She Sat Wrapped: The Yarn- and Felt-Covered Chairs of Tanya Aguiñiga

Sometimes a chair is not a chair. Sometimes it is a way to muck up the prevailing cultural orthodoxy, as well as a place to set your buttocks on and take a load off. An unsuspecting, nondescript metal folding chair, for instance, might go into the workshop of furniture designer Tanya Aguiñiga and come out mummified with yarn. Or looking like it grew an epidermis of wool, or sprouted a thin layer of fuzzy pink moss.

“The idea was to transform the folding chairs into the opposite of what they are,” she says. “You know — no longer cold, no longer uninviting, no longer mass-produced.”

Orly Olivier

Bright idea: Aguiņiga and her seat covers

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More About

• Tanya Aguiniga
• Tijuana
• Atwater Village
• Mickey Mouse
• Maclovio Rojas

Among merciless chair snobs, there is no more alternately coveted and derided piece than the Eames chair. Aguiñiga’s gallery manager asked her to cover one of those in wool. He happened to have a bunch of the chairs sitting around in his basement.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, wincing. “I don’t know how I feel about messing with someone else’s design.” But in the end, the temptation of felting an iconic Eames chair proved irresistible. Such is her passion for the form.

“We had 16 chairs in the bedroom alone at one point,” she says. “Right, honey?”

“Hmm? Did we?” says her husband, Todd, slouched deep into the sofa in the living room. The sofa is a Knoll. Someone had put it out to pasture at the curb, and Aguiñiga scooped it up and then reupholstered it.

“I’m superobsessed with yarn and wool,” she says, “mainly for its warmth, depth, texture and story.” Story?

“Yes. I look for yarn that has good stories behind it. Like the cones of wool woven by rural women in Uruguay.” She imagines that the women’s husbands are no-good, useless drunks, and so they get together to make the yarn as solace and as a source of income.

Or the goat-hair yarn from England, which hasn’t been manufactured since the 1970s. It’s deep gray-brown and prickly, like a goat in spool form. She wrapped two chairs with it.

What goes through her mind while she’s making a chair? “Not making the chair.”

It takes 30 hours of hand-rubbing pelts of soapy wool. Your fingers start to cramp. Your skin goes raw.

One of her more intellectually challenging chairs is part of a minimalistic desk-chair-lamp triumvirate called the Shadow Trio. It is so minimalistic, in fact, half of it does not exist. A white chair with only two legs is bolted to a white wall. The shadow cast on the wall forms the chair’s other half. Ditto for the table and lamp. The three items seem to float in midair.

“At first, people said it was gimmicky. But it’s one of my favorite pieces. It needs the wall to exist, otherwise it falls down. It’s about strange half-relationships. All of my work started coming out with a double-sidedness. Just coming out and coming out, and I didn’t know why.”

“It’s so obvious,” friends told her. “It’s because you’re from the border.” As in Tijuana, the United States–Mexico border.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was interested in acquiring the Shadow Trio for a while. Then hard economic times hit, and suddenly the museum didn’t need another chair that nobody would be allowed to sit on.

Aguiñiga is 30 years old, slim, tall, bespectacled, and tonight is wearing her black hair in a single lopsided bun, which looks like a Mickey Mouse ear missing its partner. She moved here from Tijuana when she was 18. But she’d been coming over for school in San Diego since she was 5. She and her parents told the border guards lies about why they were crossing. It was easier that way.

“It really messes you up crossing the border every day, living your life in two different countries. Going from somewhere with no running water to somewhere clean and modern and perfect. I was always afraid of getting kicked out of school.” They used fake addresses so she could attend U.S. schools. To be in class by 8 a.m., she’d leave at 4 a.m. She lived so close to the border that she could take a short walk to the fence and peep through to see the U.S. The fence runs straight into the sea.

In her 20s, she joined the Border Art Workshop and helped to build a community center in the Maclovio Rojas squatter settlement out of old garage doors. People take discarded American garage doors down to Mexico and re-use them to build housing. Four garage doors, and another one for a roof, and you have a room, like a house of cards.

Her husband watches as Aguiñiga flips through photos of old artwork. (Irony of ironies: He works at Crate & Barrel.) She did an installation of wooden crosses labeled with the names of people who’d died trying to cross the border. Some froze to death. Some starved. The names came from the coroner’s records.