Puffy, soft mounds of bright color create dream-like upholstery on this free-form chaise lounge. The bubble-shaped, plush backs are luxurious to lounge on and cuddly enough to hug. The soft cushions grow out of a stone-pine slab carved with the texture of ripples on water, held up on thick, ball-ended legs.
The Lion Turtle began as a material problem. Andrew's Artist in Residence at Cranbrook floated the idea of asking a company to donate material for thesis work. A friend, business executive Menaka Litten, connected him to Graf Lantz — weeks later a shipment of cashmere felt cutoffs arrived, beautiful and intimidating enough that Andrew sat with it for three days before touching it. When he finally called Daniel Lantz, Graf Lantz's co-owner, to ask if there was anything disrespectful he should avoid doing with the material, Daniel just laughed: "No, fuck it up. I don't care what you do with it. That's why I sent it to you!"
That permission became the piece's method. Andrew turned a cedar mold on the lathe, boiled sheets of felt, stretched them by hand and foot over the mold, and held the stretch with oversized custom "blocking springs" adapted from millinery technique — no stitching anywhere. The resulting pebble-shaped cushions, upholstered in a palette of blue-gray, mustard, and turquoise, are modeled on the moss-covered rocks at low tide on Winthrop Beach, Massachusetts, where Andrew used to live.
The legs are two eight-foot cedar trunks his grandfather set aside in 1983 when clearing land for a house in Old Lyme, Connecticut he built but never moved into. Andrew and his siblings played on those logs as kids; they sat outside uncovered for years, then under his workbench for years more, curing solid — nothing in this piece is laminated. The stone-pine platform came from a tree urban-salvaged in Pasadena by Rich Benson, a gift Andrew still isn't sure he fully earned.
Finished, the piece reminded Andrew of the Lion Turtle from Avatar: The Last Airbender — an island-sized creature that turns out to be alive underneath. He borrowed the name.