Bootleg

Almost two and a half feet of it, and barely a pound.

A single length of driftwood, worn down to the hard center of itself, rising off a footed pine plinth with a slow bend near the top. Barnacles climb the shaft in a broken line — pale, ridged, still exactly where the sea set them, thickest where the water held it longest.

It reads as a staff. Something carried, leaned on, handed down. Nothing was carved or shaped to make it look that way; it came out of the inlets along the North Carolina coast already finished, found on shrimping and fishing runs. The wood was sealed in polyurethane to preserve it as it was, then hand-set upright on a pine base.

For an altar, or a room that holds one

Height is what this piece gives you. It draws the eye up the way a candle does, and it takes almost no surface to do it — seven inches square at the foot. It works standing alone at the end of an altar, on the floor beside a chair, or anywhere a room needs a vertical without needing more furniture.

Details

• Dimensions: 7" W × 7" D × 28½" H, including base
• Weight: 1 lb 2 oz
• Materials: Natural driftwood with intact barnacles, polyurethane sealed finish, hand-built footed pine base, stained
• Origin: The coastal inlets of North Carolina
• Permanently mounted — the sculpture does not lift off the base
• One of a kind — this piece will not be repeated

The name is only one side

Turn this piece and it becomes something else.

That is true of everything we make, and it is the reason none of these sculptures has a front. We name each one for what we saw first — the angle that stopped us. Rotate it a quarter turn and the figure you were looking at is gone, and a different one is standing there. Ridges become a face. A wing becomes a wave. A crowd becomes one body.

So the name is our reading, not an instruction. Set it whichever way it speaks to you, and turn it again when it stops. People who live with these pieces tend to move them a few times a year without quite deciding to.

Carved by water

Not one line in this wood was cut by a blade. Every groove, hollow, and ridge was worked slowly — by salt, by tide, by years in the water — along a coast that has fed and carried people for generations. We think of these as pieces already carved by hands older than ours and left on the shore to be found.

What we do is small by comparison. We find them, we preserve them as they are, and we give them a base to stand on so they can be seen. Sometimes two pieces are set together because they belong together — but the wood itself is never cut, shaped, stained, or painted. Nothing is corrected. The wood says what it already had to say.

Care

Dust with a dry, soft cloth and a light touch around the barnacles, which are original and fragile. Keep out of direct sunlight and away from moisture. For indoor display.