Working with Natural Forms offers reminders of mortality,
the chance to feel time-bound,
linked to the seasons,
these woods the
capillary action of water leaving wood

Leaving wood available for its next life.

shrinkage and expansion
trough and peak
co-equal partners in life

the fleshy sounds of wetness
the crisp sounds of dryness…

Working with Natural Forms helps develop
tolerance and forgiveness
the appreciation of approximation
the celebration of differences
the value of deformities

Working with Natural Forms is a chance to explore rhythms
magnify, modify, enhance common ones,
add new ones:
what are your rhythms?
you have a language before you know "grammar"

Each tool, each form, each wood
has an inherent sense of time, texture…

If objects have Soul… tools do too…
There is an inherent danger… often costing a drop of blood, a stitch or two

We’re hurt chastened and slowed down…
It hurts our sense of control, ambition.
It forces us to alter our plans…
Who can we blame…? Nobody!
Just be available to the delight and weariness of frustration and discovery
Working with Natural Forms is like developing night vision…
at first everything is quite Black…
then mirabile dictu… dimension, depth appear…
This happens when there is both a shift
in Light and Time and Space…

Working with Natural Forms is about Altered rhythms:
can you just be with the materials…
without needing to re-work them… quite yet….
The need to start re-working
is like the need to turn the light on,
to reestablish your sense of time.
Be Brave. See how long you can take the Altered State

Working with Natural Forms is about "never perfect enough"…
It makes you think and feel about
repaired, cobbled objects

Working with Natural Forms is a way to make the Sacred from the Ordinary…
arranging, ritualizing objects…

religio… means binding back, re-joining
It makes you think about joinery in a new way

My work has been about retrieval
Bringing back a lost furniture form
Bringing myself back to a balance
Using objects, chair-trees
to recall old stories which people already know…

but may not have heard in a long time

All art, poetry, dance does that…
it more or less evokes

Deep Memory, Mnemosyne