Six Artists Taking Wood to New Heights

Wood is full of surprises, even though it is one of the most traditional and ancient art materials. It has been utilized for a long time to create innovative forms in African, Pre-Columbian, and Oceanic art. Its unpredictable nature often takes even the artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, who has been crafting massive sculptures out of cedar wood for almost forty years, by surprise. “It’s common for the wood to [refuse to] yield to something I am asking of it—as I build my work, the original image changes,” she tells me. “I give myself a talking-to every time I see a truckload of my cedar beams; I mean, come on, Ursula, enough is enough. There has to be another material you can work with, I promise.”

Wood has been positioned as a viable contemporary material for sculpture by artists such as von Rydingsvard, Martin Puryear, and Courtney Smith. Their powerful, large-scale public artworks and beautiful, minimalist, or whimsical shapes transcend wood’s connections with basic craft. In recent times, the accessibility of digital tools for design and manufacture has made wood easier to work with. The ability to shape wood has been increased by CAD software, CNC equipment, and laser cutters, increasing its versatility and lowering the requirement for labor-intensive hand talent.

But today’s most inventive woodcutters aren’t always utilizing the most recent technological advancements. Some, like Christopher Kurtz, are still perfecting age-old woodworking procedures, while others, like Alison Elizabeth Taylor, are reviving wood sculpture techniques.

Christopher Kurtz

Kurtz shares the elder artist’s devotion to manual expertise; she was formerly an assistant in Martin Puryear’s studio. “I continue to work wood by hand because the result is much more nuanced and spontaneous for me—not because I’m nostalgic,” Kurtz says. “The human hand is still infinitely more complex than any multi-axis CNC machine.” “A craftsperson from a century ago would recognize the method I use very well.”

Kurtz’s sculptures appear improbable, like to prototypes of as-yet-unproven astrological hypotheses. They are frequently quite thin, with the wood either curving around itself like loose ribbon or terminating in tiny points. While his furniture business is more robust, it nevertheless features the same meticulous craftsmanship that launched it in 2008 to support his paintings.

Kurtz takes pleasure in his work.

Rachel Beach

Building painting panels taught Beach the fundamentals of woodworking, which he eventually applied to construction. Her curiosity stems from a useful relationship with the subject matter. She states, “I like wood’s factual, elemental relationship to manual labor and building.” “It is human-scale and historical; one human can construct one object out of wood.”

In addition to her interest in transitional elements in the built environment, which she describes as “seams that transition space to plane, edges that frame an experience or vista, the place the floor meets the wall, or where a hallway opens to a room,” Beach frequently references the methods and techniques of architecture in her work. Her recent work incorporates a wide range of references, from symbolic languages like maritime flags, hieroglyphs, and typography to ancient armor and shields.

Beach’s human-scaled geometric sculptures have incised designs that resemble modern skyscrapers or minimalist totem poles, as well as angles, patterns, and colors reminiscent of Memphis furniture. “In addition to the more obvious spatial, structural, and material relationships my work has to architecture, it also [combines] the commonplace with the magical,” says Beach, elaborating on this conceptual affinity with the built environment.

MANGLE

MANGLE is a collaboration between the woodworking students at Fundación Escuela de Artes y Oficios (School of Arts and Crafts) in Santo Domingo, Colombia, and María Paula Alvarez, a married artist. The group’s name derives from the Latin term for the mangrove tree, a plant with twisted, tangled structures that symbolizes their fascination with intricate forms found in nature.

“I believe what sets them apart is their diversity,” says Dara Metz of Magnan Metz, the collective’s New York gallery. Part of MANGLE’s attraction, in Metz’s opinion, is their cross-disciplinary methodology. She says, “They make both conceptual and useable objects without considering what category they might be considered.”

Despite the pair’s training in carpentry, many of MANGLE’s sculptures lack the obvious hallmarks of woodworking. They provide the appearance that wood may act like rubber, fabrics, or even actual living plants. Some of their latest subjects include tangled extension cords, concrete and wood representations of ferns, and delicate plywood lattices influenced by Bogotá’s ironwork.

Julian Watts

Watts studied conceptual and installation art at the University of Oregon instead of picking up a chisel or operating a lathe. However, when he started working in a woodshop after graduating, something clicked. Watts states, “I became obsessed with wood very quickly.” “It incorporates the organic, irregular forms that I have always been drawn to as a living material.”

The sculptures by Watts have an almost sensual appearance, resembling sexual dream objects. His bowls include unusual apertures, and his spoons have absurdly long handles. His most recent creations, “blob vases,” are filled with holes and resemble fairytale birdhouses more than vessels. His humorous and impractical work subverts the idea that wood is inherently solid and utilitarian.

Watts is motivated by this link to the past even though he uses wood in unconventional ways: “I like the idea that my strange, very non-traditional-looking woodcarvings follow an almost identical process that has been part of human expression for as long as we’ve been around.” Watts’ sculptures use traditional folk wood carving techniques.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor

According to Taylor, “at first, woodworking seemed very off-limits because of the bias against craft in contemporary art.” Not to mention how gendered and predominately male the field is still. She claims, “Men in hardware stores are still trying to explain wood glue to me. I made my teachers nervous when I got near a table saw.”

It’s obvious that Taylor doesn’t mince words or follow the herd. Her specialty is marquetry, which is the application of tiny wood pieces to a surface to create an image or pattern. Taylor uses wood veneer pieces that she cuts and fits together like jigsaw puzzle pieces to create her flat, figurative compositions and installations. “I enjoy creating flat representations from three-dimensional

Unlike the Renaissance marquetry, which depicted themes such as pleasure-seekers at gaming machines or posing with whalebone cocktails, Taylor’s art features modern, frequently everyday scenes. The marquetry hybrids in Taylor’s upcoming exhibition, which opens at James Cohan Gallery next month, blend wood with paint and photographs.

Bhuvanesh Gowda

Gowda attributes his early life interest in wood to this. Growing up atop the southern Indian mountain range known as the Western Ghats, Gowda has a deep personal and cultural connection to the subject matter. He says, “Almost everyone knew how to work with wooden tools and construct wooden buildings.” He claims that even “wooden ploughs” and other wooden implements had attractive features.

In his latest research, Gowda examines the connection between Eastern philosophy and modern advances in physics. While some of his wooden components have been expertly crafted, others have been preserved unaltered. Some are painted, while others are charred black, implying a psychological story or the convergence of conflicting forces. Meaning introverted or inward-facing, Antarmukhi I (2016) is a carved sculpture that reaches both above and below.

The main source of material for Gowda is salvaged wood, which he either gets from friends or buys secondhand. He clarifies that this is more of an ethical decision than a conceptual one, saying, “The use of salvaged wood lies in my responsibility towards the environment as a human.”