Browsing the Pinterest site I came across a word that I didn’t know the meaning of and this took me down the wonderland path to the origins and meaning of “memes” and how it differs but can be a source of inspiration. On that journey I found the term was coined by an evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins to describe a cultural element analogous to a biological gene. The word meme can mean any idea, fashion, picture, song, etc. that is propagated and communicated and in so doing takes on a life of it’s own. As it spreads people often will change it by putting on their own spin it. Think of the spins made on joke cartoon memes where in the telling of the joke a different animal or ethnic group is creatively substituted by another person to make a different audience laugh. Like biological genes the cultural meme will mutate as it spreads.
If memes are the social equivalent of biological genes where does nature as a source of inspiration fit in? Our finely detailed cabinet pulls with few exceptions have in some way been directly influenced by our appreciation of nature. Plants, animals, insects and other physical entities when taken collectively are how we define nature. In our new website’s cabinet hardware section we have grouped our pieces accordingly into natural categories:
Animals
Flying creatures
Plants
Flowers
Textures
Hedges
If you look at the different categories the influence of nature as a source for these creative designs should be apparent. While customers like our work we can not describe the pieces or the pictures as memes as they appeal to a select small audience. Given that our work including our photographs are all copyrighted and original we also hope that it will not be propagated without our permission to do so.