Story & Process
T H E S T O R Y
In this film, The Art of Chickening, you will meet Sally Linville, the Creative Director, and hear the story of the inspiration behind the original Chicken Footstools, ‘Henny’ and ‘Penny,’ created as Sally’s graduate design studio project in 2009.
T H E P R O C E S S
We are glad to report that Chicken Footstools continue to be crafted with the same natural materials and care as the original two. Today, our Kansas City-based studio operates with both part-time employees and as a cottage industry. Artisans engage in spinning, knitting, and stitching at home, setting their own work schedules. The studio serves as the primary meeting place for design, felt-making, sculpting, finishing, photographing, and releasing chickens for adoption. The team of “chickeners” is comprised of women in various stages of life who enjoy employing their own creative practice toward the making of Chicken Footstools. The imprint of their artistry is truly what renders each chicken unique.
Each Chicken Footstool begins life as a wooden egg. Fallen logs are foraged from creek beds around Sally’s family’s farm in Kansas and are then turned on a lathe to create an egg shape—the perfect heart of the chicken. The egg is an anchor for upholstery and a structurally sound center to help the chicken function as a footstool.
The chickens need sturdy legs and feet on which to stand. Through the design process, they were repeatedly enlarged in pursuit of a balanced footstool. Now the oversized bronze feet are one of the most defining features of a chicken made by The City Girl Farm. The studio works with a local foundry using a lost-wax casting method, where molten bronze is poured into a ceramic mold created from the original clay sculptures. When the bronze has cooled, the ceramic is chipped away to reveal the final piece. This same process is also used for the beak.
Once the egg, legs, and beak are prepared, these components are assembled into a standing chicken with the bronze beak connected to a spring, allowing a subtle pecking action in the neck. This hand-built process sets the unique posture of each chicken. The frames then come home to roost in the studio where they are upholstered and made ready for their fiber feathers to be fashioned. While the artistic exploration of feather designs through years of special collections and flocks has continued to expand, the construction of the body frames has remained the same.
Studio artisans create feathers primarily with Merino wool. The art processes involved vary with each project but often include spinning, knitting, felting, and stitching. These happen collaboratively at the studio and by “chickeners” at their homes, diligently upholstering one feather at a time.
Each chicken is crowned with a signature red comb, is uniquely named, and is given an edition number which is etched on the bottom of their feet.
