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SubscribeWe’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Christina Boy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Christina below.
Christina, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
Making projects specifically for someone’s home is always quite personal and meaningful. You are building something that this person or family will live with and interact with for years to come, and they will quite possibly pass it on to the next generation. There have been many projects that I have felt humbled to work on. In late 2016 I received my first large scale commission: 14 benches and 10 stools for James Madison’s Montpelier. I was thrilled. This was a huge project for my one-woman shop and I felt validated. However, this project had a lot more in store for me than that. The benches and stools were for the new exhibit “The Mere Distinctions of Colour” that opened in the summer of 2017 – an exhibit that tells the stories of the enslaved people that lived and worked at Montpelier.
Not only did I get to make these pieces for this exhibit, but I got to make them with wood from the property that had been cut several years before. While the benches and stools were not technically very complicated, learning to make multiples of one item in my small studio and to do it efficiently was a challenge. I broke it all down and got into a routine. Using the wood from these trees felt extremely powerful to me. These had been big old mature oak trees. While I got into the rhythm of milling and cutting, my mind kept wandering to these trees growing and thriving on this land. What did these trees see? What stories did they witness? What kind of actions occurred beneath them, around them, in them? While milling one board I discovered a bullet embedded. What happened here? What did the people enslaved by James Madison experience and live through?
While working on these benches during the day, in the evenings I was reading a book about a man in a concentration camp during World War II. Both of these actions made me so very aware of my European heritage and I grappled with my whiteness, and my white privilege.
I am forever grateful that this project gave me the time to reflect on these issues and to face my white privilege as I live side by side and among my African American family that I married into. To this day I keep learning more and more of what my whiteness means in regards to myself and the people around me and how to be a better person in spite of it.
Christina, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
At 16 I took an interior design class in high school and realized I really loved planning interiors. At 17 I interned in a cabinet shop. I loved the hands-on work, but was put off by the chauvinism that I saw and experienced. Later that year I land in an office and commercial design firm where I ended up apprenticing, and at age 21 I took over as manager. However, the desire to work with my hands didn’t go away, and so, at age 24, I started my undergraduate degree at VCU in Craft and Material Studies with a focus on glass and wood. Post-graduation, I became a core fellow at the Penland School of Craft and expanded my skills through their workshops over two years. In the past 12 years, I’ve built my own studio and worked many different jobs – from a cabinet shop, to catering, to being a line cook in a fancy inn, all while figuring out how to establish my business. It has undergone a lot of different phases. All of these phases taught me different lessons that are contributing to the way I currently work, and I am sure there will be more phases to come.
At Christina Boy Design we make customizable small batch production items like our stackable stool 33, and expand services all the way up to completely custom pieces for my clients, like a whole dining room set, and anything in between. I love working together with my clients on these pieces, very heavily so in the design phase, and as I progress, I keep them informed on the progress of their project. I currently still all my sketching and drawing by hand, color render them if they need more of a visual, and provide them with wood, paint, and other material samples like rope and leather that I may use in their project. If a clients wants, they can come and pick out their wood with me, otherwise I take great care in the selection of each board for their project. I work with North American hardwoods that I source locally. If a customer has usable wood that was felled and milled on their property, I do love the challenge of creating something new for them out of it. I find it adds a whole other layer of intimacy to the project that is exciting,
I love color and texture and I always try to incorporate at least one of these elements in my projects. Even if it ends up being a very neutral color for the client, I love the juxtaposition of natural wood and paint, the added texture of a rope or of rougher carved elements on a fine piece. Making wood look like other materials is also something I enjoy playing with, like in my patchwork chairs. The textured and painted tiles of wood give the chair a very tactile and fabric-like quality.
Over the last four years, I have become a lot more comfortable in my skin as a woodworker and furniture designer, and I believe I have found my voice in my work. It feels more cohesive to me, and although my clients get very different pieces that need to fulfill their various requirements, there are elements in all of them that tie them together and make them uniquely mine.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I was born and grew up in Germany, and I attended high school in Bonn. I really struggled academically. After 10th grade, I called it quits and spent a year in NC, where I got my high school diploma. I didn’t know what was next in life for me, and so I did several internship in different areas: graphic design, restoration at a national museum, in a cabinet shop, and lastly at a high-end office and commercial design company. This is where I landed, and they offered me an apprenticeship. I trained hands-on with them for two and a half years, and I attended a trade school in Cologne once a week to learn the technical aspects of running a furniture business. After taking my exams, I was offered a full-time position managing their showroom. We carried a lot of furniture from the Bauhaus era as well as furniture designed by Scandinavian architects of the 1950s and 60s. During my time there, I really fell in love with furniture. When I went to the movies, I could say more about the furniture I saw in the film than about the actors. While I loved that job, something was missing. While traveling solo through Italy in September 2001, I came across Murano Island and fell madly in love with glass blowing. Seeing these burly men make these delicate objects fascinated me, and I knew I had to learn how to do this myself. After some discussions with my parents, I made an almost rash decision and moved back to the US less than a year later. I lived in Northern Virginia and worked at a German bakery for a year while also working as a drafts person for an interior designer so I could put together a portfolio (and establish in-state residency). In 2003, I started at VCU and never looked back. I did learn to blow glass, but realized furniture still held my heart. It also came much more naturally to me.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I want my furniture to make people smile and bring them joy. That may sound really cheesy. However I don’t necessarily want to make pieces that seem like anyone else could have made them. I like bringing my own little twist and funk to them, be it by adding a bright color or texture or both. In making my one-of-a-kind pieces and customizable small batch productions, I take my job seriously. I want to make a piece of furniture for my clients that will not only fulfill its function, but also last. At the same time I also don’t want to take myself too seriously – where is the fun in that? I want the fun I have in my studio and the joy of working with my hands shine through. The pieces I craft are personable, enjoyable, and radiate a sense of playfulness.
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Javier Luces Chris Thomas
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