I want to kill anyone who thinks they own me…
I am always grateful for those who genuinely invest in my practice…
I have done so much more (creatively) than those family members who taught me, and done so much less (volume) than the three generations of Goulder who came before me…
My pop taught me to upholster like a 18th C artisan with tacks, hessian and horsehair fibre. I loved the attention to detail and the materials. I came to hate the forms of every piece of furniture we touched…
A family tradition does not equal excellence. It delivers coherence and proximity and, in the best of times, intimacy. Many of my family members should never have been furniture makers, but they continued the line. From them I learnt that passion is overcoming apathy…
To continue the family business, it was essential that I left it…
I shaped my body to the craft; I embraced the crafted object as sacred. For this Broached collection, I tried to relax the body and tickle the object…
The CNC robot can create a more intimate work than the craftsperson can. So, who is the craftsperson = Embouchure; the craftsperson is someone who holds their body in a certain posture to create a certain affect.
This collection is a performance; of history – it is a memoir, of my skill – how I hold my body. The body lifts the weight of history, which for me and my family line is clear…
I will show (myself and…) you something forgotten. A layer of manual industrial memory. An exorcism of artisanal skill…
In the 1930s, my family supplied the most fashionable large department stores of Sydney with locally made furniture. Ninety years later, I am a solitary artisan supplying the wealthy with symbolic objects of refinement…
For three generations my family competed in the marketplace based on price and quality. I have abandoned that game. My career has been focused purely on excellence of craftsmanship. Now the robots and algorithms are catching up with the solitary privileged space once occupied by the craftsman…
What is left for the artisan is storytelling; combining forms and materials in a manner that conveys a unique subjectivity – a wild, broken, joyful, enormous human experience, stitched together with love…
This is where I have always wanted to be: vulnerable, barely sustainable, but highly visible and symbolically meaningful.
Words by Lou Weis
Jon Goulder approached Broached to assist in creating a memoir in the form of furniture objects – a love song to the three generations of Goulder furniture makers and his inheritance of this tradition. Our process is akin to filmmaking. We start with a script and the designer then manifests the story in the form of an applied arts collection. As the story of Jon Goulder evolved, we started to see him both as an individual, enacting a collection that represents reflection and crises, and an enactor of a broader historical context: the evolution of the place of manufacturing in Australia across the 20th to early 21st C. The resulting essay was not our usual lengthy piece of prose but a series of quips about Jon Goulder, his relationship to the family history and his present way of practicing his craft. The text is written by Broached from Jon’s imagined first-person perspective.