In “Approaches to What?” (1989) the essayist George Perec staked his claim for the everyday with the one sentence paragraph: “Question your tea spoons.”

In this forthcoming essay for Cabinet magazine, I explore Perec’s injunction through my own making process, and through the commentary of architects, designers and philosophers. Why was the first spoon I carved quite so wonky? Was it, in fact, a spoon at all? Why do serious thinkers struggle to take spoons seriously?

Approaching the spoon as an object worthy of attention, this piece begins to tentatively work at the intersections of material culture and the discomfort associated with notions of vulnerability.