[peaceful music]
- I have a very strong feeling for everything that grows,
but I'm most in awe of trees.
I refer to them as the quintessential material.
Well, it's wood, to begin with.
They contain fire.
They transpire air.
They transform water into water vapor
and they're rooted in the earth.
So they really embody the five elements.
And I think that's why I find them so endlessly inspiring.
[grinder whining]
The natural form has a lot of visual cues of its own.
It has its own structure, its own cellular structure.
I would be a fool to not work with it
because I mean, all woodworkers know,
you have to pay attention to grain,
but there's the nature of the piece,
and then there's my little will working on it.
I don't wanna exist in some kind of creative vacuum
where it's just me and the piece and nothing else matters,
so I do think about the viewer.
I do try very hard to engage and spark their imagination,
to have their eye look into the piece, to draw them in.
The cultural context is tremendously important,
and I'm leaving a little archive.
It's a record of a time and a person and a story
that frankly, isn't told that much by women in wood.
[peaceful uplifting music]
We're in the great northern Appalachian forest complex
that runs all along the Eastern Seaboard.
The woods that grow around here are generally maple,
and that could be sugar maple, but it could also be red maple.
Cherry, which is wild cherry, walnut, and butternut,
although butternut is disappearing.
Yellow birch, white birch, and basswood.
There's some very nice logic of having a tree.
It has leaves, you cut it down, you cut it into wood,
you turn it, you do all this stuff to it.
And then for me, it's almost
like returning the leaves to the wood.
So what I might do here is use that as the mid rib
of the leaf, let's say an oak leaf that has lobes,
and I would lay out the lobes like that.
In a case like this, I would use this air tool.
It's called a pencil grinder, turns very fast.
I'd use it to rough out this form
to create the mass of the form.
But when I'm close to where I want it be,
I really love an Exacto knife
and a hundred pack of replacement blades.
[plucky strings music]
I began carving in high school.
I had a wonderful teacher named Mrs. Blake.
She showed us how to make frescoes on plaster.
There was a kiln, we used clay.
It was an incredibly wonderful program.
And at one point, she gave us linoleum blocks
and the carving tools to make block prints.
And I realized that I really loved carving.
Mrs. Blake gave me my first set of carving tools.
I still have them.
I still use them.
I think along the way, there were many, many people
who I've found or who have found me
who have just supported me tremendously.
Foremost of whom would be David.
[chainsaw whirring]
- David: It's a lot like cutting jewels
because even though you have a sense
of what's on the inside,
you don't really know until you cut into it
and then you see what you've got.
We'll bring the tractor around, 'cause these are obviously
way too big to move any other way.
We'll take them piece by piece and put them
in our lower wood drying shed.
And I won't use these for four or five years.
So I have to keep that far ahead.
Some people will find something that they love to do
and they'll go anywhere to do that thing.
And other people find a place that they wanna be
and then figure out what they have to do to stay there.
And for Michelle and me, it was the latter.
The longer we stayed here, the deeper that understanding
of the topography and of the botany of the area,
the nature of the trees around here and their life cycles
and their behaviors, their characteristics
became an important aspect of our experience of wood
and our experience of working wood.
The saw mills want straight trees that they can saw out
for two by fours and for flooring and things like that.
But what Michelle and I use are the things
that are junk to the industry.
There might be a burl up in a yellow birch tree.
Nobody wants that.
- Michelle: A burl is a growth on a tree
that's often caused at the site of a wound of some sort.
It doesn't really hurt it.
It just grows along with the tree,
but it does cause the grain, instead of growing straight,
to start growing irregularly.
So these very concentric
and eccentric grain patterns develop.
This piece also has discoloration from water damage.
It has these little black lines
referred to as spalting that are mineral deposits.
There's a lot going on.
This tree had a lot of stuff happening to it.
I like working with burl because it has
a lot of personality to begin with.
In a sense, I have two different ways of working,
one where I'll choose a material that has a lot of personality.
[quirky upbeat music]
Then I'm having a bit of a dialogue with it and trying
to suit the form to suit the reality of the material.
But occasionally, I wanna have my own way with a form.
And that's when I'll choose a very bland piece of wood,
like basswood, that doesn't talk back at all.
Taking one's cues from the physiology of the wood
as you find it, lot of it is getting out of your own way.
You know, turning me down and letting that wood speak
a little bit more loudly, then suddenly,
that's when I start realizing that the wood has a lot to say
and that I'm just translating it almost.
Sometimes people say to me, "You must be so patient.
"How do you do it?
"You're spending days in your shop,
looking down at this piece."
That comes extremely naturally to me.
It hearkens back to my hands' first training,
drawing with a pencil and sewing.
My mother was a great seamstress and taught me
and all of my sisters how to sew.
We had to master just the needle and thread
and make even, small, perfect stitches.
That was very important training for my eye and my hand.
And also that inner focus that you need
to just do repetitive work and do it well.
My father was a tool and die maker.
He was building cabinets
and when it got time to buy hardware,
he looked at all the hardware and thought,
"This is all crap.
"There's no way I'm gonna buy this.
I'm gonna make my own hardware."
So he put the lathe together.
[lathe whirring] [wood cutting]
Because it was made to turn metal,
there's all kinds of calibrations on here,
so it's really made for fairly high precision work.
I'm not in charge of holding that tool.
The tool holder holds it.
All I have to do is turn these two handles.
It's like using an Etch A Sketch.
It took me a while to figure out how to do both
at the same time, but it is unusual.
It's not a wood lathe.
And in a way, I'm not a turner's turner.
- David: Michelle's ability to visualize
a three-dimensional form in a solid mass of wood
is astounding to me.
I can't understand how she can do that.
How she can take a... like "Reunion Bowl."
She can carve this large bowl
that's also attached to five spoons,
all a single piece of wood.
Or the brocaded pillow with a wooden bowl
stuck down into it, but is a single piece of wood.
[quirky music]
- Michelle: "Ondines," my father comes into that piece
because that is kind of a highly engineered piece.
The central piece was that canteen form.
And then I turned two cherry burl bowl forms
as a sort of lattice and attached them.
Meanwhile, in the interior of that cherry vase,
I carved two mermaids.
I didn't carve them separately and then put them back in;
I carved them within that center mass.
They're looking at each other,
they're reaching around each other.
It's a very intimate piece.
And I really do acknowledge my father
and his work and his mind.
I inherited some aspect of his mind, which is that ability
to see a three-dimensional form in your mind,
rotate it in your mind, and then work on it.
- For her, it's like she's trying to figure out a problem.
Once she's figured that problem out,
she'll do a couple, say, "Okay, I've got that."
And then she goes on to find the next problem.
She's always been a tireless explorer.
[bright music]
- I consider this piece to be a bit of a self-portrait.
I made it at a time when I was feeling somewhat constrained.
You know, I guess in any field,
you get known for doing certain work
and there's pressure to continue doing that work.
And sometimes a good way to work through those conflicts
is through the work.
This particular book was carved from one piece of wood.
The covers, I used the wood burning tool
to get this very dark color.
For the pages, after carving them,
I used wood bleach.
It bleaches the color out of the wood
and makes it have sort of a sueded, papery texture.
It's just a perfect surface for drawing on
with the wood burning tool as well.
This book at the bottom, you look at the spine,
you can see it says, Gulliver's Travels,
so giving a nod to the original.
This piece was strangely fun to make, though.
There's something about tying something up like that,
that's, I don't know, strangely satisfying.
[bright music]
When I came up here to go to Marlboro College in 1969
when I was 17, I remember driving up the hill
and just feeling, like in my chest, I thought,
"Ah, I am home."
It was something about the mountains,
about the forests, and even about the winter.
Here especially, I think people think
in terms of their homesteads.
They use that word homestead and it means it's the place,
it's a locus, not where you just go to live and sleep;
it's a locus of economic activity.
And many people here make their living
in one way or another off the land upon which they live.
And I think that back-to-the-land movement
was just this notion that you could be
connected in that way.
And I feel like it's where humans are most satisfied.
[soft folk music]