Pouffe

As a child growing up in the Willamette Valley, my family spent a lot of time in nature. At one point, we purchased a square acre of land about a mile from the Oregon Coast. Rather than clearing the land to build a house, our family of four cut a path through the salal and huckleberries to a clearing the center and pushed in a flatbed trailer. Upon that, we built a simple cabin framed with old telephone poles we salvaged from the beach, and plywood walls. Several simple structures were also in that small clearing, providing us the very basic places to sleep, cook, and play. We reimagined the forested space as if it were a traditional house—a stump served as a chair, a log was split lengthwise and opened up to make a tabletop, and so on.

The title for this piece, “Pouffe,” refers to the allusion to a stack of Moroccan seating cushions. The patterns I carved into each Pouffe form alternates patterns found in nature with more traditional decorative shapes, alluding to the symbiotic relationship between humans and the natural world.