Experiment with Nature » sculpture

The Bucket Board

Steve Ebert — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 17:17:15 +0000

Brooklyn based artist, director, and all-around stuff-maker, Mac Premo, was tasked by the World Wildlife Fund to raise awareness for this past years’ Earth Hour (which occurred March 28th, 2015 at 8:30PM). The project asked him to take something already existing in the world (namely, trash) and re-purpose it into something useable and beneficial to daily life.

As a highly accomplished assemblage artist, Mac was already a pro at digging through dumpsters, and after reaching out to Encinitas, California-based skateboard company Sanford Shapes, they settled on creating skateboards out of discarded paint buckets. Using a process similar to the one we used in crafting our hand-made cruiser decks (LINK HERE), they pulled discarded buckets & wood, planed them down for pressing and routing, then finished the process with fine-sanding and drilling holes for mounting hardware. The results were pretty phenomenal – watch the well-made and entertaining video above, check out photos of the process and finished decks along with some of Mac’s other work below, and visit his portfolio HERE.

McNabb & Co. Studio

Steve Ebert — Thu, 14 May 2015 19:03:19 +0000

Philadelphia based McNabb & Co. Studio offers a refreshing and unique take on fine woodworking in their project, “The City Series”. Founder James McNabb meticulously uses a bandsaw to individually shape small pieces of various wood species, eventually combining them into stunning collages of sorts. The abstracted architectural forms come together in an interesting perspective on urban sprawl, and when combined with the application into the mediums of furniture and wall art. The final products are stunning pieces certainly fitting for any urban loft. In his own words, “Each piece depicts the outsider’s perspective of the urban landscape. Made entirely of scrap wood, this work is an interpretation of making something out of nothing.”

Check out some photos of the below, and visit the portfolio site HERE.

The Diatomist

Steve Ebert — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 18:07:37 +0000

Nature is seldom matched in its beauty & simplicity. A prime example of this simple form & function are diatoms. Located in nearly every place that there is standing water, diatoms are single celled algae that encase themselves in beautiful glass shells. There are hundreds of thousands of varieties of diatoms all that build their own unique forms. They range in size from 5 microns to 200 microns – for a sense of scale, one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter. Diatom arrangement first began in the early 1800’s after the advent of the microscope, and was initially practiced by microscopists and works were sold to amateur naturalists for display at small gatherings. Nearly invisible to the naked eye, each arrangement could fit within a period of an average font size.

Fast-forward to today, diatom arrangement is virtually a lost art form, with the only living practitioner being Klaus Kemp. Watch the video above for a profile of the artist and how he researched and mastered this once lost art form, and see more examples of his work below. The dexterity and dedication required in finding and arranging these tiny forms is truly an Experiment with Nature. To find out more about Klaus and his work, visit his website here.

Jay Nelson Art

Steve Ebert — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 23:03:12 +0000

Here at Shwood we are constantly searching for inspiring ways to think about and use natural materials. Recently, we were blown away by the creativity, craftsmanship, and playfulness of these live-able sculptures that bridge the gap between art and life.

Bay Area fine artist, Jay Nelson, is not concerned with all of his cuts and angles being perfect. In fact, he would prefer it if they weren’t. He believes these imperfections and the workarounds required to solve problems make the end result more fun. In his own words, “art should be fun.” Through his process of experimentation and problem-solving in his projects, he has learned to embrace the imperfections and the unique results that they generate.

See some videos and photos below to find out more about some of Jay’s projects and hear him give his unique and inspiring perspective. You should also definitely visit his website to see more of his work.

Book Sculptures – Guy Laramee

Steve Ebert — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 21:16:47 +0000

Artist Guy Laramee offers an interesting take in his work on the oft-used phrase “print is dead”.

In his own words from his artist statement: “My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “what” we think, but “that” we think.
So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.
After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: to project us into this thick “cloud of unknowing.”‘

Check out some examples of Guy’s sculpture below, and see more of his work at his portfolio site HERE.

Neon Sculpture by Eric Franklin

Steve Ebert — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 22:52:25 +0000

Local Portland Sculptor Eric Franklin works in an extremely interesting, if somewhat macabre, medium. He utilizes clear glass tubing, vacuum sealed and filled with noble gases such as neon, krypton, argon, and xenon to create stunning renderings of the human form. The process is extremely tedious and painstaking, sometimes taking thousands of hours per finished piece to ensure that there are no leaks. Any leakage in the joints of the glass connections or molecules inside the sealed piece would affect the reaction of the gases within.

He uses the glass as a container for light and space, with each piece being unique and unexpected as there is no real way to tell how the gases will coalesce as they work their way around the glass housing. The gases even react to your body’s electromagnetic field and flicker and change as you move close to them.

See the photos below for examples of Eric’s work and follow the links at the bottom for more information.

Visit Eric’s portfolio site, or watch this Discovery Channel feature to find out more about his work.

Woodcuts – Bryan Nash Gill

Steve Ebert — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 18:06:23 +0000

Beautiful video by Philip Leaman showcasing the locale, process, and feeling behind the work of printmaker and sculptor Bryan Nash Gill. We love this inspiring take on looking to nature for inspiration and meaning. Brian visits lumber yards, or as he calls them, “Boneyards”, and repurposes downed trees that would otherwise be burned or turned into low-grade lumber. He then turns the salvaged pieces into blocks for relief printing or sculptural installations in a true experimentation with nature.

Bryan Nash Gill – Woodcuts from Philip Leaman on Vimeo.

To see more of Bryan’s work, visit his website: http://www.bryannashgill.com/

The Museum of Arts and Design – Against the Grain

Josh Fulfs — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:05:36 +0000

New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) current exhibition is clearly something that would resonate with us here at Shwood. Titled “Against the Grain“, the exhibition features 57 artists from around the world who use art as their medium and utilize everything from the simplest of hand tools to the most advanced technology.

From MAD’s website:

The exhibition emphasizes the way artists, designers, and craftspeople have incorporated postmodernist approaches and strategies into woodworking—deconstructing vessel shapes, playing on the relationship between function and form, and utilizing woodturning and furniture techniques in the creation of sculpture and demonstrating exciting possibilities through the use of technology.

If you’re in New York, be sure to go check out the exhibition. For everybody else, you can watch an introductory video and look through more photos over at MAD’s website.

Cornelia Konrad

Jillian Barkley — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:02:06 +0000

Cornelia Konrad creates site-specific installations by implying a sense of weightlessness to ordinary objects. The German artist’s sculptures appear to be frozen in time and space, gracefully suspended in the air as if the otherwise ordinary landscape has begun to float away. You can see Konrad’s diverse body of work at her website: www.cokonrads.de

Scott Hazard

Jillian Barkley — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:22:42 +0000

American visual artist Scott Hazard doesn’t just want his audience to look deeper, he practically forces them to. By utilizing a unique combination of photography and sculpture, Hazard is able to draw the viewer’s attention to what would typically be the more-easily overlooked aspects of his images. His artist statement explains;

“As Walt Whitman wrote in the preface to Leaves of Grass, ‘The greatest poet dilates any thing that was before thought small…with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer.’ My work temporarily removes or alters the viewer’s existing frame of reference to provide an opportunity for a different presence of mind, a distilled frame of reference.”

View his entire body of work at scotthazard.net