Tell us about your practice and how you came to making?

I'm a designer and woodworker based in Brooklyn, and my practice sits somewhere between sculpture and furniture — functional objects approached as spatial compositions, where volume, texture, and the way a body encounters a piece all matter as much as whether it holds weight.

My relationship with wood as a material started long before art school. When I was young my mom and I would raid the cut-off pile at the lumber yard for our wood stove. I always asked to come along because I loved the smell. I remember sanding one piece obsessively — trying to get it as smooth as possible — I loved the texture and smell. That sensory pull never went away.

I studied sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Yale Norfolk, then spent years assisting sculptors and woodworkers before training formally at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. Furniture became a natural evolution of sculpture because it let me make objects people live with, not just observe. I'm interested in work that holds both presence and utility — things that are complete because they're used.

Do you have a ritual when it comes to making/designing work? What’s your process getting from the ideation stage to a completed furniture piece?

My process almost always begins with geometry. I sketch forms that feel structural and precise, and then I ask how I can introduce softness — through weaving, curvature, pattern, or surface manipulation. I'm drawn to the moment where something rigid begins to feel fluid.

From there, I move quickly into prototyping. I don't believe in solving everything on paper. Wood reveals itself in the process. I often learn what a piece wants to be by physically pushing the material and seeing how it responds.

There's also a lot of revision. I'll build something, live with it in the studio, tweak proportions, change the density of a weave, adjust a reveal by a fraction of an inch. Precision matters, but so does intuition. The two are always in conversation.

You have a background in sculpture. When did you start to move into woodworking, and how does your background in sculpture influence your work now?

I moved into woodworking after school because I wanted to build objects that had consequence in everyday life — things that earned their place in a room by being used.

Sculpture trained me to think about negative space, weight, tension, and balance. That training still underpins everything I do. Even when I'm building a bench or a console, I'm thinking about silhouette, shadow, and how light interacts with surface texture.

Woodworking added another layer: constraint. Joinery, structure, durability — those are real demands that keep the work honest. I love the tension between expressive form and structural logic. It's what makes furniture more interesting to me than sculpture alone.

There is play with form, color and pattern in your work. Where do you draw inspiration from?

I'm deeply inspired by the negative space that architecture produces — not the buildings themselves but the voids they create, the shadows between forms, the gaps that give everything else room to breathe. I'm drawn to work that has to operate within rules, because constraints are generative. They force decisions.

For me, sculpture alone has never felt complete. A piece needs a function to be whole. So I work within those formal restrictions — structure, joinery, durability — and try to make something that appears sculptural while also functioning. That tension is where the interesting stuff lives.

What I find most exciting is when materials that could easily fight each other find harmony instead. Design combinations can feel genuinely adversarial — two forms or materials that just won't cooperate. When you finally get them to work together, when the adversarial becomes harmonious, that's what I'm looking for.

You use coopering, fluting, and weaving to add texture to your pieces, what draws you to a particular method of making for each piece? How do you pull the texture out of the material?

Each method begins with structure, not decoration.

Coopering is inherently geometric — a series of angled staves forming a curve. I love that it reveals its own construction. You can see the math in it. It's a technique rooted in utility, barrel-making, but when applied to furniture it becomes sculptural without trying to be.

Weaving introduces tension and compression. It softens wood by juxtaposing it with fiber — two materials that have no obvious reason to go together, which is exactly why I love combining them.

Fluting manipulates light. It turns a flat surface into something animated through shadow.

I don't apply texture decoratively. I look for processes that amplify what the material already wants to do — grain, tension, curvature — and try to make those forces visible rather than hiding them.

Is there a method, or style of woodworking or joinery that you find to be particularly enticing? If so, why?

I'm endlessly drawn to coopering because it feels both ancient and mathematical. It's a technique with deep utilitarian roots that becomes something else entirely when you apply it to furniture. The geometry is right there on the surface — you can read exactly how the form was made — and I find that honesty really compelling.

I'm also fascinated by joinery that disappears. When something structurally complex feels completely seamless, that restraint is its own kind of power.

Peg Woodworking is an all female-run company, and you’re also involved in community outreach to expose women and under-resourced communities to woodworking. How has that shaped the way you approach and grow your practice?

It's central to my practice, not peripheral to it.

Woodworking spaces are still largely male-dominated. I was one of the only woman in my furniture program, and the only woman in every group shop I've ever worked in. Building a female-run studio wasn't just a logistical choice — it was a cultural one. It changes how we collaborate, how we problem-solve, how we mentor each other.

Community outreach matters for the same reason. Teaching young women and under-resourced communities woodworking isn't just about skills. It's about access — to tools, to confidence, to economic opportunity. Its difficult to exist in spaces that weren't designed for you. Passing on what I know feels like the most direct way to change that.

Is there anything you’ve dreamed of making, but haven’t yet?

I would love to build something architectural at scale — a woven facade, a large suspended installation, a permanent public work where coopering and weaving operate structurally, not just decoratively. I want to push these techniques beyond furniture and into space.

But honestly, what I'm dreaming about right now is closer to home: I want to make work that's lighter. Not smaller — lighter in mood. My forms have always been serious, rigorous, precise. I want to bring more color, more material experimentation, more genuine play into the studio. Design doesn't have to be severe to be good. I think I've known that for a long time, but I'm only now letting myself act on it.

What's next for you?

This show, Play Haus, feels genuinely aligned with where I am right now — and that's not something I take for granted. I want to pull in new materials, loosen my grip on the serious, and get back to the part of making that feels like discovery rather than production.

My studio has been a safe place for me so many times — through hard seasons, through big life changes. I want the work itself to start reflecting that. More joy. More color. More of the feeling I had as a kid sanding a piece of wood at the lumber yard just because it felt good to do it.

The technical ambitions are still there — lighting, larger scale, architectural applications. But the next collection starts with play. That feels right.