BOISBUCHET RESIDENCY PROGRAMME
ELLEN SIGUNICK
SEASON 2022
Ellen Sigunick is an artisan and furniture maker based in Newburgh, NY. She is the founder of Sigunik Studio, a decorative arts atelier specialising in parchment and leather applications in furniture design and architectural surfaces.
She began her journey with parchment while living in East Africa, developing a body of photo based work about the lives of street children in Nairobi. Her time there shed light on the importance of using every part of an animal and the ritual of a respectful slaughter.
When she returned from Kenya, the search to continue her exploration of the material led her to Pergamena, a tenth-generation tannery and the only commercial parchment producer in the United States. She spent five years there manufacturing parchment, becoming familiar with the nuances of hide behavior, and researching and developing an application process for finished goods. Over the past 15 years, Ellen has worked with architecture and interior design firms to create heirloom quality pieces of furniture, and is expanding to design a line of home goods and furnishings.
During Ellen’s one month residency at Boisbuchet, she explored new techniques to incorporate her former photography practice into parchment furniture design. With over a decade worth of parchment and leather remnants accumulating in her workshop, she sought to discover methods to incorporate these remnants into new and interesting surfaces. Ellen spent her time at the residency divided between the woodshop, the meadows, and a darkroom setting to create the prototype for two pairs of bent laminate seats. The Cyanotype plant-based imagery on stingray leather became the cladding for the seats. These contact prints of plant life from the Boisbuchet meadows was based on the recording of time and place, and the idea that memory distorts and fades, and how we choose to fill in the missing details when we need to hold on to meaningful memories. This process was the beginning of a contemplation of processing grief, and the physical record we each leave behind for a new interpretation.
