Artist Statement

As an artist and craftsperson, I incorporate green woodworking skills with other traditional skills of joinery, wood turning, and casework for my current body of work, the Abacus Series. These pieces reflect many of the structural elements of a typical abacus with its frame, rods, counting beads, and a bar to separate the upper and lower beads. While an abacus requires this structural hierarchy in order to function mathematically, altering this structure offers me an opportunity to play on those structural hierarchies. In my counting frames, a frame can be open or closed; reduced to just a base; or a constrained container, each a structure for a collage of beads.

The work begins with selecting and laying out the frame material, informing its scale and tenor. Next the stock for the rods is chosen from sets of shaved sticks of various sizes. I place the rods across the frame to determine their order and placement. This is enough to determine the joinery for that frame and how to secure the rods. Beads are turned en-mass, selecting pieces and types of wood that best relate to the feeling of the abacus and its title.

Turning the beads for the work has become an exploration of the incredibly diverse qualities of wood. Trees like humans adapt or succumb to stresses, disease, and their environmental conditions. My turnings can reveal a specific branching structure in a limb, or the wood around what was an insect infestation. The beads can become beings or personas to be dressed up or down, in line with or in resistance to structural hierarchies of the frame. Each turned wood bead brings its own coloration and pattern to be painted over, clothed, cloaked or armored, smoothed or left rough, oiled, waxed, or left bare.