As an architect and designer, Annie Coggan had the tools to put a creative spin on what otherwise might have been a disorienting transition: moving from Brooklyn, New York to Starkville, Mississippi. The move, prompted by her husband’s teaching position at Mississippi State University, along with what we might call the general “recessionary mood,” served to spark a quirky and slightly bookish project.
Inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” a book about the local food movement, Coggan was determined to “work within arms’ reach.” She decided to open a small restaurant that would serve gourmet comfort food made with local ingredients, and she crafted the menu with her brother, Ted Coggan, a longtime Atlanta chef. When it came down to furnishing and decorating the space, however, they faced some tough decisions.
“I always work in two tiers,” says Coggan. “I work in a really pragmatic way, but I also always try to connect my work to storytelling.”
The pragmatic dilemma was clear to Coggan. Good quality chairs for commercial use are expensive. “I plain couldn’t afford them,” she says. On the storytelling front, too, commercial chairs were clearly lacking.
Searching for inspiration, she started studying the vernacular chair of Mississippi and eventually landed on photographs by Walker Evans.
“Looking at his way of making images, I noticed he’s always got a surrealistic quality,” she says. “Things are normal and understandable, but in his best photos something is a bit peculiar.”
Coggan imagined that, if Evans were to make a chair, he would find a peculiar piece to add to it. She had found her story. She would rescue old Mississippi chairs and perform surgery on them. She would create something new and surreal.
Coggan looked for chairs all over the place and found many broken ones for free. If she ever bought one, she never paid more than $20 for it. Thanks to Mississippi’s long tradition of wood-working and its established furniture industry, she also found a few large boxes of furniture legs, balustrades and other wood objects that had been turned and carved. The boxes became her “limb repository.”
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