Each work in the Industry series uses traditional and contemporary iconography and has been stripped down to its elements. The silhouettes stand bold with the white bird’s eye maple inlaid within the Indian rosewood setting. Animals and insects mingle with industrial buildings, warfare weaponry and other such products of capital. Featuring hummingbirds, seahorses, dragonflies, skeletal figures, and butterflies alongside tanks, helicopters, pylons, smoke, grenades, fighter planes and gasmasks, the viewer is forced to recognise the dichotomy between the natural or organic, and the manmade or destructive. Presented as if fossilised, there is an overwhelming sense that both will have their downfall and eventually become imbedded within history.

Perhaps the irony comes not simply from their opposition but also from the fact that the natural and the artificial are very much cohabitants in the twenty first century. The Industry series offers a poignant commentary on such an environment, each piece being highly evocative in its own right. The finish of each Industry piece references the seventeenth-century marquetry methods of André- Charles Boulle (1642-1732), and whilst Studio Job cut the veneers using contemporary laser technology, the positioning of each piece of the veneer is undoubtedly still an intensely handcrafted process. The strict symmetry in each piece, and most notably the Dressoir, maintains the integrity of the aesthetic, and given the simple, clean lines of the furniture, produces a powerfully balanced work, whilst also encouraging a contemplation of the notion of repetition; the phenomenon of cloning in the natural world and of mass production in the industrial sector. Each design piece in the series has been employed by Studio Job as a ‘canvas’ on which to construct a modern memento mori; a plethora of visual metaphors that act as signifiers either of bucolic nature or of mass-destruction as associated with industrialism.

posing piece, with a commanding silhouette, the Industry Cabinet features its apocalyptic imagery in a strictly symmetrical layout on the expansive front, with the formation in the centre of two gas masks supposedly breathing in the smoke bellowing from a power station. The effect is perhaps reminiscent of a Rorschach inkblot pattern. When opened, the substantial doors reveal a sparse interior, divided into eight identically sized compartments. Inside, the Indian rosewood is interrupted only by the solid brass hinges which sit flush to the surface, and the silhouettes of bones across the horizontal slats, suggesting the ultimate degeneration of mankind.

This striking screen presents a contemporary design approach to a conventional furniture object and provides an ideal backdrop for the elaborate imagery of death and destruction that defines the Industry Series. As with the screen in Studio Job’s Perished Series, skeletons populate the Industry screen to create a fossilised effect, though they are now joined by hazardous and deadly chemicals and instruments, presented as if they were ‘urban fossils’.