Inspirations, Philosophy & Journey
The high deserts of the Eastern Sierras have always been home for me. I find much of what I create, and design is inspired by objects and systems I see in nature, from mimicking grain lines with copper alloys, to simulating marble veins with concrete, and to casting 3D prints inspired by natural Li patterns. Nature is a creative well that I dip into for much of my creative engineering process.
In college I was fascinated by systems, studying the flow of information and resources in my two majors, Computer Science and Information Systems and Operations Management at Emory University and its brother business school Goizueta. I was intrigued by recursive algorithms and appreciated natural mathematical relationships like the Fibonacci sequence in programming, and simulated the movements of starlings in strategic modeling. While these classes stimulated my curiosity to learn the natural world, I hadn’t found balance. Whether due to the intensity of the curriculum or an overloaded class schedule, my 5 and 10-year plans didn’t excite me. As I prepared for finals and wrote cover letters to jobs I didn’t want, I reminisced over summers painting homes. My boss had taught me how to see. He taught me how to have a critical eye and notice the nuance of a craftsman: the finesse of correct hand pressure and the experience of knowing the right brush for the job. I thought back on my semester abroad in Athens, Greece and the experience of living in such an old city and how living there changed the way I looked at the made world. Before my senior year finals began, I had signed up for summer classes at Art Center in Pasadena and for the first time in a long time I was excited about my future. Within days of receiving my diplomas in Atlanta, I was back home in Los Angeles and walking into a night class. My experience at Art Center taught me just how much I didn’t know, from how to make a mold to how to use power tools. But it also reminded me how much I enjoyed making things. Having researched furniture makers in one of my classes, I realized one of them had founded a school not far from where I vacationed as a child. While his school had a limited application pool and the maker had died many years before, I found students of his who had started similar tribute schools and with a mission to teach anyone who wanted to learn.
The classes were held in a naturally lit shop, with a view of the ocean, just down one of many little forgotten turn-offs on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast Highway. The subtlety of painting I learned that one summer was taken to new depths. By sharpening chisels, reading woodgrain, and making my own hand planes, the school taught woodworking in the old way, just as James Krenov would have, teaching the spiritual relationship between maker, tool and creation.
The school taught a fabrication philosophy focusing on the material, listening to the wood and how its grain orientation related to how it could be cut as well as the contour of its final shape. Krenov did not make the same piece twice but allowed the subtlety of each piece of wood to fundamentally define the shape of the cabinet, differentiating each from others like it. Krenov's freedom to dress imperfections and highlight the beauty of difference is embodied in my understanding of the Japanese concept, Wabi-Sabi. His process relied on the maker to listen to the material and design from there. This need to pay attention to each piece of wood and how it joins to others before you can define the final aesthetic, reminded me of my programming education, where you test the variables and methods before you start writing the main code.
To Krenov furniture isn’t just meant to be used, but to be an experience. Each interaction with a piece should open a new awareness of the wood. Feeling the shape of the piece reflected in the grain and vice versa, the viewer begins to wonder if the cabinet was made for that piece of wood or whether the wood was made for the cabinet. Learning the Krenovian way changed my understanding. I'm glad it was my first foray into making since it helped contextualize every process and material I've learned since. Learning to understand a material takes time and patience, learning to understand the feel of different variations of the same material and the effect that "feeling" has on the piece. I was lucky to have spent three months in BC learning to take my time. I was encouraged to take breaks when frustrated, to walk down to the beach or hike one of the hundreds of paths only steps from the shop’s front door. My understanding of power tools had time to change. In a world of industrial production, a hand finished edge stands out; comforting, and subtle, with variations that can’t help but be fingered by the curious hand. But to make everything by hand, to dimension every linear foot by hand, means it would take longer to make one piece than you could earn for rent. If the tools to make more exist, why not partner with an accurate machine that can feed you parts ready for your nuanced final touch. So what if material preparation requires a template, so what if you have to waste a little more wood, if the final shape is true to the grain, and the grain compliments the shape of the piece, you’ll have created a stronger, more refined piece of functional art that will also be handed down the generations rather than be discarded on the next move.
Making has helped ground me, relating the history and people of old to processes and materials I use today. The made world has different context than it used to. Stories regarding the genius of architects such as Antonin Gaudi and his parametric modeling process nearly a century before the computer existed, have a different weight as I turn on my modern parametric 3D modeling software. Understanding why the concrete cracked or the print warped, it comes back to my stay in Canada. Am I forcing the material or am I listening to it? Though my teacher from BC might wince if he knew I was CNC programming, his understanding of materials has deeply influenced me. As I learn new techniques 3D modeling complex natural forms that couldn’t be made by hand, or imitating marble veins using colored fiber reinforced concrete, my appreciation of nature as well as my foundations in fabrication will forever contextualize what I make and where I am in the timeline of the built world. In my ever-progression to learn more, exploring new modeling programs, updates in 3D printing, casting, and robotics, my process will always reflect the attention to material and love of nature I learned to listen to in British Columbia.
