Peter Marigold (b.1974) is a British, London-based designer who graduated from the Design Product MA at the Royal College of Art in 2006 under the tutelage of Ron Arad. He was awarded an Esme Fairbairn bursary following his graduation. Since graduating Marigold has largely produced furniture in limited edition and has presented his work with gallerists such as Libby Sellers and Sarah Myercough in London. His interest in cleaving, halving and manipulating wood has been a constant in his work. “I have long had a preoccupation with bi-symmetry. The notion of splitting one thing into two is, I find quite strange. A destructive moment creates; a cell divides. I have experimented with this idea through various projects,” says Marigold about his work. Marigold first came to prominence for his Split Box Shelves (2006) in which a single, narrow log is split into randomly sized quarters, lengthways. These pieces form the corners of each box, therefore creating an irregularly-shaped box that Marigold mounted on the wall as a shelf.

In 2017 he was nominated for the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize, staged at the V&A in collaboration with BBC Radio 4. Marigold’s Bleed cabinets were exhibited at the V&A as part of that prize. Made from cedar tongue-in-groove planks joined by steel hardware stripped of its zink coating, causing a bleeding effect to the surface when Marigold exposed the cabinet to the elements.

Marigold first met Tadanori Tozawa, director of Hinoki Kogei in 2011 when Marigold was invited to Japan by the organisation Japan Creative, connecting international designers with traditional Japanese craftsmen. Hinoki Kogei is a woodwork factory in Saitama prefecture in Japan and together they made the Dodai benches created from a log split into two forming the sides of the bench and with a seat cover made from woven igusa grass and wooden rods. The Cleft series is their second collaboration.

The Cleft series include six cabinets of different sizes, each with a body of dark stained ash, but with each cabinet having a cleaved frontage in different species of wood. Cleaving the wood lengthways results in a very textured surface with both grain and knots raised. Clefting wood this way is complicated as it’s impossible to predict the result beforehand. Tozawa had to cleave close to 100 trees before finding the six most suitable pieces for this project. Each piece is therefore entirely unique. The Sen cabinet in the V&A collection has a front made from Japanese Sen, a species of wood native to Japan. It resembles ash and is very pale in colour. When this particular trunk of Sen was cleaved, it revealed a prominent knot that was cleaved in half. This knot now decorates the bottom part of each door. The cleaving of the Sen trunk also resulted in a very exaggerated curve to the wood, concave on the left door and concave on the right, giving the doors a wavy appearance. The wood was carefully selected according to the overall dimensions of the cabinet.