Codex, Court, and the Alien Familiar: A Conversation with Cory Robinson

Shelley Selim: How would you define the term codex for your work? Is it a set visual language that you're using?

Cory Robinson: Yes, that’s how I see it. And that language is a bit of an amalgam of my interest in 20th-century design typologies and universal geometries that trace through different cultures and time periods. This really developed through revisiting drawing, revisiting shape making, revisiting the most simple design elements during a residency abroad, not even thinking about design history or alignment with anything specific. And now I’ve begun to implement new modes of technology in the work, whether it be Adobe Illustrator or 3D milling software, to manipulate that design language in different iterations. 

SS: In this exhibition, you're recontextualizing familiar domestic forms. How does this new environment alter their meaning?

CR: I don’t think I’ll really know until they’re installed in the space, but the keystone pieces for me of this new show are the wall hung rugs. They're significant scale—seven feet by seven feet—and I’m installing them as a contemplative wall, in the space I’m calling the Church. And while they don’t have the luminescence of stained-glass windows, they are suggestive of those forms with the broken-down color gradations and outlined shapes. But they have a fuzziness, like they’re out of focus, so I’m excited to see how they materialize.

SS: You have three domains in this exhibition: the Church, the Court, and the Garten, and all of them are informed by childhood memories for you. I’m so interested in how your rural, working-class background informs your design practice.

CR: It's something I've been thinking a lot about. Those three spaces are all political in their own way, especially when you think about the Garten and it’s relationship to agriculture in the Midwest. For me that concept derived from growing up surrounded by genetically modified corn. I basically grew up in a corn desert—when you looked out the window in my childhood home, all you saw was corn. My sister and I grew up very isolated, 15 miles outside of a town of 5,000 people.

SS: How did you grow to identify yourself as an artist or a designer within that context when it sounds like you weren't exposed to a lot? 

CR: It feels like ancient history, but it's also like yesterday. My grandparents made this investment in sending me to a neighbor’s house to learn watercolor painting. It was my only extracurricular experience—I didn’t play sports. Like I said, we were pretty isolated. As a young person, this was one of the only things I did where I met kids that were not at my school. I met a vegan kid once and I had no idea what that was. So, I continued with these lessons from when I was about eight or nine years old all the way up through high school. I had also been put into an accelerated academic program, so when it was time to think about what to do with my life, I decided to try art school. 

SS: Were you the first person in your family to go to college?

CR: Yes, I think my cousin and I were the first to get a college degree in the family. And it was expensive, so I invested and had fun with it. And as I went through the program at Herron, I was unsure of how I could turn this into a career and it was through Phil Tennant’s mentorship and encouragement that I decided to go to graduate school. This was in the late 1990s, when all the luminaries of the studio furniture movement were heading up furniture programs, like Wendell Castle’s alignment with RIT, Roseanne Somerson at RISD, and Tom Loeser at UW Madison. And I ultimately decided to study with Wendy Maruyama in San Diego.

SS: Yes I was wondering about this, because you have such a deep respect for those late twentieth-century studio furniture designers. How did Wendy’s mentorship shape your work?

CR: Well, immensely. I think it was an interesting time in her career in that she had had a lot of success when she was a young professor at the Appalachian Center and then at CCA. She was making a lot of multiples of designs and selling work to collector’s guilds through Peter Joseph Gallery in New York. That was so appealing to me, and in school we were encouraged to look at studio furniture as an artistic practice, without a lot of considerations for clients, commissions, or the actual marketplace. I realized, in the image of Wendy’s career, that if I wanted to continue down that avenue I would have to find a teaching position, so that’s what I did. There was also a generational shift happening then, where there was so much excitement around the first generation—people like Wendy—but the movement seemed to slowly lose momentum over time. So, as I continued in my career as a teacher and a maker, I started to develop a deeper appreciation for design and design history—and that wasn’t something over emphasized when I was in graduate school. Over the past five or six years, I’ve been working on forms that seem more in the consumable home good lane, specifically a lot of table designs that draw cues from mid-century design.

 SS: Yes, you’ve expressed this real reverence for mid-century designers like Wendell Castle and Isamu Noguchi. How do you see your work as a continuation of their legacies? Or does it diverge?

CR: Many of the people that I admire from that period were deeply invested in material studies. They weren't drawing it on paper and someone else was making it. They were often making it. Even Noguchi—there might been studio assistants, but when you see that work, chances are his hands touched it. And I have always loved that quality about a Wendell Castle or Wendy Murayama or a Noguchi. The problem is if you have to touch everything in your studio, you’re not going to be producing a lot. That’s when people like Castle said at a certain point, “I’m going to turn this into an enterprise. I’m going to be a designer.” By the time he died he was using a multi-axis CNC mill robot like those you would see on a Detroit assembly line. 

So, I’m exploring that idea too. I would like to make 200 objects a year; right now I make about 25. I’m still looking for the balance of authorship and growth. The wall rugs are a good example of that—I’m working with a really gifted fabricator to make them. I’ve incorporated digital prototyping, milling, and laser cutting into my workflow. I didn’t train to be an industrial designer, so these new tools and approaches are exciting to me.

SS: Yes, and when you're considering the iterative process that you're exploring, where you're building upon that foundational language, it's certainly a lot easier to produce in a larger quantity and a greater variety using software and more advanced machinery.

CR: Yeah, I joke that teaching how to make furniture from a woodworking perspective is like teaching shoe cobbling. It can feel a little antiquated sometimes, so I am purposeful to try and connect that information to how students might turn the skill into their own enterprise.

SS: During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was this craft revival in the United States, particularly knitting and crochet, and I believe that was when you started making tufted rugs. How did you get interested in textiles?

CR: I actually haven't thought about that until this moment, but it's a fun memory because I, like the rest of the world, was at home and bored. Some people might have been fine watching television, but I can’t do that—I had to be doing something. So, I started woodblock printing. I worked with these really simple stamp forms on my dining room table. Then in 2021, I was invited down to the Pentaculum residency at Arrowmont School of Craft in Gatlinburg. It’s very unstructured—you spend a week working independently and eating meals with your craft materials cohort. My friend Chris Lee was there and she told me about these rug tufting kits that entered the consumer market during the pandemic and I was fascinated. I bought one and started experimenting with designs shortly after I got home. Once I had learned the process, I was able to send designs to an experienced fabricator—actually Tim Eads, the person I bought the original kit from—who now uses a CNC powered tufting mill to make artisian designs into wall hung or functioning rugs. 

I love how a rug can be a focal point in a room. A lot of furniture is designed to blend in, but rugs can make a statement if you want them to. So, I hope they work out close to my vision. My grandfather told me when he was still around, “If you hire somebody to do something and you can get 85% of your vision, you're doing pretty good.

SS: Tell me about your grandfather.

CR: He owned a collision repair business. I grew up really close to him, my mom's father. He was handy, he was salt of the earth. He owned multiple properties and if anything needed repairing, he’d go buy the boards and do it.

SS: Did he teach you how to do that too?

CR: I think by osmosis, a lot of the men in my life growing up did, you know? But there was one thing that he did that I very specifically remember. When I was a little, little kid, like five years old, to keep me out of the way he’d tell me, “Hey, here’s a bunch of bent nails that I pulled out of these boards, why don’t you straighten them out. So, I'd hammer the nails on the concrete and flatten them back straight. And then he’d say, “well, go ahead and nail them in that board.” So I would, and then he’d say, “well, let's pull those nails back out.” It was just a way to keep me away from what he was doing; eventually we made some birdhouses together and things like that too.

 SS: That means when you entered art school, you came with this foundational knowledge of how to work with wood. This interests me because you continue to experiment with new materials, but you always return to wood.

CR: Yeah, I do. I've thought about it a lot over the years. For one thing, I love to teach to it. It's an enormously challenging material to master. It takes many, many years, and different types of wood have different qualities and challenges, so it keeps it lively. I think it’s beautiful. It has such humility as a material. But it’s also where the majority of my skills have been developed, as a builder, as a maker. I’m okay at welding, I’m okay at casting, but I’m much quicker to resolve an idea with wood. I’ve been teaching for 25 years and I can foresee a lot of problems before they present with that material—it’s like my 6th sense, I guess. 

SS: How do you think your experience as an educator has impacted your work? How is your approach similar or different to Phil Tennant’s or Wendy Maruyama? Has it impacted your studio practice at all?

 CR: I think what we learned from Phil was community. What I initially learned the most from Wendy was accountability. As students we would have big blocks of time where we were prototyping, building, making, talking to our mates. But if the time came for critique and you weren’t finished, Wendy was likely not going to review it. If you spent 8 weeks, 16 weeks building something and you got to the finish line and it was unresolved, there was no discussion. So that set the pace pretty quickly. When I first started teaching, I tried to bring that level of seriousness to the program at Herron.

SS: Okay, let’s pivot. Tell me about the thrones you created for the Court.

 CR: Those are reminiscent of a project from 2019 that I designed and didn’t fulfill. I was thinking a lot at the time about objects of power and their symbolism within autocratic contexts—like chairs associated with Kim Jong-un and gold-plated furnishings of Donald Trump, for instance. I had proposed making a body of work called Magnificence and Monsters, where I would reproduce five seating stations from famous autocratic regimes—like Saddam Hussein’s throne at Al-Faw Palace, which was a gift from Yassar Arafat. After the palace was taken over by the United States military during Operation Iraqi Freedom, soldiers would take photos sitting in it and it seemed almost Disney-fied. The proportions were outrageous. So that idea continues to interest me and as I consider the power of our court systems today, I chose to place the thrones in the Court as guardians.

SS: As I’m processing the concepts of the show, what stands out to me are these childhood memories and a feeling like you're out of place, like an alienation. Even the attraction to the slab of redwood in your grandfather’s garage—that’s from a different part of the country, and then you ultimately end up in California.

 CR: I am attracted to things that might seem a bit out of place in their current context. It feels like the Midwest can create a lot of those moments right now as cultural norms are often defined by global trends seen on screens, not accounting for how the local audiences might recontextualize those behaviors or styles. What is trending in LA can be acquired in Indianapolis, but it might feel out of context? That’s how using the salvaged redwood feels to me. It is of California and the west but brought here and then salvaged here. Redwood was a common construction material in the 1940s through the 80s, but now in the Midwest it is much less common because it is being more thoughtfully harvested and distributed. In collectible car culture they call that “unobtanium,” the things that are so rare you have to pay a premium for them. I like that rare material connection to the Garten part of the exhibition. The wood is alien but familiar. The forms reference plants and fauna, while being made from ancient dead material that was once living. Maybe they’re a reflection here of how this part of the world feels both familiar and alien to me. Though my interest in design objects framed with strong narratives and direct material study may not have led me to a traditional identity of a furniture designer, I have been able to forge a familiar career here.