The Elders

It looks like several figures standing together. It is one piece of wood.

The tallest ridge runs the full height, straight up and slightly turned, the way a person stands when they have been standing a long while. Beside it and behind it the same piece breaks into shorter forms — one to the shoulder, one barely past the waist — all leaning the same direction. Walk around it and the count changes: three, then two, then something almost single again. Nothing was joined to make that happen. The water split this wood along its own grain and left a crowd behind.

The surface is worked to the bone. Deep vertical channels run the whole length in bands of dark and honey, more like carved bark than smooth driftwood, and none of it was cut. It came out of the coastal inlets of North Carolina on shrimping and fishing runs, exactly this way.

The wood is sealed in polyurethane and mounted upright on a slim metal rod above a hand-built pine base finished in a dark stain, standing twenty-five inches tall.

For an altar, or a room that holds one

This is a piece about company. Not a single figure keeping watch but a crowd of them, cut from one body — which is a different feeling to have in a room. It works at the head of an altar, on a floor beside a chair, or on a console where it has the height to be seen from across the space.

Details

• Dimensions: 13" W × 13¼" D × 25" H, including base
• Weight: 5 lb
• Materials: A single piece of natural driftwood sealed in polyurethane, metal mounting rod, 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, working down with the vertical channels. Keep out of direct sunlight and away from moisture. For indoor display.