Over the past few weeks my focus has shifted to developing new projects for wowhaus, my public art and design collaboration with my wife, Ene Osteraas-Constable. Many of our projects have their origins as ‘social sculpture’, where we create structures and situations designed to bring people together in convivial exchange. Yesterday we introduced MIX, our […]
Category Archives: studio process
Bull Kelp Experiment 1
It is High Spring on the Sonoma Coast and I’m finding my interest in woven structures is shared by birds, whose nests are literally dropping from trees with the afternoon winds from an unseasonably high barometric pressure. My initial experiments with bull kelp were a success. Wrapped around a tapered round of driftwood, the material […]
The Jay Martin Chair
In summertime when I was a kid my family would make the annual pilgrimage to the Connecticut coast to visit my mother’s parents, who lived in a converted ‘pony barn’ a few hundred yards from the Long Island Sound. My grandfather was an accomplished woodworker, and their humble home was filled with furniture he had […]
Lessons from Samone
I had a tiny shop in our garage in the flatlands of North Oakland when Ene and I first moved to California in the early nineties after circuitous travels through West Africa, across the United States and into Alaska. I had been deeply inspired by working with the village menusiers of Togo, and was just […]
Bull Kelp at Salmon Creek Beach
Jig-Cam on the Elder Chair Production
Wooden chair frames traditionally have a bent back leg. The legs need to splay out towards the floor to carry the load back and keep the chair from tipping, and they need to splay out upwards to ease the sitter back to a comfortable angle of repose. Round stock is often steam bent to […]
Dairy Barn Chair
I discovered this chair in an abandoned dairy barn in Tomales, California, among artifacts from a formerly productive cattle ranch just down the coast in West Marin County. It is a good example of “maintenance equals improvement” in that the original rush-woven seat has been replaced by a woven leather seat improvised by the deceased […]