For millennia, humans have reimagined the possibilities of wood. Used to produce heat, provide shelter, transcribe language, cultivate food, and visualize the divine, wood has played a vital role in human history. To this day, it still accompanies each person from cradle to grave. This lasting connection led the architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright to describe wood as the “most humanly intimate of all materials.”
Although wood has maintained its functional significance over time, the art and craft of woodworking have fluctuated in value and popularity. In the world of fine art, works made with wood were historically placed in the category of “craft,” which was seen as inferior, thanks to outdated material hierarchies that also marginalized ceramic, glass, and textile.
Fortunately, this all has started to change. Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a resurgence of woodworking in contemporary art, driven by a confluence of factors. As the art world has made more efforts to recognize women and indigenous artists, woodworking, along with craft more generally, has received more attention. With increased ecological awareness and a renewed appreciation for craftsmanship, artists are exploring innovative ways to blend traditional techniques with digital technology. This is reflected in a burst of exciting new shows that focus on works made of wood, proving that this classic material can tell contemporary stories.
Monstera , 2025
Raul De Lara
The Fine Arts Work Center
Untitled, 2025
Shana Hoehn
Make Room
Art’s woodworking forebears
The first indication of the wood renaissance that we’re seeing today might be traced back to the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2013 exhibition in New York, “Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft and Design.” This show not only provided an overview of the state of contemporary woodmaking, but also identified the artists who were redefining the material’s functional, spiritual, and artistic potential, like Ursula von Rydingsvard, Wendell Castle, and Martin Puryear.
These influential artists both paved the way for the next generation of wood sculptors and created opportunities for underrecognized craft-based artists to enter fine art spaces. It is now commonplace for carvers to have blue-chip gallery representation, like American sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, whose remarkable exhibition, “Proximity,” was held at Karma New York earlier this year.
Déesse, 2024
Dominique Zinkpè
Southern Guild
“Much has been made of the increasing digitalization of work and leisure pushing people to pursue hands-on skills and activities, but it’s true, we’ve seen it across all levels of the art world,” explained Jennifer-Navva Milliken, the executive director and chief curator of the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. “People of all ages are starting to understand the value in knowing how inanimate objects work and being able to build and repair them.” She also highlighted the aesthetic appeal of wood, as well as its narrative and conceptual promise.
How artists use wood to tell stories
One such artist exploring wood’s narrative potential is the self-taught Beninese sculptor Dominique Zinkpè. “Wood, for me, is not just a material,” Zinkpè said in an interview with Artsy. “It is a vessel of memory, spirit, and presence.” He honors the material’s profound symbolic and spiritual significance through his towering totemic sculptures composed from hundreds of miniature Ibeji dolls, twin figures central to Yoruba beliefs. Each miniature doll statuette is individually carved and assembled in rows along reclaimed wooden frames. The vibrantly painted forms illustrate the interconnection between the self and society, the singular and collective.
The sculptures featured in his exhibition, “Ejire (Double Rhyme),” at Southern Guild’s Cape Town location earlier this year, are both figurative and abstract. In Powerful Woman (2024), rows and rows of white-painted statuettes sit atop a carved bust of a woman, like an exquisite headpiece. The dolls form a rippling ladder in Ascension (2024), with two carved hands extending from the top. Another work, Déesse (2024), features a cobalt blue column that forks into two shorter extensions. Zinkpè attributes the animated quality of these works to the warmth and tactile intimacy of his material. “When I work with wood, I feel that I am not just creating a form,” he said. “I am extending its life and giving it a new story to tell.”
Raul De Lara, a Mexico-born artist now based in Brooklyn, also approaches woodworking as a form of storytelling inspired by devotional objects. In particular, he is inspired by the miniature Catholic icons that can be found in local markets across Mexico. “It’s like magic,” said De Lara. “At some point in the whittling process, a tree branch is turned into a holy saint.” Today, he transforms everyday American household objects, like dining chairs and houseplants, into poetic yet playful symbols of immigrant ambition and resilience. Incorporating 3D sketchbooks, VR headsets, and hand- and electric-carving tools, his practice borrows from traditional furniture design, folk art, and the natural world. “When I’m not working, I spend a lot of time hanging with trees and looking for leaves in the park.”
For his forthcoming exhibition, “HOST: Raul De Lara,” at The Contemporary Austin, he will substitute houseplants for wildflowers that are native to both Mexico and Texas, where De Lara and his family settled after immigrating to the United States. By depicting six-foot-tall Damianita daisies and firewheel flowers sprouting from small pots, he references his experience as a DACA recipient: rooted to the U.S., yet constrained and unable to flourish. “How can flowers but not people be native to two places?” he asked, adding that the wood he chose for the series is also native to both countries.
Woodworking depicting contemporary life
Like De Lara, fellow New Yorker Alison Elizabeth Taylor emphasizes the importance of spending time with trees. “Trees are everything,” she said. “Scientists have even proven that taking a walk in nature, or even just looking at a tree, revives cognitive function.” Taylor’s passion for wood is readily evident in her extraordinary wood marquetry paintings, which showcase a variety of wood grain patterns, textures, and colors. To modernize the Renaissance-era technique of inlaying small pieces of wood veneer to form intricate designs, Taylor incorporates oil-painted veneers and shellacked photographs, in a process she calls “frankensteining.”
Taylor’s choice of subjects is equally radical. Electric bikes, pubic hair, N95 masks, C-section scars, diseased trees, and leopard-print sneakers are just a few of the objects that appear in her compositions. “Traditionally, inlay is associated with wealth and power, palaces and churches,” she said. “So when I depict ordinary scenes or people often excluded from historical imagery, I’m using the seriousness of the medium to give them gravity and importance.” For example, Anthony Cuts under the Wburg Bridge, Sunset (2021), included in her exhibition “Future Promise” at James Cohan, depicts a hairdresser cutting his patron’s hair amid discarded oil barrels and broken furniture heaped around bridge pylons. In Cheryl Before She Left for Maine 2020 (2022), a female figure wearing a blue bandana and flip-flops sits on a building stoop with a turquoise guitar on her lap. Taylor is currently at work on a series of similarly styled portraits for her upcoming exhibition at The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C.
Interacting with nature through wood
Los Angeles–based artist Vincent Pocsik’s affinity for wood is innate. “It’s in my genes,” he said. “My dad was obsessed with wood, so I grew up surrounded by it.” He first pursued a career in architecture, earning his MA from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, before returning to woodworking. Lacking formal training, he developed his own intuitive approach. Today, he combines his father’s traditional craftsmanship—hand-carving, sanding, and dying—with the digital technology he used as an architect, including three-dimensional modeling software and computer-controlled machines that cut and shape wood according to digital designs.
For Pocsik, whose works were on view last year as part of LOY Gallery’s show “A Trail to Chase,” there’s no distinction between art and design. “No matter what I’m working on, I’m trying to challenge the viewer’s perception and push the bounds of what a sculpture or a piece of furniture can be,” he said. Accordingly, his figurative sculptures feature long legs and contorted torsos with wooden lamp shades replacing their heads, as seen in Sitting with One Shoe in Walnut (2024). Meanwhile, his upholstered benches are supported by meticulously carved forearms and hands, as in Damned to Love You (2021). His hyperrealistic wall works, featured in a recent solo show at Nazarian / Curcio, also depict anatomical body parts that intertwine with botanical forms, such as Two Gerberas with Hands (2024), which features ebonized walnut daisies with swirling stems that sprout human hands.
Damned to Love You, 2021
Vincent Pocsik
LOY Gallery
Fellow Los Angeles–based artist, Shana Hoehn, also never picked up a chisel or operated a lathe while in school, opting to study painting and video installation instead. Seeking a way to represent bodies that were archetypal, rather than personal, she turned from video to sculpture after graduation. “Sculpture allows me the freedom to synthesize imagery from all different sources,” she explained. Her decision to work with wood came about naturally, and was influenced by financial, ecological, and conceptual considerations. “I’m interested in transformation,” she explained. “Think about all the stories of women who choose to turn into trees.”
Hoehn primarily uses found wood for her sculptures and etchings. The sculptures included in her exhibition, “Sleepless,” from earlier this year at Make Room Los Angeles, are crafted from fallen trees that residents donated after the windstorms and wildfires that swept through Pasadena, California. “An intimate relationship develops not only between the tree and me but the person who gave it to me,” she said, adding that she sends regular updates on each sculpture’s progress. Untitled (2024–25), for example, depicts a woman’s bent leg dangling from a knot in a severed tree trunk. Beetle (2025), meanwhile, features a wooden, womb-like form with a pair of parallel legs extending out from an orifice at its center. The disembodied limbs of the tree and the female figures’ legs are made of the same smooth wood. This aesthetic suggests a similarity in how women and nature have been marginalized by Western societies throughout history. “Women and trees are kindred spirits,” said Hoehn.
Beetle, 2025
Shana Hoehn
Make Room
Trees, after all, provide the material for all these artistic experiments. Across differences in subjects, styles, and techniques, each of these contemporary artists working with wood shares a profound respect for the living, breathing forms. As De Lara said: “Excellent craftsmanship is my apology and expression of gratitude for the tree.”
For more inspiration, browse available artworks in Artsy’s “Contemporary Woodworking” collection.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/rIYwnDf
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