I had always wanted to make the connection between what we so painfully saw of our society after Katrina, and my own community where I see the same poverty and social injustice just 2 hours from Wall Street. This work links examples of Utility Furniture, half built or half decayed, with photographs from my community – photographs that could be mistaken as being from New Orleans. The Utility Furniture Scheme, which ran in Britain from 1942 to 1951, was the last example of the link between furniture design and social idealism; a history that started with William Morris in Britain, continued with Bauhaus, then De Stijl, and was taken up in Scandinavia, before returning to Britain.
Design is no longer seen as part of a larger scheme for social improvement; the material itself is the end.