Sitting in Mark Gardner’s backyard is a ten-foot tall red maple sculpture, enigmatic and majestic in its combination of mass and graceful curves. “This is the biggest piece I’ve ever done,” Gardner says during a recent tour of his studio and workshop just a mile or so from downtown Saluda. “It was a huge piece that an arborist found for me a couple of years ago when I was doing a residency at SUNY Purchase, north of New York City. I liked it because it had two intersecting shapes, the trunk and the long limb at a strange angle.”
Gardner says his sculptures result from a dialogue with the material at hand — currently maple, cherry and ash — the indigenous wood of the Blue Ridge. It’s a creative orientation he embraced while a student of Saluda’s nationally respected wood sculptor Stoney Lamar. “He always says that a piece develops from the back and forth between the sculptor and the wood, the challenges that the condition of the wood presents, and the unexpected results that happen,” Gardner says, noting that he uses only relatively new, green wood that’s not fully dried. “Different parts of the wood dry out at different rates, and that causes cracks. So what I do is let the wood and how it’s dried and cracked tell me what to do. It’s like releasing the tension in the wood.”
Gardner’s ongoing dialogue explains the sometimes curvilinear, sometimes bifurcated forms that are his signature.
More finished and crafted are Gardner’s smaller pieces — exquisitely turned wood bowls and delicately etched reliquary vessels in ebonized maple. The bowls are especially in demand; Gardner hopes to move later this year from his cramped workshop at the back of his house to a larger repurposed building just outside the town limit, the better to work on the bowls and vessels.
Woodworking has been part of Gardner’s life from childhood in his native Cincinnati. It was his father’s hobby and a bond between them, especially when he turned 16 and his father enrolled him in a furniture-making class at the University of Cincinnati. But when his father began coming home with the bowls he’d made in a woodturning class, Gardner was hooked and left the slower process of making chairs and tables for the more immediate process of woodturning. It was during a woodturning workshop at the Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg that he befriended Stoney Lamar, who asked Gardner to help him prepare for an upcoming crafts show at the Smithsonian in Washington. A visit to Saluda soon followed, where Gardner met his wife Nancy, a photographer, and settled down with her 14 years ago in the rambling, tin-roofed cottage that had been in Nancy’s family for generations.
Gardner’s workshop is so crowded with machinery and works in progress that the door to Nancy’s darkroom has become nearly unreachable, so the planned move is timely. “I think the neighbors might appreciate it when I move the workshop, too,” Gardner says. “Power saws are pretty noisy.”
Gardner’s work will be on exhibit at Silver Fox Gallery in downtown Hendersonville from July 25th to August 27. For details visit silverfoxonline.com and markgardnerstudio.com.