Guy Martin - Labour of love

Above: .

Above: Moonhouse - a spiritual garden retreat

Above: from inside...

Above: A high-quality potting shed

Above: Winsham - built from cedar wood

Guy Martin is unsure about defining himself as ‘an artist’, is uncomfortable with the term ‘customers’, talks about being in a transitional period and is uncertain as to the shape his work will take in the future. Yet, as an artist/designer/maker, Guy applies a well-formed philosophy to his creative work and has a strong connection to his rural Dorset surroundings.

Guy designs and makes ‘ecologically sensitive domestic interior furniture and garden buildings’ and works in materials that are all sustainable and locally sourced, but this concept is the pinnacle of a long, and very personal creative journey.

His father was a figurative sculptor who worked mostly in clay, and Guy grew up watching him work, aspiring to be like him. After studying sculpture at St Martins School of Art, he spent a few years working as an assistant to phenomenally influential sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. The influence of Caro’s steel sculptures can be seen in Guy’s early sculptural furniture.

But it was during his time working as a design tutor at Parnham College for furniture-makers from 1988 to 1994 that Guy began to rethink his whole approach to the craft. The renowned Dorset college was established by internationally successful furniture-maker John Makepeace in 1976, at a time when art and furniture were colliding, and artists were beginning to question the nature of mass production.

Guy first came to my attention when an exhibition of his furniture, entitled Whole Life Cost, was touring the UK, hosted by the Devon Guild of Craftsmen and with support from the Arts Council. The tour landed at Walford Mill Crafts, near Wimborne, and I went to hear him talk about his take on the relationship between spirituality, nature and design.

His furniture is stunning: contemporary pieces made from contrasting pale and blackened ash, in clean and simple lines, that beg to be touched, such is their pleasing organic form and stark simplicity. But I am also struck by Guy’s gentle open nature and his deeply-felt passion for his work.

A month or so later, as we sit at Guy’s kitchen table in Greenham, he talks candidly about how reaching an epiphany relatively late into his career as a successful furniture designer, led him to take a very different direction in his work.

‘I changed my approach to design. I reassessed my values and the way we live and relate to our environment. I felt we needed to address issues and I thought we needed to change the way we looked at design,’ he says.

The change in ideology was the result of various developments in Guy’s life. He had become increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of the design industry, and when dramatic changes took place in his personal life, Guy embarked on a personal study of world religions in search of meaning. Eventually, he formed a relationship with Christianity, which had a profound effect on his work.

‘I think of myself as a Christian because I admire Christ the man, who he was as a human being and what he taught. Christianity led me to think about the idea of service. Design is about service; it’s about listening to the real needs. So my work became most simple. I paired it down and only made what was necessary,’ he says.

And Guy always had a very clear idea about the commissioning process. ‘It is about discovering what people need, which is not necessarily the same as what they want,’ explains Guy. ‘If I’m making a dining table for a family, I’d much rather talk to them about what they eat, how they socialise, if the kids will use the table to do their homework. There are two parts to the process: the psychological and the physical.’ 

Since the end of the Whole Life Cost exhibition last year, Guy has been taking some time out to evaluate the tour and to reassess his creative direction. When I catch up with him, although having decided his furniture work should take a back seat for the time being, he is full of his usual candour and zest about moving forward into possibly his most creative time yet.

‘It is very useful to have a break from things that have become so familiar. It makes you see them in a different light,’ he tells me.

But Guy hasn’t sat still. He has been working on his own house and has been setting up a site at the local sawmill to concentrate on ecologically sensitive garden buildings. The ones that he has already completed stand out as something extraordinary. An artist’s studio, incorporating straw bales; an outdoor performance space, with poetry readings in mind; and a magical garden retreat, all custom made from timber sourced locally.

Guy’s ecological buildings are an idea whose time has come and, as a result, orders are flooding in, through word of mouth alone. But you can rest assured that Guy won’t let demand compromise quality, as his work is his calling and he invests every piece with a little part of himself.

For more information, or to contact Guy, visit www.guy-martin.com