I'll set a scene—like an octopus in water—and then deliberately break the boundaries by having the arms trail out of the scene, over the edges of the box, kind of coming at you. I like there to be a quirky hook, something that makes you stop and question what you are looking at. When your brain has to work a little to make sense of it, I know it’s complete and perfect!
