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Richard Jones Furniture
Biography
I began my career as a trainee furniture maker in my native During my time in the industry I have been a furniture practitioner in a wide variety of roles and at many levels. Employment early in my career included periods as a bench joiner, cabinetmaker and furniture maker for a variety of mainly small businesses. Those early positions were followed by workshop supervisory and management roles along with increasing responsibility for designing, initiating, and managing the manufacture of furniture and wooden artifacts for my employers; during this period I was, for example, employed as the Furniture Technician in the Furniture Department at Edinburgh College of Art, and as the workshop manager at the Children's Museum of Houston. During the middle of the 1980s I started taking on private furniture design and making commissions in addition to my full-time employment. I moved to Texas in 1993, and some eighteen months later I opened the full-time business Richard Jones Furniture in 1995.
In 2003 I returned to
Seeing my Work
My furniture has appeared in galleries, exhibitions, expositions and shows since the early 1980s. Selected highlights include participating in the Philadelphia Furniture and Furnishings Show, 1999; The Houston Home and Interiors Show, 2000; participating in a mixed media show at the Brazosport Art League, Lake Jackson, Texas, 1998; invited exhibitor in Furniture expositions between 1999 and 2002 at Gremillion & Co gallery, Houston, and taking part in the collaborative multi media events 'Fire' at the KGA Compound, Houston, during 2001 and 2002 hosted by the well known interior designer Kelly Gale Amen. I took part in the annual group exhibitions of The Northern Contemporary Furniture Makers at Tennants Auctioneers in Leyburn, Yorkshire, and in 2013 I exhibited work at, 'MAKERS', Cube Gallery, Manchester. I have, at various times, been represented by Artifex Gallery, Sutton Coldfield.Writing
I enjoy writing and my articles and contributions on furniture making and woodworking topics have been published in the USA and the UK. Magazines where my writing has appeared are Fine Woodworking, Woodwork, Woodshop News, and Woodworker's Journal in the USA; and in the UK, Furniture & Cabinetmaking and The Woodworker.I eventually stopped writing articles and turned my attention to a longer text, and a subject of special interest to me is timber technology. My long standing interest in this was enhanced initially through developing a series of expanded learning materials for the furniture students I taught whilst working in the Higher Education sector. These learning materials evolved into an illustrated and academically reference manuscript on timber technology which was published and released in 2018 by Lost Art Press as the book Cut & Dried: A Woodworker's Guide to Timber Technology. The manuscript was written from the point of view of one woodworker for other woodworkers, e.g., furniture makers, carpenters, joiners, and so on, be they professionals, amateurs, students, etc. This premise of writing as a woodworker on the subject is a markedly different approach to most writers who are overwhelmingly wood scientists writing for fellow timber technologists. This latter approach generally results in a challenging read for the non-specialist, a category into which, for the most part, many woodworkers fall. My aim was to create a text that makes the subject accessible to non-specialists that nevertheless need such information.
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