Paradise Bird

It doesn’t take long to see the bird.

A long tail sweeping back. A breast lifted. A head turned like it just caught something on the wind. None of it was carved — the water did all of it.

This piece came out of the inlets along the North Carolina coast, pulled from the water on shrimping runs. The pale rings across its back are barnacles, still sitting where the sea left them. They are the record of how long it drifted before it came ashore.

The wood was sealed in polyurethane, then raised on wood dowels above a hand-built pine base, stained so it reads as a bird in flight rather than a bird at rest. No metal anywhere in the piece — wood holding wood.

Details

• Dimensions: 15¾" W × 4" D × 11¾" H, including base
• Materials: Natural driftwood with intact barnacles, polyurethane sealed finish, wood dowel mounts, hand-built pine base, dark stained
• Origin: The inlets and coastal waters 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.