Follow the material towards the body
Jewellery is worn, while furniture supports a person at a larger distance. Both can make material, contact and proportion unusually noticeable. Looking across the two fields can reveal questions that an isolated object does not announce.
Centraal Museum’s account of its 1989 Bakker exhibition says the presentation included industrial designs and theoretical positions alongside jewellery, at the designer’s explicit request.1 The breadth was part of the intended reading of his work.
Give a strip more than one job
The Strip Chair provides a furniture example. Bakker’s project record describes six laminated-beech strips, with different paths contributing to seat, back and supports.2 The chair makes a material element legible as it changes direction and takes on another task.
That is the productive connection to carry across scales. The question is not whether a chair resembles a necklace. It is how a material can organise its relationship with a person, and how much of that organisation should remain visible in the finished form.
Keep different fields in the same view
The museum’s maker record places Stripstoel SC alongside Bakker’s jewellery within one collection overview.3 It gives a reader a way to move between objects without dissolving their differences.
A chair still has to be a chair, and a wearable object has another relationship with movement and touch. Bakker’s work becomes richer when those distinctions sit beside a shared curiosity about materials. The useful connection is a way of looking, rather than a claim that one discipline simply produced the other.
