Pear Family

Board cooking Coronavirus COVID-19 family Fun kitchen pandemic Pear wood

PEAR FAMILY

It is a project that was born during the lockdown caused by Covid-19 pandemic.

In the middle of March 2020, majority of us in Poland, started home isolation due to the virus outbreak. I could observe it was a tough time for many people. This made me think of creating a project that would bring out something GOOD out of the time of struggle.

This is how Pear Family started to shape. A project that is a set of kitchen boards coming from a single plank of wood.

Project assumptions:
- there will be something nice to wait for in the difficult time of pandemics

- something good will come out of the difficult time
- people who have recently become active in cooking will have a decent kitchen board
- in times of social isolation a new form of connection will establish

This project was aimed at my Facebook friends. It started with a post, where I explained the idea and contacted those who were willing to participate. I was surprised by how many people responded.

Why Pear?

I bought a beautiful pear board. I thought it would be a great material for making kitchen boards. It was very hard and did not have big, visible pores. After consulting this with a wood specialist, I was sure that this type of wood was very well suited for the purpose.

*Freshly cut pear wood smells like warm, baked buns. Just so you know.*

Why Family?

Each person who applied for the project would become a part of the Pear Family as all the boards come from one big pear board.

Project detailed idea:

Participants would choose the shape and size of the boards according to their likings.

All boards will be 16 mm thick and available in two visual variants:

- geometric shape: rectangle or circle
- rough vector shape of chosen country: this may be a place to go to as soon as you can, and the board would remind you of that. To give an example, I have prepared a view of the island called "Reunion".

Shapes and sizes guidance. Island image source: Google maps

To help with choosing proper size of the board I created a simple illustration using fruit and vegetables in relation to board sizes

Additional information:
- all boards were impregnated with multiple layers of natural tung oil, which is safe for contact with food and great natural wood impregnator
- the boards were glued with a glue of the highest water resistance class
- the maximum possible dimensions of the board were 30x45cm
- for boards that had the shape of the country, the concave parts had the accuracy of the R5 radius
- the order of applications determined the priority of the queue to get the board

Letting wood "breathe" after cutting. "X" mark on the floor is the visual indication of work stations in the workshop during Covid-19 pandemics.

There were countless amount of little knots in the wood. This is a mark of a tree growing lots of little branches.

CNC cutting the shapes. Rectangles were cut on the saw.

One board had a crack and it got repaired with a dovetail key.

Preparing the surface by scraping with sharp blade before applying tung oil.

Beautiful wood surface after applying 5 layers of tung oil. Each layer needed to dry for at least 24 hours. This piece was a test sample to make sure the process goes very well.