Enduring Materiality

• The post discusses the maker's deep reverence for trees, describing them as symbols of wisdom and respect for their longevity and endurance.
• The author draws a parallel between the intricate patterns of wood grain and the unique lines of human palms, emphasizing their shared ability to tell a story over time.
• The responsibility of the maker is highlighted, stressing the importance of cherishing everyday objects like furniture and seeing them as part of a larger, historical context.
• Rather than giving materials a "second life," the maker views their role as enabling relationships between people and objects, letting the material retain and share its wisdom.
• The blog concludes by stating the belief that material forms, like wood, can teach us something meaningful about ourselves and the world.
  
  

Ogun
Edward Kamau Braithwaite

My uncle made chairs, tables, balanced doors on, dug out
coffins, smoothing the white wood out

with plane and quick sandpaper until     
it shone like his short-sighted glasses. 

The knuckles of his hands were sil-    
vered knobs of nails hit, hurt and flat-     

tened out with blast of heavy hammer.  He was knock-knee’d, flat-     
footed and his clip clop sandals slapped across the concrete

flooring of his little shop where canefield mulemen and a fleet 
of Bedford lorry drivers dropped in to scratch themselves and talk.     

There was no shock of wood, no beam    
of light mahogany his saw teeth couldn’t handle.    

When shaping squares for locks, a key hole    
care tapped rat tat tat upon the handle 

of his humpbacked chisel.  Cold 
world of wood caught fire as he whittled: rectangle     

window frames, the intersecting x of fold-     
ing chairs, triangle     

trellises, the donkey 
box-cart in its squeaking square.       

But he was poor and most days he was hungry.     
Imported cabinets with mirrors, formica table     

tops, spine-curving chairs made up of tubes, with hollow     
steel-like bird bones that sat on rubber ploughs, 

thin beds, stretched not on boards, but blue high-tensioned cables, 
were what the world preferred.    

And yet he had a block of wood that would have baffled them.    
With knife and gimlet care he worked away at this on Sundays,     

explored its knotted hurts, cutting his way 
along its yellow whorls until his hands could feel   

how it had swelled and shivered, breathing air,     
its weathered green burning to rings of time,

its contoured grain still tuned to roots and water.
And as he cut, he heard the creak of forests:

green lizard faces gulped, grey memories with moth 
eyes watched him from their shadows, soft

liquid tendrils leaked among the flowers
and a black rigid thunder he had never heard within his hammer

came stomping up the trunks. And as he worked within his shattered 
Sunday shop, the wood took shape: dry shuttered 

eyes, slack anciently everted lips, flat
ruined face, eaten by pox, ravaged by rat

and woodworn, dry cistern mouth, cracked
gullet crying for the desert, the heavy black

enduring jaw; lost pain, lost iron;
emerging woodwork image of his anger. 




Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB (/kəˈmaʊ ˈbræθweɪt/; 11 May 1930 – 4 February 2020),[1] was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon.[2] Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University,[2] Brathwaite was the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.

I want to write here a bit about materiality. About the responsibility of the maker when working with material like wood. I don’t believe in God. But if there was some sort of all-knowing power out there that I unconditionally respect and revere, it’d be trees. There is no better allegory for wisdom than a generations-old oak tree offering respite to passers-by. In the bark, the pokey leaves, the knurled roots, the immovable trunk. If an oak tree tells me to do something, I’m going do it no questions asked.

Saying that trees are wise is by no means a new or revolutionary thing to say. I’m not interested in being new or revolutionary. I do think though that a certain differential reverence for wood and trees is worthwhile. There’s nothing that says “I’ve lived through more than you can imagine” than a plank of old growth maple with hundreds of skinny and dense growth rings, with tight pearlescent stretch marks running orthogonally to the grain. Nothing makes me feel more obsolete, unimportant, and miniscule compared to looking at that plank of maple, and imagining the forest that it came from. 

Sometimes when I’m bored, I stare at my palm. Don’t knock it until you try it. The first minute can be a bit boring, but if you are able to get into a groove, your palm becomes an entire world, a topographical labrynth of texture and color. Your palms tell the story of you, and no one else. When the problems of today feel overwhelming, your palms can be a reminder that, for hundreds of thousands of years, people like you have been staring at their palms. For some reason that’s calming for me.

I hope I don’t really have to draw the connection between wood grain and your palm prints. Oops.

I have strong beliefs about the things we interact with on a daily basis. As a self-proclaimed furniture designer, I find it somewhat necessary to generate a values-driven system that defines why I make and what I care about. I will begin to textually define those beliefs for myself and for you here, particularly as it relates to wood and palms.
The tools we engage with to facilitate our daily lives should not be taken for granted. They should serve as reminders to be grateful, happy, and comfortable. They should place us in a larger context of humanity and history. 

My primary goal as a maker is to use material to provide function to a user. My secondary goal as a maker is to provide an opportunity for a user to develop a meaningful and guiding relationship with an object. 
Furniture and home goods are to be cherished. To be taken care of. To be passed down. The memories they hold from before their interactions with said user should be celebrated through their materiality. Evidence of use should be nurtured and celebrated, not hidden. 

I don’t believe that as a maker, I am giving a second life to a material that once had a first life. Instead I believe that as a maker, I am giving a person an opportunity to develop a lasting relationship with material, and giving that material an opportunity to continue to offer wisdom through it’s existence. As wood grows from seedling to tree to lumber to chair, the energy and lifeforce imbued into every element of that being is maintained. The physical and emotional footprint that the material takes up is crafted from its physical form and surface materiality. As a maker, my goal is to allow that form and surface to teach us something about ourselves and the world around us.