CHar

“I abandoned my original ideas…and ended up using the detritus of that labor as inspiration and material for a small body of work called CHar.

I wanted to work with cedar, and I wanted to work with industrially available dimensions. I had ideas of shapes, even ideas about what these shapes would mean. I was going to take a 4×4 fence post, deconstruct it (cut it into pieces) and then re-construct it (glue it back together)…some with the goal of getting back to the original shape (straight), and some in newly configured ways (bent/crooked).

All was well for a little while, until I hit a wall. The pieces were clearly at their limit, they could not be worked anymore without becoming noticeably overworked. The problem was that at the same time they did not feel finished. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t! Keep working them and they would begin to feel artificial, OR stop working on them while they were not yet finished…so I abandoned them (and none of them are part of this body of work!)

As I was cleaning up (both the shop and my emotions) I began to see the discarded chunks of wood as something more than garbage…I realized that because they were cutoffs and I had therefore paid them no mind, I had inadvertently created building blocks that were wonderfully organic and unapologetic. Unlike the pieces I had deliberately cut, these were those pieces’ cutoffs and leftovers…no intentions and “deep” thought had gone into their creation, and it was palpable!

So I took the hint and began to make shapes from those scraps, and the results are “CHar”.