One of eight vaka sails into the harbor of San Francisco’s Treasure Island Last week I attended the welcoming ceremony for a fleet of vaka moana that had just crossed the Pacific from New Zealand, where the eight craft were built. Using traditional sailing rigs supplemented by solar-powered electric motors, the craft and crew made […]
Tag Archives: appropriate technology
Hancock Shaker Village
I especially love the simple tools the Shakers made, like this dust pan. We took a jog off course on our recent East Coast college tour to visit the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass. This was my first visit, though I made frequent excursions to the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, NY when I […]
Micro-Expedition, Sessions 8 and 9
Jack and Willey broke out the hand planes to joint a long stringer of Sitka spruce The boats are shaping up and the students are getting fired up for our journey next month. Here’s a little gallery from the past two weeks of Micro-Expedition, the Atelier Studio I am teaching this semester at CCA as […]
Micro-Expedition, Session 2
I made a 1/4 scale model of the ‘surfboat’ I’ve been studying to use as inspiration for the class. The design represents a type of hull that performs well and is easy to build, requiring no ‘building jig’. The frame for the boat is built off of the main ‘deck batten’, laid upside down on […]
Micro-Expedition, Session 1
I will be simultaneously publishing new content on my Micro-Expedition course on my new CCA weblog, which you can follow by clicking here. I’m excited to be teaching the Atelier Studio for CCA’s Furniture Program this semester. Russell Baldon invited me to be this year’s Wornick Visiting Professor, and I’ve designed a course I’m calling […]
The Legend of Lumberjack Surfing
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 […]
NOMO Developments
We rode in the 4th of July parade to promote the NOMO concept Our first week back at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center was action packed as we laid the groundwork for the NOMO EXPO. A part of our project as artists in residence is simply to promote the ‘NOMO’ concept, a word/logo we […]