The Desk
Josef Albers • Steve Harrison • Pierre Jeanneret • Clementine Keith-Roach • Bobby Mills • George Nakashima • Mira Nakashima • Christopher Page • SASA Works
An exhibition exploring the power, poetry, and purpose of a timeless object
From the drawing boards of revolutionaries to the quiet corners of poets, the desk has long stood as a symbol of contemplation, power, and creation. The Desk, an exhibition bringing together works by Steve Harrison, Pierre Jeanneret, SASA Works, Bobby Mills, and George and Mira Nakashima, examines the cultural, political, and personal weight carried by this enduring object.
Curated with a deep reverence for the desk’s role in shaping ideas and identities, the exhibition spans continents and centuries, highlighting unique interpretations of the form—from the spare elegance of Jeanneret’s Chandigarh design to Nakashima’s soulful materiality, and from the elemental craftsmanship of SASA Works and Bobby Mills to the hand-built utilitarian narrative embedded in Steve Harrison’s approach.
Complementing these desks are artworks and objects that speak to the environments we build around them—those quiet companions that populate our working lives. Sculptural desk accoutrements by Steve Harrison punctuate the show with a tactile intimacy, elevating tools and vessels into meditations on function and beauty. Christopher Page’s paintings explore the illusionistic space of the screen, reflecting on our shifting relationships with image and presence in the age of digital work. Clementine Keith-Roach’s casting of her own body carries a layered symbolism of domesticity, sensuality, and fertility, drawing a through-line between embodiment and the spaces we inhabit.
Joseph Albers, whose pedagogical legacy shaped generations at the Bauhaus and later at Black Mountain College, is represented here by works that resonate with the precision and discipline of the modern workspace. Albers believed that design should serve both purpose and perception—his own desk at Yale, famously uncluttered and methodically arranged, reflected his pursuit of clarity and order as essential to creative thought. His inclusion in this exhibition underscores the importance of visual structure in the environments where thinking happens.
“In a world increasingly dislocated from the tactile, the desk remains a sanctuary for thought,” says James Brown. “It is where revolutions are penned, where letters of love and grief are written, and where great works begin in silence. A desk is not merely furniture—it’s a witness,” adds Christie Brown.
Throughout history, desks have signified more than function. Charles Dickens stood at his sloped desk to write. Virginia Woolf famously declared that “a woman must have money and a room of her own”—the desk, central in that room, became a symbol of intellectual independence.
The Desk invites viewers to consider not just the desk as object, but as locus: of solitude, productivity, memory—and presence. It reflects on our evolving relationship to space, work, and the materials that surround us, asking: What do we bring to our desks, and what do they bring out of us?
Biographies
George Nakashima
A pioneer of the 20th-century Studio Craft movement, Japanese-American craftsman George Nakashima’s work epitomises quality, simplicity, and the value of patience when making. Working slowly with Japanese hand tools, and embracing the natural qualities of the wood he chose, his work is noted for both its precision and organic atmosphere.
Mira Nakashima
Mira Nakashima is a renowned American woodworker and designer, recognized for her exceptional craftsmanship and dedication to continuing the legacy of her father, George Nakashima.
Josef Albers
German-born artist Josef Albers was a student and faculty member of the Bauhaus, and later a teacher at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College. Best known for his pioneering contributions to colour theory and abstract art, Albers’ style bridges American and European modernist sensibilities, and investigates the relationships between space and colour. Albers’ own desk was famously sparse and uncluttered, reflecting his commitment to clarity and precision in his creative process.
Christopher Page
Christopher Page is a painter of light, shadow and reflection. He makes trompe l’oeil paintings on canvas, and directly on walls and ceilings that confuse the boundaries between real and virtual space. Paintings of framed paintings with shadows cast across their surfaces call into question where the work begins and ends; blank mirrors confront us with our own absence; glowing skies distort architectural space. And yet, the paintings are not trompe l’oeil in the traditional sense. They are hard-edged compositions of colour fields which look as much to Modernist abstraction as they do to Baroque illusion.
In this new group of paintings Page returns to his mirror series, incorporating more direct architectural forms that disrupt the illusion of reflection. Using shadow as a descriptive tool this new body of work further interrogates the audience’s perception of the pictorial plane.
Christopher Page
Interior. (Evening.)
April 2021
Clementine Keith-Roach
Clementine Keith-Roach is a sculptor of new ruins. Her work centres around the process of plaster-casting. Casts taken from her body and other objects are blended with found terracotta vessels. The works are then painted to create a continuous surface that blurs the boundary between body and object, skin and clay. Keith-Roach’s works are reminiscent of archaeological artefacts, but they also propose new worlds to come. They are both funerary and pregnant with possibility.
Lydia Gifford, Anna-Bella Papp and Clementine Keith-Roach
Clearings
1 March 2019 – 20 April 2019
SASA Works
SASA Works is a culmination of founder Craig Bamford’s work as an artist, architect, and craftsman, and informed by his interest in disciplines from metalwork, jewellery, carpentry, painting, and writing. His upbringing in rural Kenya formed a connection with a way of making that is alchemical; elemental – inquiring into form and material to create work that speaks of the world around us, and the universe we exist in. Each piece by SASA Works is made from reclaimed local materials using traditional techniques, and is designed to be in harmony with the elements of a home.
Steve Harrison
Steve Harrison is a ceramic artist working from studios in North London and Wales, noted for his signature pitted salt-glazed objects, in an ever-evolving variety of forms and colours. Harrison’s practice is a reflection of a lifelong obsession with his craft, and creating works, from pots to writing utensils, that are not only art pieces but functional, beautiful enhancements to a lived life.
Steve Harrison
The Age of the Beaker
3 June – 10 September 2022
Steve Harrison
The Witches
13 October 2021 – 17 March 2022
Steve Harrison
The Loft Pots: Selection, Firing and Contemplation
28 November 2019 – 15 February 2020
Pierre Jeanneret
The work of Swiss architect and designer Pierre Jeanneret epitomises Modernist principles of design, city planning, and living. Having collaborated with his cousin in designing Chandigarh, a purpose-built city in Northern India, Jeanneret is perhaps most noted for his contributions to furniture design. Taking advantage of local materials, and made by skilled craftsmen, his series of furniture designed for the city’s municipal buildings remains highly collectable, and iconic in the legacy of Modern design.
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for Chandigarh:
An exhibition of historic furniture
From the private collection of Rajan Bijlani
4 August – 19 October 2024
Bobby Mills
Furniture designer and craftsman Bobby Mills works from a rural studio in Devon, and creates pieces that are wholly one-of-a-kind, and made intuitively from English oak and walnut. Mills allows his process to be guided by the centuries of growth, observing the unique grain and details of each piece of wood he works with.