Broken Line Studio: Initial Public Offering

Broken Line #1, wood, 8" x 9" x 1.25", 2009

BrokenLineStudio does not have a single moment, point or place of genesis. Rather, it has grown out of my own searching, reflection, creativity and most importantly out of my interactions with the people who are dearest to me. I have been building objects with wood for a couple of years now and they have taken many forms. Furniture dominated the first two years while I was employed at Walker Creek Furniture in Essex, MA. Recently, mosaics have taken the center stage.

I began building mosaics as table tops and they were received with a positive reaction from nearly every audience. This reaction encouraged me to continue making mosaics and I began creating them as objects rather than functional pieces of furniture. As I progressed, there was a hesitation in me that challenged these mosaics and asked "Well, nice image, nice object, but what does it mean?"

There are many layers of meaning in a piece of wood. First and foremost, it is itself. Wood. Tree. Structure. Purpose. All these things combine into a history, whether we consider a sapling in it's first year or a 12 inch beam cut for a house in the 17th century, itself already a century old. When wood is touched by the hand of man, it becomes a player in a history much longer than its own life or the life of one who touches it. And as these histories collide and compound upon one another, wood, a medium, passes through my hands and I am offered the opportunity to tell a chapter in this (hi)story.

But I am a man. How do my wooden objects bear witness to a human narrative?

My father called me on the phone last fall and he told me a story about walking in the woods. This is what I wrote in my journal after I hung up the phone:
Today I spoke with my father, yes, my earthly one. What he told me was this, that he'd had a revelation about my work. He spoke of my use of lines, ceasing and restarting again elsewhere but perhaps at an odd angle; something that follows from the first line but also deviates. It changes in its continuity. And he said that this was like man coming to know God. We get glimpses here then there at another angle and only after years are we able to construct it all into a cohesive image, if we are ever able to.

With this in mind I began the BrokenLine Series.