At Boston’s renowned North Bennet Street School (the oldest trade school in the U.S.), woodworking students spend two years immersed in American furniture making tradition. Asheville furniture maker Hayley Davison recalls that while enrolled there, she spent hours viewing the decorative arts collections of the city’s museums, learning the visual language of early American craftsmen as well as Shaker artisans. In class, students made copies of classic forms such as the high boy or secretary, learning 17th and 18th-century joinery methods, proportion and scale. That emphasis on craftsmanship over design took the pressure off, Davison says, allowing her to focus first on honing her skills.
By the time she struck out on her own, she was ready to add design into the mix. And by that time she was living in Kauai, Hawaii, where she spent 15 years making furniture before moving to Asheville in 2009. Trained in American period furniture, partial to European Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, and surrounded by Asian influences, Davison has a style all her own.
Light wood, simple lines, and nature-inspired motifs are defining elements of her furniture. There’s a hint of the Japanese aesthetic she encountered in Hawaii in the sliding doors she often uses in place of drawers in storage pieces. That influence is also evident in the tansu — a type of chest with sliding doors instead of hinges — a form she has often reinterpreted. But there’s also a strong nod to Arts and Crafts and Mission styles: her pieces are linear with just the occasional slight curve in the leg or front.
Unlike Arts and Crafts furniture, though, Davison’s furniture rarely includes hardware: handles are typically fashioned from wood and the drawers slide on wooden runners. She has stayed true to her North Bennet Street training: she uses traditional dovetail and mortise and tenon joinery (a hallmark of Mission furniture), which allows the wood to expand and contract freely over time. “Everything is designed to move,” she says, and this prevents the loosening and cracks that cause furniture to fall apart over time. A typical sideboard or storage piece takes around 50 hours to create, involving any number of hand tools. “The big power tools will only get you so far,” says Davison. From there, her training and patience take over. She uses only linseed oil or beeswax for finishing, allowing the natural figuring of the wood to show through and affecting a deeper, richer surface appearance over time.
While in Kauai, Davison made hundreds of rocking chairs, dining sets, beds, benches and sofas, some of which were collected by the island’s celebrity second-home owners. A distinctive feature of those pieces was her use of a local hardwood koa, which was easier to get when she arrived on the island but has since become rarer. It’s a warm wood with a lot of “figure” (a woodworking term for the appearance of the surface of the wood), similar to a tiger or bird’s eye maple but redder and more dramatic. Koa wood is so expensive that while in Hawaii, Davison used even the smallest scraps to make chopsticks and small boxes.
Since moving to Asheville, Davison says she finds herself responding to the seasons and closeness to nature that comes with living in the area. Dragonflies and butterflies (classic Art Nouveau motifs) show up in her work in the spring and summer and leaves in the fall, carved into panels or made from colored glass inserts. Here, she uses local cherry, maple and walnut, but holds on to a small inventory of koa as accent wood for special projects. Working in a light-filled studio behind the home she shares with her husband John, a painter and son, Evan, Davison has become a member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, exhibiting at its two annual shows and working on commissioned pieces.
While in art school after finishing at North Bennet Street, a professor told Davison “furniture isn’t art.” While few who encounter them would argue that her pieces aren’t art, the craft is her primary consideration. Like those pieces she studied in the museums, her furniture is designed to be well used, well loved and handed down. “It’s solid,” she says. “It’s meant to be here in 100 years.”
Hayley Davison can be contacted through her website davisonarts.com. You can also visit her at the Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands, southernhighlandguild.org, October 18-21 2012, at the US Cellular Center, Asheville.