I will be working in a group focused on recontextualizing and bringing life to the Met’s exquisite secrétaire and commode commissioned by Marie Antoinette. Our goal is to highlight both the form and function of these lacquer furniture pieces, exploring their materiality, modes of production, daily functionality, and sentimental value. My personal contribution to this project will be to demonstrate how these objects of fashion both enabled and embodied the 18th century woman’s sense of individuality and secrecy. Many of these new values that revolutionized feminine privacy and autonomy during the Enlightenment can be exemplified in both the form and function of the commode set.

Because the furniture once belonged to the most public female figure of the time, I am using the Queen’s preoccupation of privacy to express the widespread values that concerned contemporary women at large. My research will include a biographical study of Marie Antoinette in efforts to understand exactly how these pieces of furniture would have been used. In addition, I will be learning the functional capacity of these specific works in order to accurately depict their various compartments and features.

My team will be assembling a 3-dimensional model of a room in which this specific secrétaire and commode would be the focal point. This virtual space will hopefully allow us to share each of our research in an interactive and educational way, allowing viewers to get closer to the history and physicality of these pieces. My individual contribution to this model will be an animation that allows users to open the different compartments and drawers of the furniture. By emphasizing the difficulty one would have uncovering each secret layer (through, for example, the representation of locks and hidden doors), I hope to portray how personal and sacred this “private self” was considered to be. Through uncovering each layer and arriving to more and more intimate spaces, I hope to grant “private access” to the Queen’s most treasured belongings, showing a side to Marie Antoinette that may not be as publicized. In order to create this page, my team will be using Rhino for 3-d modeling. I also intend on using Illustrator and photoshop to create digital drawings and collages. We plan to utilize a type of animation or annotation system, and are currently exploring different methods to do so. Although I have a lot of digital learning and problem solving ahead of me, I believe that this project will appropriately communicate both the personal importance of and reliance on these pieces, as well as bring light to the structural complexity that lies beneath the lacquered surface.