b. 1988
I’m a sculptural wood artist living and working in Sonoma County, Northern California. My primary medium is wood from locally foraged and sustainably felled trees, which I shape into sculptural forms using gouges and carving tools on a lathe.
I’m drawn to material that carries the evidence of a tree’s life — cracks, fire scars, rot, the structural stress of growing around what could not be avoided or ignored. I’ve always been most interested in these ‘defects’, often gravitating to the strange and imperfect. These are the places in which I encounter inspiration and discovery; the aesthetic artifacts of a life shaped in place, by place.
I mount raw, fresh wood onto my lathe — a simple, powerful machine that spins the piece so fast that at times it almost looks still. My gouges carve the wood as it turns, peeling away layers to reveal rings, voids, stress lines, rot — whole interior landscapes hidden right under the bark. Trees, rooted beings that they are, never dodge or avoid or deny the imprint of their environment. They grow around it instead, and what might have destroyed them becomes part of what holds them up.
I work the wood while it’s still fresh and full of moisture. After shaping and hollowing, I step away and let it dry as it wants to; warping, cracking, tightening — sometimes drawing tightly together, sometimes falling apart entirely. This is where the material becomes a collaborator rather than a canvas. The wood keeps shaping itself after I’ve set my tools down, and once it settles I might carve deeper or char the surface, accentuating whatever the piece has become while no one was watching.
Like so many of us, I’ve had a complicated life in my body. Loss, addiction, the experience of not always recognizing or liking what I see in my reflection. I find that my time with the wood offers a space of solace and healing. When I find a scar in a piece of wood, shape a whole form around it, and fall in love with it exactly as it is — I’m finding a new way to love another part of myself. And at the end, I find myself standing alongside this piece of art, unapologetically displaying itself to the world — cracked, charred, warped — open, imperfect, whole.
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