Don Miller is a Philadelphia woodworker and educator. He holds a BA in German from the University of Kansas and an MFA in 3D Design from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He attended the London College of Furniture Early Stringed Instrument program.
Miller retired as an Associate Professor in Craft+ Material Studies at the University of the Arts in 2020 and was previously a Lecturer in Furniture Design at Rhode Island School of Design. He has also taught classes at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass CO and Steneby Skolan, Dals Langed Sweden and served as visiting artist at San Diego State University and Herron School of Art and Design. He has been a resident artist at Steneby and Dong A University in Busan, South Korea. Miller’s work has been shown in national and international venues. He maintains a studio/workshop in Germantown PA.
Artist Statement
Rilke wrote: “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though their growth it too increased.”
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space
I often walk in the woods near my home, a forest of beech and poplar, oak and maple. When I run into my neighbors there, I always feel that were looking for the same thing- space, light, time away from the anxiety, fear and isolation that plague us these days. A sense of what came before.
(Matter) The forest is a way of thinking, an “unthought known” against which I project wordless thought form, an un-formed self. It reflects back a sense image. I am in-formed.
I am a woodworker. I build things that reflect my engagement with the world around me. My hands are always busy trying to imagine and embody these fragile, unnamable relationships. My body and senses give over to the organic nature of material. My mind projects a rational ideal. The outcome is often unanticipated. Working with wood, working in space and light and time, I meet the resistance and constraints each material presents with persistence and skill. Skill liberates my imagination to embrace ambiguity and failure.
(Material) The sensing of cycles of growth and decay, of nature’s time, lends a self solidity, continuity. Through engaging with unformed matter, the resistance offered, the constraints demanded, I am formed. Potential is implied, outcomes imagined.
My workshop is in Germantown, a Philadelphia neighborhood where the past often feels more present than the present. The burial ground across the road. The 18th century villas neighboring hair salons and store front churches. The forest nearby. Here I’m released to work across, back, through this landscape, drawing objects from the past into a space between their then and my now.
(Medium)- This process (projecting/reflecting/sensing/forming) manifests in iterations of human artefacts and histories of use and interaction. Furniture is a powerful shared cultural idiom whose deep haptic familiarity triggers sense memory, at once an intensely personal yet broadly shared imagination. In an objective sense, craft is a social construct, a word to start an argument with. But it can also be an imagined village, a community outside time and place where folks wander to the nearby forest to gaze into the trees, searching for a reflection of themselves. These days this imagination is clearer to me than ever before.
“Every force evolves a form.”
DRM 2021
