The following text accompanies an installation I made as part of the NOMO Exhibition we’ve designed and curated as the culmination of our residency at Kohler Arts. Over the past few weeks I’ve made fictional, yet plausible sculptural elements that support the idea that surfing has origins on the Great Lakes. I will provide more detail soon about the NOMO Exhibition, but here’s a preview of my “Legend of Lumberjack Surfing” installation:

The Legend of Lumberjack Surfing

“There is a little known legend that surfing has early 19^th century origins on the Western shores of Lake Michigan, separate from its more ancient roots on the islands of the South Pacific.

When timber rafts were floated down Wisconsin’s rivers to be shipped to far off urban centers, large slabs of wood occasionally broke loose along the lake and washed ashore. Enterprising lumberjacks and boat-builders often rescued the timbers by drifting them offshore, standing atop them and paddling them to beachfront workshops, occasionally attaching sails to ease the journey. When the surf was heavy, the maritime lumberjacks beached the timbers by riding waves to shore, steering with a long wooden paddle. Over time, the activity of riding waves became an end in itself, and the ‘lumberjack surfers’ learned to shape the rough sawn planks for better performance in the waves.

By the early 20^th century, the ‘lumberjack surfers’ adapted wooden boards to ride on land by attaching crude wheels to their undersides, thus inventing an early form of the skateboard. Many of these ‘trapper’s skateboards’ were made from stretchers originally used to tan wolf hides. By the middle of the 20^th century, experimental skateboards were commonly made from discarded, wooden alpine and water skis, which were rapidly being replaced by fiberglass.”

Another part of the NOMO Exhibition at Kohler Arts features longboard skate graphics I designed collaboratively, like the Northern Pike Longboard (above) drawn by Mary Whitehall and Zak Worth. The burnt/etched deck is part of a series depicting fish native to Lake Michigan

Tagged: appropriate technology, bike culture, contemporary art, craft philosophy, deep craft, DIY, furniture design, green design, innovation, kohler arts, longboard, public art, scott Constable, skateboard, slow design, surfing, sustainability, tall tale, traditional craft, vernacular architecture, woodworking, wowhaus

I made these lightweight panniers from salvaged materials for my Dahon folding bike

After our cross-country trek and a long overdue visit with family on the East Coast, Ene and I arrived in Sheboygan late last week for the final three weeks of our residency at Kohler Arts. We’ve settled into the guest cottage at the James Tellen Sculpture Garden, about 6 miles south of the town center, and a short walk to the sandy shores of Lake Michigan.

As we curate our NOMO exhibition and lay the groundwork for the NOMO EXPO, I’ve been commuting to town on my trusty Dahon folding bike. Over the weekend, I made a set of panniers when we hosted a public ‘Bike Bling’ workshop at the Kohler Art Center’s ARTery. The panniers consist of a lashed wooden frame, zip-tied to my rack, and saddle bags made from a recycled exterior banner, with duct-taped seams. While my panniers are intended to be temporary, they are surprisingly strong and lightweight, and I’m hoping the prototype will be improved upon by others during the EXPO.

To read more about our residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, please click here and scroll down.

Tagged: appropriate technology, bike culture, contemporary art, craft, deep craft, DIY, green design, innovation, panniers, public art, scott Constable, wowhaus

sometimes I make up songs during a long walk

There is no better design tool than a good long walk. It may not always lead to creative breakthroughs, but does reliably clear the noggin and put things in perspective. Before I begin to think about a particular project during a walk, I usually find myself simply getting into the cadence and breathing of walking, sometimes making up phrases and melodies to help me focus. Whether or not I make progress with the project at hand, I always return to the studio feeling relaxed and optimistic, eager to field the inevitable challenges of the day.

Tagged: craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, scott Constable, woodworking

I made my ‘indoor sawhorses’ to double as a table base

In all my years working with wood I’ve never felt the need to own or build a proper workbench. For a long time, I simply lacked the dedicated space and opted instead for working mostly outside, preferring to stage my work on sawhorses and collapsible building jigs tailored to a particular use. The scraps from one project would have an afterlife as the rudimentary furnishings to make the next. During the rainy season, projects would occasionally migrate indoors, so I made sawhorses as though they were furniture (pictured above). The prolonged lack of a dedicated bench opened up my thinking to the kinds of projects I would consider taking on, and I learned how limitations can be liberating.

To me, there’s also something inherently a little sad about a workbench. Like a well-intended New Year’s resolution, a workbench tends to be over-built and under-used, its function shifting too easily from utility to burden. Sawhorses, on the other hand, take up very little space, and both their construction and use are perpetually open to interpretation. Now that I have more space than I ever imagined, I still opt for sawhorses over workbench, a strategy more in keeping with the ever-fluctuating scope and scale of my projects.

Here are some ideal characteristics of good sawhorses:

• Lightweight
• Strong enough to stand on
• Stacking
• Flexible enough to conform to uneven surfaces
• Able to live outdoors for extended periods
• Constructed of recycled or scrap lumber

However you plan to use it, the most important feature of a good sawhorse is that it be owner-built; designing and making a sawhorse is the perfect, first furniture project.

Tagged: craft philosophy, deep craft, DIY, furniture design, sawhorse, scott Constable, woodworking

I feel like Mr Hulot when I need to transition from studio craft to a business mode.

In craft work, quality is the result of acting in a way to increase the likelihood of desired outcomes. A maker is an active agent in each step of the process of bringing something into being, where every step is equally vital to the whole. Planning happens in real time and outcomes are continually adjusted and refined in a kind of feedback loop of sensory data, in response to predetermined criteria- a comfortable chair that lasts a lifetime and is as easy on the eye as it is on the environment, for example.

As my studio practice continues to thrive, my focus has shifted to managing multiple projects in a range of media with overlapping time frames. I’m finding a direct correlation between the management of craft and the craft of management, and have been enjoying applying some of the tenets I’ve distilled on these pages over the past few years, to the practice of business.

Tagged: business, craft, craft philosophy, deep craft, innovation, management, scott Constable, woodworking

I’ve always liked to use chalk when roughing things out on wood. Lately I’ve taken to scouring the beaches during negative low tides in search of seashells for making my marks. The Pacific Razor Clam is ideal, softer than the East Coast equivalent, but hard enough to make a clean scratch, and loaded with calcium carbonate to leave a crisp white line.

Tagged: aesthetics, california coast, deep craft, green design, scott Constable, sonoma coast, sustainability, traditional craft, woodworking

I can relate to the work style of a 1930’s American cabinet shop (public domain)

After over a year of design development with the architect and client, selecting logs of deodar cedar and having them custom milled and cured to outfit the interior of a new guest house down the coast, I’m regaining perspective on my original thinking behind how I approached the project: Shuffling the Tree.

As my cabinets, doors and built-in furnishings take shape, each part of the tree finds its corresponding use in built form, the planks having been painstakingly graded for grain character, color and structural integrity. The process of hand sorting thousands of board feet of air-dried, rough sawn lumber has been slower than I had anticipated, but well worth the effort, and I’m feeling less overwhelmed as I convert my neatly stickered piles into glowing wooden furnishings. I’m taking extra pains not to use any laminated sheet materials, constructing all casework in solid stock.

I’ve found that designing and building this way automatically bestows a building with a feeling of belonging-ness, as though the house stands in honor of the tree it displaced. When the material is locally sourced from the waste stream, diverted from horticultural salvage that might otherwise be burned as firewood, the building’s interior has the added benefit of reducing carbon emissions to the atmosphere. I call my approach ‘bioregional vernacular’, and I’m glad for the opportunity to test its scalability.

cabinets of deodar cedar w/face frames, stacked up while I prepare doors and drawers

To follow my progress on designing and building the guest house interior, please click here and scroll down.

Tagged: craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, scott Constable, slow design, sustainability, traditional craft, vernacular architecture, woodworking