My Turn

The Collectors of Wood Art (CWA) held their annual forum in Scottsdale this weekend, and I was able to drive up for some of the Saturday sessions.

I first got to see a panel discussion chaired by sculptor Connie Mississippi, with sculptor-carver Susan Hagen, turner Merryll Saylan, turner Virginia Dotson, and furniture maker and artist Wendy Maruyama. The theme was place, and each artist presented images of places and work inspired or informed by those places.

Susan Hagen focused on a series of ten dioramas (Recollection Tableaux) she created for the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, depicting aspects of life in the prison throughout its history.

Merryll Saylan talked about home and community as place. Some of her pieces had domestic themes; some were more broadly influenced by her environment (e.g., changing color palettes), neighborhood (urban, industrial), and community (family, friends).

Virginia Dotson focused on the geology and cultures of the American Southwest, showing images primarily from Canyon de Chelly. As a desert dweller myself, I have always loved her geologic layered work, and I was interested to see that her new work incorporates painted petroglyph and petrograph motifs.

Wendy Maruyama touched on the World War II Japanese-American internment camps in the United States but focused mainly on inspirations from visits to Japan and China. Her incorporations of hentai images from Japanese pornographic comics and iconic images of Godzilla were particularly amusing. She has also begun using digital video in her work, such as a video of an Asian woman (her sister) applying “dragon lady” makeup, seen through a two-way mirror in a piece.

After a break, the forum continued with digital-image or slide presentations by various artists, emphasizing future work.

I first discovered the exquisite naturalistic carvings of Janel Jacobson this summer in the collection of Fleur Bresler. Janel showed the progression of her work from relief carving in clay to the fully dimensional wood carvings she now does, and she shared some of her specific techniques. The detail in her work is astonishing.

Turner Dewey Garrett’s work always interests me. He is always exploring fresh ideas, informed by his background as an engineer. He has now built himself an ornamental-turning system, but he’s not content to stick with traditional rose engine patterns; he has written software for himself that enables him to create patterns on the fly.

Sculptor Michael Peterson is continuing to explore organic shapes and textures in his work. I find his work irresistible.

Sculptor Jack Slentz is playing with Swiss cross and gear and star shapes, and complementary pieces combining positive and negative shapes. He is also using new materials: stitched rubber and street signs.

Kerry Vesper, furniture maker and sculptor, is carving wave or flying-banner forms and blossom forms in plywood. He is also playing with collaborations with glass artist Alisha Volotzky.

Todd Hoyer and Hayley Smith say they haven’t been making a lot of art recently, because for the last three years they have been engaged in building their studios and a house. Their joint presentation was about just that process. It was particularly interesting to see how the process reflects their approach as artists; for example, the floor of Hayley’s studio is essentially a sample board of colors and textures they were testing for use in floors in their house.

After the presentations, I spent a couple of hours savoring the del Mano Gallery exhibition set up in the conference center. They had multiple pieces from some four or five dozen artists. I haven’t taken so many photos since the ITE. I would share some with you, but I think del Mano would prefer that I not. You can see a lot of work at their web site, however, so check it out.

Going to the forum also gave me the chance to say hello to some friendly faces I met through the ITE this summer: Elisabeth Agro, Albert and Tina LeCoff, Steve Keeble and Karen Depew, Arthur Mason, Joe Seltzer. Brief though my visit to the forum was, it really makes me want to get back to the work I’ve been distracted from by moving and shows and holidays and new toys. I have so many pieces just begun or even just sketched out that draw and build on my ITE experience. That’s the work that excites me most, but, alas, it must yet wait for another few weeks, until after my next show. It must wait because it requires space, psychic space, birthing space. In the meantime, I think about it, dream about it, plan it, work out the details. It gestates in me.

All the ITErs were asked to write artist statements for the exhibition. I have asked for copies of everyone’s statements from the Wood Turning Center and will post them as soon as I get them. In the meantime, here is mine, expanded from a previous statement, published on my website: 

Simple and sensual, my work is about form and substance, containment and expression, the interplay between lift and mass.

As an art medium, wood is unique in that it once lived, and lived long, rooted in the earth, formed as much by the tree’s own life force as by the external forces acting upon it. Wood can be treated as an inert material; it can be cut, carved, colored, bent, planed, pulped; like any other medium, an artist can impose on it whatever form and texture its physical nature will allow. But like a human face, its deepest beauty lies in its record of survival, in its singularity of being, and if an artist chooses to address that aspect of its nature, then the treeness of the wood, that original life energy, can live on in the made object. This is what I try to achieve in turning—to approach the wood as one vessel of energy to another and to make of that interaction a literal vessel.

The quality that I strive to achieve in each turning is presence.

I believe that an object made so, with reverence for its source, retains the spark of that source. Such objects when held or beheld can remind us of our connection to the numinous and the material, the spirit and the earth, a healing connection that grounds us and elevates us and restores us to the whole.

For me, the ITE has been precisely about healing, about transforming brokenness, integrating it into the beauty of the whole. In the work I have produced here, this has involved playing with brokenness in many forms: sometimes deliberately breaking the surface or the wall of a vessel, sometimes working with an existing break, sometimes responding to an accidental break. In various pieces, I have used the brokenness as a feature, exaggerated a break, excised breaks, mended breaks. In the process of this work, I have been transformed by the ITE, both artistically and personally, and I expect the exploration I have begun here to continue for a long time to come.

Saturday, August 4, the Wood Turning Center had a members’ meeting and lunch, which Jean-François, Peter, Sean, Siegfried, and I attended, followed more in-depth gallery talks by each of us. That marked the official end of this year’s ITE and the last time we were all together as a group.

Afterward, Jean-François, Sean, and I headed off to Jane’s house for a celebratory dinner, while Siegfried and his wife, Gudrun, went to Phil and Monika Hauser’s, and Peter went to play with friends.

Siegfried and Gudrun left Philadelphia on Sunday, August 5, I believe, for three weeks or so of travel in the U.S. before they return to Germany. Sean flew home on Monday, August 6. I spent Monday cutting and packing wood to ship back to Arizona (mainly my beloved pear and a holly tree I acquired the day before, thanks to Jane), then headed off to New Jersey for a week at the shore with my partner and her family. Jean-François’s wife, Marie-Claude, arrived Tuesday, August 7, for a few weeks’ visit, mostly in the Philadelphia area, most of which they spent as guests and then housesitters at Jane’s. I believe they will be returning to France this weekend.

And that’s how the ITE ended, folks.

But as Albert likes to emphasize, the ITE isn’t just an experience; it’s a beginning. So stay in touch. I’m sure there will be plenty more to come from each of us.

The opening was a tough night for me. My vertigo was very bad, and it was all I could do to stay upright and smiling, so most of the photos below were taken by Jane, and I can’t tell you a lot about the events of the night. Vince’s films were screened, as was my video of the artists talking. Each of the ITErs talked about his or her experience, and each of us signed a plaque from a Stubby lathe that the Wood Turning Center (WTC) is raffling off in October. Also signing the plaque were Jane, Gus, Fleur Bresler, and other WTC board members.

After the opening, the WTC staff, the ITErs, and several esteemed guests (chiefly the WTC board members) went out for a celebratory dinner at the Pub restaurant, courtesy of the WTC. Elisabeth couldn’t be with us, as she had to leave town right after the opening, but the rest of us had a good time letting down and letting go.

The morning of Friday, August 3, we made one last field trip, to see one of the largest pipe organs in the world, the Wanamaker organ, right in the heart of Philadelphia, at what is now Macy’s. Our guide was Scott Kip, who had substituted for Jane as shop supervisor for a week while she was on vacation and whose day job is working on restoration and maintenance of the organ. It was a fascinating visit, one I would recommend to anyone in Philly.

Here is the façade of the organ. None of these are working pipes. The actual organ is housed behind the facade, spread over seven floors.

Charlie Brown was visiting Macy’s at the same time, for some kind of anniversary.

Every one of the nearly 29,000 individual pipes of the organ can be played from this console. (Every note of every simulated instrument is a separate pipe.)

Some of the variety of pipes that make up the organ. Material, length, diameter, and other factors create the tone of each pipe. Each pipe must be tuned separately.

The organ depends on an extensive network of wooden channels that move the air that make the pipes sound.

This is truly an awesome instrument. I wish I could convey how amazing it was to see how it operates—and then to hear it played. There are daily concerts at noon and, I think, at 5 p.m., so check it out for yourself if you can.

Tuesday and Wednesday, we mostly spent cleaning up the shop. What a mess we had made! We swept up bags and bags of shavings and scraps and dust. And we had to sort through all of the tools and equipment and materials to separate what belonged to the Wood Turning Center and what belonged to the university. We also went to the Wood Turning Center to turn in our artist statements and corrections for the labels and to check out the installation. I had one piece, called “In Her Dream,” that required special installation, as you can see below. The shadows in the photos are distracting, but I’m really pleased with how the piece and branch seem to float.

I also videotaped Sean, Siegfried, Jean-François, and I talking about the work and our ITE experience, which I later turned into a Quicktime movie. I lack the software here to convert it into a format suitable for uploading, but I will continue working on that. It is available for viewing at the Wood Turning Center.

Thursday evening, August 2, all of us except Lesya—Peter came in from New York a day early, and Elisabeth pulled herself away from the museum—met with Albert at the Wood Turning Center. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss what single piece represented for each of us our ITE experience. The Wood Turning Center was acquiring a piece from each of us for its permanent collection, and the input from us would be considered in determining what those pieces would be.

To backtrack a little, Jean-François, Siegfried, Sean, and I had met individually with Albert on the previous Sunday to discuss our ITE experience and the work we had produced. Speaking for myself, it was an enlightening conversation. Talking through my pieces chronologically with Albert helped me see my experience as a whole for the first time. The conclusion I reached in that conversation was that there were two pieces that represented my experience—“Offering,” the first spouted vessel I turned, and “Learning to Cope: Pear Incognito under a Mantle of Cherry”—and I leaned toward the latter as the ultimate choice.

The purpose of the meeting wasn’t for each of us to say what piece we would choose for ourselves, but to hear what everyone else would choose for us—that is, to hear how our fellow ITErs perceived our work and our experience. The discussion was fascinating. It was a challenge to look objectively at each other’s work, to set aside our personal preferences and look at the work in the context of the individual artist.

Being away from the rest of us gave Elisabeth and Peter interesting perspectives. In particular—though perhaps not surprisingly, given her training—Elisabeth seemed to see each of us the most clearly.

Some of our views were widely divergent to begin with, but in the end, we seemed to reach consensus on everyone. For me, the piece everyone settled on was the cloaked pear bowl, and that is the piece the Wood Turning Center did acquire. I hope that the Wood Turning Center will indicate on their site which pieces were acquired for each of us, because in the blur of the opening, I didn’t register what they were for the others.

Tuesday evening, July 31, after a day spent cleaning the shop, we drove to New Jersey for a nice, relaxed, and tasty dinner with Phil and Monika Hauser. Phil is vice president and treasurer of the Wood Turning Center and is himself a turner. Phil and Monika are Swiss, so Siegfried had a good time speaking German for a change. Phil also generously gave us some chunks of coolibah to take home and turn.

Lesya ended up doing dances with one of Sean’s pieces, one of mine, and Peter’s chainsawn bench. Sean, Siegfried, Jean-François, and I also participated in the dance with the bench, with Lesya directing us from the sidelines. Vince filmed all of the dances on Saturday, July 28, and the finished videos were shown at the opening and are available for viewing at the Wood Turning Center throughout the “allTURNatives” exhibition. 

I have embedded the finished videos here. They can also be found on Vince’s website. If the embedded video does not appear below, click here to view the videos on YouTube.

Well, I’m finally back to wrap up my documentation of the ITE. Reentry has been a challenge—more about that perhaps in a later post—and between the time lapse and my vertigo, my memory of some things is a bit blurred. But the photos aren’t. So I apologize for the delay, but I hope you enjoy the posts that follow.

to say that I’m on vacation for a week with very limited access to the Internet. I’ll be reporting on the exhibition opening and the winding down of our ITE—with photos—as soon as I get back to civilization next week, so check back then!

You can now preview our show, the new “allTURNatives” exhibit of ITE work, as photographed by John Carlano. The Wood Turning Center will have its own virtual exhibit on its site in the near future, which will include some installation shots and other material not available to me, so keep checking there.

Some caveats apply here: Only for my objects are titles provided (viewable if you allow the Active X controls or when you hover your cursor over the large image), and only my sequence is chronological. The sequences of images for other folks’ work are not chronological and may not even be logical; this can be blamed on the order in which the objects were photographed and the way the files were named. Some objects have multiple photos; in particular, John shot rapid sequences of Siegfried’s kinetic work in motion to try to capture their movement. Be sure to scroll through all of the thumbnails at the left of the screen to see all of the images. Here are links to the web pages, by artist:

• Elisabeth Agro, scholar
• Jean-François Delorme, wood artist
• Peter Harrison, furniture artist
• Sean Ohrenich, wood artist
• Siegfried Schreiber, wood artist
• Lynne Yamaguchi, photojournalist and wood artist

If you can, please come see the work in person at the Wood Turning Center. Join us there on Friday night at 5:30 for our official opening or on Saturday afternoon, 2–4, for a gallery talk with all of us.

What a trip the last week has been. Turn, turn, turn. Even Thursday night, at midnight on the last night before having our work photographed and delivering it to the Wood Turning Center, Jean-François was turning one more wall piece while Siegfried and I cataloged and prepped our pieces. Friday morning, Sean was touching up pieces while packing his work up.

Friday was a long day at the photographer’s studio. John Carlano photographed everything, and we are talking about a huge quantity of work, especially from Jean-François and Sean. I counted at least 46 pieces from Jean-François, including 10 wall hangings and 6 cement bowls, and 39 from Sean. I can’t count Siegfried’s, because many of his involve multiple pieces and I don’t know what the combinations are. Divided as my time was and as slow as I am, I have 15 new pieces—of which, I will say, I am pretty proud.

Saturday, Vince Romaniello filmed Lesya dancing with Sean’s piece, my piece, and Peter’s chainsawn bench. The bench dance involved the four of us turners interacting with the bench (under Lesya’s command) as well. The film will be showing at the opening and, I assume, throughout the exhibition.

All the work is at the Wood Turning Center now. It has all been professionally photographed. I think the cataloging is done. The exhibit designer comes today to lay it all out. The work will be installed, labels will be printed and placed, and Friday night, the whole shebang will be unveiled.

Meanwhile, Sean was back at the workbench the instant he was free from other duties. Jean-François and Siegfried have also been back at it. Everyone is busy making gifts, except me. I have not been able to work since finalizing my pieces, and I had to push hard to manage that, because since last Monday, July 23, I have been battling vertigo. The world keeps tilting on its axis, and I have been working hard just to stay upright. I stagger about like an old drunk, sitting or leaning as much as possible, even napping on the floor of Jane’s office when it gets too bad. I’m trapped in my own Hitchcock movie. Where is Kim Novak (or Barbara Bel Geddes, for that matter) when you need her?

We worked.

Don’t expect much in the way of posts for the next few days. Our deadline for turning in work for the final exhibition is this Friday, so all we will be doing until then is working, and for me at this point, that means turning, not blogging.

Here are a few photos from the last couple of days, just to try to keep you current.

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We are really in production mode now. Except for a brief meeting with Albert and Jane about scheduling and shop rules, we all just worked. I wish I were as fast as these guys, but I gave up trying to keep up long ago.

Jean-François whipped through his spalted ash bowls and is doing more Chinese elm bowls. He tried texturing them with an electric chainsaw, but the effect once the texture is wire-brushed is not much different from what he has done with an Arbortech—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sean has made a few pieces in this form, appealing in its simplicity and very versatile. Check out the “carved” motif on the face of the first piece. Those are bug holes, guys. I have never seen them form a pattern like this. Let’s hope some of these bugs survived to pass on their genes to other wood borers.

Here is another piece in the same form. You can see the other side of it in the next photo, along with the next incarnation of one of the pieces shown in yesterday’s post.

And here is a new piece in that form being started on the lathe. A simple block, a simple form, but with oh-so-many possibilities.

Siegfried was busy with the chainsaw for a long time today, cutting up a large log of what we think is silver maple. Then one minute, I was holding the door for him as he came in carrying an armload of cut blocks; the next, he had this array of roughed-out vessels sitting on his workbench. Check out the figure in some of these pieces.

Siegfried wanted to be sure that I got a good shot of the lovely shavings he is getting from this wood. Mmm. Maybe I’ll steal a little tomorrow.

I keep forgetting to take pictures of what I am doing, but I almost finished a large, flared cherry bowl today—and maybe I will go finish it now, before heading back to the dorm for bed. I will again be playing with the idea of cleaving as I carve its rim. And Jane brought me branches from her brushpile that I will use with the pear vessel I turned yesterday. Are you intrigued?

In case you are wondering about the toll this intensive experience is taking on us, know that Jean-François has been talking to his tool rest—and it answers him in French.

Lesya came in again today, both to carve more waves and to meet with Vince Romaniello, who will be filming her five dances for screening at the opening. She is coming in tomorrow to carve again. I think we might have an addict on our hands! After all, working with your hands is a different kind of dancing.

Siegfried finished (I think) his carved box elder vessel—at least, he finished the bottom of it on the lathe today.

He also finished the Cryptomeria bowl that cracked so badly, making flames where there was damage.

Jean-François and I finished the last of our broken-bowl series. For more control, instead of breaking the bowl, we cut it on a scroll saw. 

Here is what the final two vessels look like. The epoxy is still setting on the osage orange bowl in this photo.

Jean-François also started a new series of spalted ash bowls today.

Here is some of what Sean was working on today.

I finished the turning of a tall pear vessel and will carve the lip tomorrow. Interesting that I who have no elegance and no grace can yet create elegance and grace with this sturdy hands. I also cut a wedge from the natural-edge pear bowl I turned yesterday and am waiting to see what happens. And I started a large cherry bowl. No photos, though. Maybe tomorrow.

Altogether, another quiet, intensive work day—and that’s probably what you can expect from us until July 27, when we turn in work for the exhibition. I’ll do what I can to keep it interesting, but here is where the push begins.

Alas, I got no replies to my 4 a.m. cry in the wilderness this morning. Ah, well. Sigh.

Today was a fairly quiet, intensive work day. 

Lesya came in not to dance but to carve waves for Siegfried’s collaborative wave piece. Sadly, there were misunderstandings early on in the communication process for this collaboration, and Sean and Jean-François won’t be working on it. Happily, Peter did and Lesya is and I will and Elisabeth may. And in the end, the public also will, as the piece will be installed as an interactive work, with anyone free to arrange the wave forms as they like.

Siegfried continued carving his box elder vessel. He later found that mounting it on the lathe to carve let him see and control better what he was doing.

Sean worked on new and old pieces. The black in this one is not painted but ebony.

Jean-François and I began our collaboration, based on an idea I used in a previous work, of breaking and repairing vessels visibly. Here are the vessels we started with. Jean-François turned the Chinese elm and osage orange bowls; I turned the sycamore bowl (the smallest).

Breaking the piece takes a bit of will. We broke the sycamore bowl into just three pieces.

Jean-François hit the Chinese elm bowl squarely and got a complicated break, which made gluing it—using 5-minute epoxy with a working time of maybe 2 minutes—a real challenge. Adding acrylic paint to the epoxy for color decreases (maybe even halves) the working time, so I use 30-minute epoxy at home. The 5-minute version is what we had on hand here, though. (For anyone who wants to know more about coloring epoxy, I discuss the subject in an article called “Nulling Voids: Filling Cracks and Holes in Wood” that, along with other articles, is available on my website under “Other links.”)

We used red for the sycamore and black for the Chinese elm. I mixed the red from acrylic paints; the black we achieved by mixing in charcoal from burnt wood (which Jean-François happened to have in jar).

I like the way the interior of the sycamore bowl came out; the exterior needs some touchup, though.

This technique—this trope, really—is deeply meaningful for me (you can read a note about the backstory on this here, under “About the work”), and it is one I intend to explore in a series of works after I return home. Using it in this collaboration is a little odd for me—like choosing a subject like, say, “death” or “incest” for a poetic exercise—and I find myself holding back emotionally, treating the process as more of a technical exercise than an act of artmaking. I would like to talk with Jean-François about how he feels about this process—indeed, how he feels about artmaking in general. I have wanted to from the beginning—the chance to explore the subject with other artists is one reason I applied for the residency—but before now, I have felt stymied by the language barrier—even though Siegfried and I managed a deep conversation about it driving home from D.C. This now is an opportunity to explore the subject.

For me, turning is deeply emotional, not just an application of technique, and it is an act in which meaning is both intentional and discovered. For me, the aspect of meaning—not technical sophistication—is what makes turning an art and not just a craft. I can argue with myself about this, of course—is not craft about creating beauty and is not creating beauty meaning enough? Yes, yes—but I’ll put this statement out in hopes of eliciting conversation about it. Turners who regard yourselves as artists (any artists, really), what do you say? Have your objects meaning? Is the meaning intentional? Do you start with wanting to express something, or does the expression emerge through the work? How do you create? Have you something to say? Must an artist have something to say? Is it enough to create objects in which others find their own meaning? Is beauty enough? Do any of you care, or do you care only about the making?

I really must sleep now. Let me hear from you, readers.