Makers

History in the Making

A commentary on labor and excess, woodworker Stacy Motte’s humorous-looking Adventures in Highboy Land is deadly serious.

By Elizabeth Foy Larsen
November 9, 2024

Winter 2025

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Photo by Cleber Bonato

Inspired by research into luxury furniture from the 16th and 17th centuries, Stacy Motte’s Adventures in Highboy Land is an examination of imperialism, land speculation, and slavery, 87 x 60 x 44 in.

An imposing double chest of drawers stands atop four cabriole legs. So far, so standard for a style of dresser that first appeared in 17th-century England and remained popular there and in the United States throughout the 18th century. In the hands of sculptor and woodworker Stacy Motte, however, this highboy is a jumping-off point for a trenchant examination of imperialism, land speculation, and slavery.

The bureau itself is massive—highboys often measure seven feet tall—and the Chippendale batwing drawer pulls are appropriately ornate. Unlike a working highboy, though, Motte’s version bows forward at the top, creating a feeling that the entire structure is at risk of tipping over, a sensation heightened by a light-skinned feminine hand that appears out of a bottom door and pulls a top drawer down, like an outstretched tongue. The effect is at once elegant and defeated—a sad giant who has lost a battle.

Titled Adventures in Highboy Land, it’s an impressive accomplishment, especially for someone who didn’t consider herself an artist until she was 30, when she enrolled at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco to study photography. Dismayed by the high cost of frames, Motte enrolled in a woodworking course so that she could make them herself.

“I realized that I was much better at thinking through ideas and communicating them in three dimensions,” says Motte, who, while at CCA, discovered almost instantly a love for cabinet making. “You can load them with information and stories, and they just have all these purposes in our lives.”

After completing a degree in photography, Motte spent an additional two years at CCA getting another BFA in furniture design. Upon graduation, she was selected for the prestigious Windgate-Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina. That honor was followed by an MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which in turn led to residencies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Center for Craft at Tennessee Tech University, which is where she completed Adventures in Highboy Land.

Photo by James Bernal

A portrait of Motte taken at the Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles.

“Stacy takes on things that no one else would ever want to. Or if someone else had tried that, they would’ve given up.”

— Eleanor Ingrid Rose

At UW–Madison, Motte studied with Tom Loeser, a professor in the art department who specializes in functional and nonfunctional wooden objects. He was impressed by both her woodworking skills and her interest in history. “The thing that stood out the most about Stacy as a graduate student was her passion for research,” he says. “She always had piles of books on her workbench, and all of her work is heavily contextualized in that research and reading. Whenever I would go by her bench, I would check out what she had.”

Before building Highboy, Motte and her longtime collaborator, craft-based sculpture artist Eleanor Ingrid Rose, were exploring the idea of making work that was a commentary on historical craft. One piece, entitled Spread, uses the iconic Wedgewood Ceramics Company as its starting point. Founded in 1759, Wedgewood employed women for manual labor but almost always excluded them from design decisions until 1900. All the while, their products were marketed to women. Rose and Motte’s piece combines furniture, partly broken or unfinished, with crushed and melted elements that look like the company’s celebrated china.

The seeds for Highboy were sown in subsequent brainstorming sessions, during which both artists were attracted to the idea of a bending cabinet even though, initially, they couldn’t figure out what to do with the concept. Motte now sees the gesture as a rebuke to the furniture world’s insular aggrandizement of this kind of piece. In her hands, Highboy mimics the act of auto-fellatio. “I think of it as bringing the highboy low,” she says.

Working solo, with input from Rose along the way, Motte “started looking at historical cabinets and looking for a reason to use the [bowing] gesture. And then I landed on the highboy, which I always thought was a pretty obnoxious piece of furniture. “In hardcore furniture making and woodworking communities, people talk about this being the pinnacle of your technique. If you can make a highboy, you’ve made it. And it is always men in technique books who are talking in this way. . . . It’s always in masculine terms.”

A highboy’s height means they are not only imposing but also somewhat impractical because the user needs a stepladder to reach the top drawers. The more expensive models were constructed with mahogany, which at the time was harvested in the Caribbean using slave labor. “The wood itself was a signifier of wealth,” Motte notes. “I think in this country, in particular right now, this darker history is something that a lot of people have a hard time acknowledging or don’t want to know about, or don’t want to think about. And yet the objects themselves are still celebrated.” Once she decided on a concept, it took Motte a year to finish the sculpture. From the start, she wasn’t sure if she had the technical skills to execute her vision, which she acknowledges by using the word Adventures in the piece’s title. She posted in-progress photos on her Instagram account so her followers, including Loeser and Rose, could track its creation and let her know what was resonating.

Photo by Stacy Motte

Initially, the highboy’s upper case was created using maple, but it was too heavy. This final glue-up is constructed of poplar.

Photo by Stacy Motte

Motte shapes the gooseneck molding for the piece’s upper case.
Photo by Stacy Motte

While sculpting Highboy’s hand from a laminated block of maple, the carving tool bounced and Motte had to patch the thumb.
Photo by Cleber Bonato

Motte wanted the 7-foot piece to feel delicate, so she exaggerated its curves and thinned the legs “as much as I dared.”

“I think of it as bringing the highboy low.”

— Stacy Motte

Loeser says the piece created a buzz in furniture circles, due to its impressive technical feats and the bold concepts it addresses. “There is a long history and tradition of new furniture riffing on historical work, but this piece really seems to capture something of the concerns that are in the air in 2024: labor, gender, sourcing materials, slavery, and systems of production,” says Loeser. “There is a pretty strong streak of contemporary furniture that plays with the humanlike aspects of furniture, but it’s mostly been along the lines of something like a chair with its front legs crossed in a humanlike way. Stacy’s piece looks like it could have walked out of an animated feature film with very high production values. It is such an engaging form, humorous and deadly serious at the same time.”

The base of Highboy is constructed from maple. Motte studied books to teach herself the techniques she needed, including how to create the cabriole legs. The curved top, though, presented a serious challenge: How could she construct something that shifted the piece’s weight forward without breaking the legs?

The answer came in making the top part nonfunctional, with false fronts in place of drawers. She also switched to the lighter and more pliable poplar and basswood for everything but the base, and anchored the piece with threaded inserts through the feet, which are screwed onto the pedestal. Using her own arm as a model, Motte carved the hand with the aid of mirrors to show her different angles.

“Stacy takes on things that no one else would ever want to,” says Rose. “Or if someone else had tried that, they would’ve given up. . . . This was the culmination of all of her years as a maker, I think. It’s so technically impressive and so weird.”

Motte intends Highboy to be the first in a series of three sculptures that will use a human body part to interact with a piece of furniture. She has been gratified by the positive responses the piece has received. “It’s scary to make things,” she says. “It’s scary to put them out in the world. And this was a big one.”

Elizabeth Foy Larsen is a Twin Cities–based author and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Slate.

Photo by Cleber Bonato

Motte wanted the highboy’s hand to “look casual, as though no effort was necessary to drag the cabinet into a hunched-over position.”

Visit Stacy Motte online.

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