After many years behind the scenes of culturally significant projects and brands, I've put this site together in some ways by request and also as an adventure into more personal and direct conversation.
Now, maybe more than ever, objects and how we value them are under scrutiny, we're trapped by them, weighed down by them, mistrustful of our desire for them, yet fundamentally bound to them and to the creative need to make them, they are expressions of our defining attribute as humans that of creating, and our highest skills. They are also ledgers of our cultural and societal preoccupation's.
My examinations and explorations are collaborative, creative and hopefully compelling. I create observations of objects through the very medium that is being observed, much in the way that litery critique is a written one, the object critique can be a made one.
The world we create is the world we inhabit, and if an unexamined life is not worth living then an unexamined world is not worth living in.
Philip Wood is best known for being the curatorial and creative
force behind the international design and art brand, CITIZEN:Citizen.
He is also a speaker, professor and cultural critic whose views on
products, design, craft and art have led him across the world, speaking
about and engaging with those who see the potential for objects as
vehicles for communication.
Wood's approach to the creative fields is one of treating them as mediums more than disciplines. He is passionately involved in tracking their various locations in contemporary culture, whether it be through curating, gallery inversions (where visitors bring their own objects to the gallery), museum shows, and what he calls rogue retail practices (which are as much cultural interventions as shopping events).
Products from Wood's company, CITIZEN:Citizen, are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the SFMOMA. In the last three years, Wood and his company have been featured in more than 300 magazines, and invited to partake in national and international art and design fairs. His collaborating artists are leaders in their fields, his own work has been highlighted as "groundbreaking" and "provocative" and he has been cited as a "visionary" and "a dissenting voice".
Originally trained in the traditions of English cabinetmaking, Wood's business career spans furniture design, production, retailing (both interiors and fashion) and now, curation and production of conceptual design objects. Whether it be fashion, art, design or furniture, Wood sees all of these as a means of communication and an entryway to understanding the world we live in. Wood's unique vision into culture and its reinterpretation has led to his being increasingly called upon for creative direction and brand strategy.
He is married to internationally renowned journalist Tania Ketenjian and lives in San Francisco.
