Honoring common forms
Catch-All Bowls, 2023
By Danielle Rose Byrd ’05
Chronic illness has shaped much of my practice and techniques, encouraging me to blend power carving and hand tool work to sculpt and carve wood. This allows me to push the boundaries of vessel and abstract forms while honoring the limits of my body. It has also presented an opportunity to consider, personally and collectively, how our bodies relate to production and worth.
I often use carved texture as a visual history of the force used to create each piece, and find it conveys most universally the complex struggle of asking my body to partake in such a physical process. Hidden labor made visible is of particular interest to me, as I believe it points to the factors (and benefactors) of many imbalanced relationships, both small scale personal and large scale sociopolitical.
My work often begins with whole logs, which is tightly tied to my upbringing watching logs being processed in the open yards of the paper mill in my hometown of Rumford, in the rural foothills of Western Maine. Seeing this raw resource trucked into town day after day told only part of the story, and was just one instance of many where only parts of the story were made visible. The people who worked it into a profitable product were not the ones who saw the profit, but who suffered the consequences of an exceptionally toxic industry. Many other value structures in virtually every line of business imaginable mimic this dynamic. Living in a much wealthier community on the coast these last few decades has deepened my knowledge of how wealth inequality informs many of these outcomes and is amplified by other purposefully disadvantaged identities.
I’ve taken this insight and am now transposing it to the craft world, casting light on deeply embedded notions of value and access using the basic tenets of disability justice. Who and what we choose to hide or ignore, and who benefits from that ignorance also holds the solutions we continue to refuse. How we behave at the small scale is also what we will bring to the large scale, and I believe that blurring the lines of utility and still honoring worth in common forms like bowls has the capacity to invite change at a more approachable level.
Danielle Rose Byrd ’05 is a primarily self-taught wood sculptor and carver originally from Western Maine and now living in Bar Harbor, Maine. At College of the Atlantic, they explored music and sound sculpture. While building a handmade fiddle-like instrument constructed from burn pile wood found on campus, they began carving scraps into spoons. They now make functional and non-functional work, and things hazily in-between. Lately they’ve been working on music and sound again, and looking for ways to bring it into their sculptural woodwork.
They have written for Fine Woodworking, Mortise & Tenon Magazine, Popular Woodworking, and from 2014-17 were a member of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks hand tool events, traveling the country teaching hand tool woodworking fundamentals.
In 2018 they were awarded the Belvedere Handcraft Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission, were Co-Best in Show at the 2024 Maine Wood Biennial, and have received a number of grants to support their work. They have taught workshops on their bowl carving methods all across the country and far-flung parts of the world. Their instructional book, The Handcarved Bowl, was published by Blue Hill Press in 2021.
