Wood in Art and Design: Sticks, Stumps, and Two-by-Fours

Spanning the imaginative and pragmatic, this introductory 3-D course explores a material with access to unlimited conceptual and expressive possibilities. Through history wood has inflected art, architecture, and design: from sculpture and furniture, to rituals both spiritual and profane. We will use wood’s aesthetics and practicality to meet our artmaking needs. Through step-by step processes we will learn joinery, carving, lamination, and other techniques to execute visual assignments concerning physics, biology, ecology, and history. These embodied experiences will allow students to negotiate any woodshop, think metaphorically, and increase cognizance of complex material relationships at work in our daily lives. 6 hrs. lect./lab