Curious Beast

Four legs, a long nose, and somewhere to be.

It is an animal. Nobody has to be told that. There is a heavy shoulder, a head dropped low like it has caught a scent, and a snout running out to a fine point — and every bit of it is exactly how the wood came out of the water. Not carved. Not shaped. Found.

What it is, exactly, is up to you. People see an anteater, a boar, a hound on a trail, something from a story nobody wrote down. It refuses to settle, which is how it got its name.

The wood is naturally this dark, and the polyurethane brings up a wet shine across the whole body, so it looks like it just came up out of the shallows. It came from the coastal inlets of North Carolina, found on shrimping and fishing runs, and stands on its own legs on a hand-built pine base finished in a dark stain.

Details

• Dimensions: 8¼" W × 5½" D × 6½" H, including base
• Weight: 1 lb 9 oz
• Materials: Natural driftwood sealed in polyurethane, hand-built stained pine base
• 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 go carefully around the snout and legs — they are the thinnest parts of the piece. Keep out of direct sunlight and away from moisture. For indoor display.