My wooden objects are heavy. I make them heavy on purpose—not as a metaphor, exactly, but because it seems important that something should be difficult to carry. In a world where almost everything is designed to be light, fast, and easily replaced, I find myself compelled to make things that resist those qualities. These objects do not want to be moved. They are awkward, uncooperative, and unapologetically material. They don’t try to explain themselves, and neither, increasingly, do I.

I make them from wood. I saw, carve, sand, wax. These are humble activities, neither intellectual nor especially contemporary, and they have a faint smell of the workshop about them—of sawdust and worn-out trousers. Sometimes I imagine someone watching me work and mistaking what I do for something spiritual or pure. It isn’t. I work because I don’t know what else to do with my hands, and because objects—dumb, stubborn objects—seem to offer a kind of quiet companionship I no longer find in ideas.

The forms tend to slump or sink. They don’t aspire to anything. Some are half-made; some look like they’re in the process of giving up. I’ve learned not to see this as failure. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that the appearance of collapse is one of the few honest gestures a sculpture can make now. Everything else feels like performance.

The relationship between me and the object is not collaborative, exactly. It is more like a negotiation between two introverts at a party. I ask the wood to become something. It doesn’t answer. I insist. It resists. Eventually, we reach a compromise—an asymmetrical form that neither of us particularly likes, but which we both agree not to destroy. This is what I call a finished work.

The objects are now here. They exist. They persist. They outlast the thoughts I had while making them, which were contradictory anyway. In the end, what I want is simple: to make something solid in a world that increasingly isn’t. Not meaningful, not symbolic—just solid. Something to stub your toe on in the dark. Something that won’t follow you, won’t listen to you, won’t disappear when you look away.