As You Were is a minimalist chair and table set located in New York, designed by Kritika Manchanda. This 2025 work represents a profound departure from conventional furniture typologies, operating instead as a material meditation on the residual traces of domestic life. Manchanda’s background in textile arts and her exploration of memory’s fragility converge in these post-functional forms that challenge our understanding of what furniture can be and mean.

The artist’s process of starching and compressing fine textile layers creates objects that exist in what she describes as altered dimensions. Shirts appear laid out across surfaces, belongings gathered in the casual disorder of everyday use, yet these familiar gestures are frozen into permanence through Manchanda’s material interventions. The chair and table function less as utilitarian objects than as repositories of domestic ritual, capturing the intimate choreography of daily life in a state of perpetual pause.

Manchanda’s technique draws from both contemporary textile art and traditional preservation methods, creating a hybrid practice that speaks to broader questions about materiality and memory in contemporary craft. The starching process, typically associated with household maintenance, becomes a method of artistic transformation that crystallizes ephemeral moments into tangible form. This approach reflects a growing interest among artists working with functional objects to interrogate the boundaries between utility and sculpture, domesticity and gallery space.

The work’s title, As You Were, suggests both military command and intimate recognition – a instruction to return to previous position that acknowledges the impossibility of such return. This temporal complexity is embedded in the materials themselves, where the softness of fabric meets the rigidity of starch-induced structure. The resulting forms occupy an ambiguous territory between furniture and sculpture, between memory and present reality.