Building larger furniture and furniture-like objects from small, rough, discarded bits of wood, I sketch pieces together. There’s intensity and an odd sense of worth in something that has been cobbled together from smaller parts. I don’t hide the connections, and I leave traces of attempts and failures to make something work—an odd map of the logic and processes used to assemble the piece.
These pieces are often fragile-looking, precariously balanced on spindly legs or bases that rock. Each performs some odd function, opening the door on one opens the umbrella-like structure sprouting from the top of another. The system of pulleys and rope that makes the action possible is as cobbled together as the piece itself, and seems destined to fail, as the whole thing seems destined to collapse. They are metaphors for our relationships with one another. The imperfect edge of one piece fitting perfectly against the imperfect edge of another, pieces whose function suggest protection but offer no real security, and everything seemingly on the verge of collapse, but never quite collapsing. I am tapping into the delight that comes from seeing something work that shouldn’t, the hope that comes from a thing endlessly repaired, no matter how many times it has broken, and the beauty in something textured with imperfections and then worn smooth through use.
Katie Hudnall is a woodworker, artist, and educator living in Madison, WI, where she runs the Woodworking and Furniture program at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a BFA in Sculpture from the Corcoran College of Art, and an MFA in Woodworking and Furniture Design from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Hudnall is curious about the aliveness of things and about how to make furniture as strange and dynamic as drawings. She is happiest in a wood shop thinking with her hands.
