Aspen Golann explains how she toys with the sets to spark creativity and prototype in her studio.
One of my first experiences playing with furniture was with a dollhouse I had as a kid. I found it in a junk store in Waltham, Massachusetts, where I grew up, and I loved setting up the rooms and creating little vignettes; sometimes I would make furniture out of toothpicks or matchboxes. My mom still has the dollhouse, and later, after I had trained in woodworking, I wanted to make some new furniture for it, so I found these kits.
Photo: Andrew B. Myers
They’re DIY kits from the 1970s by the X-Acto company for making tiny 18th-century American furniture, exactly the kind I am classically trained to build, but in miniature. You need your own tools, like a chisel, and the upholstery is challenging to make. But it was exciting because the kits also turned out to be the perfect shortcut to prototyping my work.
After I quit my job as a high school teacher, I took up woodworking, specifically 17th- to 19th-century American furniture. I soon realized I was being trained in the language of colonization, but the interesting thing with language is that you can use it to say whatever you want. So I started making subtle interventions in my pieces, like crafting a three-seated stool. I found a fertile space to talk about dissenting perspectives and things like racism and the queer experience.
I keep the miniatures around my studio so my mind will unconsciously collage them together with other things. Sometimes I’ll actually cut two minis in half and stick them together or drop them on my workbench to see how they fall and touch. They allow me to quickly see an idea before I invest time into it. Plus, you can find them on eBay for five dollars a pop.
They’re also fun to build. I like to assemble them at my dining table with a bowl of popcorn when my mind is at rest. Carl Jung said that everything original emerges from the play instinct, and these minis allow me to access that instinct, just like my dollhouse did.
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