- On this episode of Making, we make sawdust and new woodworkers with a community woodworking shop, turn natural found objects into graceful sculptures and blend science and art to make museum worthy installations.

That's all next, here on Making.

This Program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station for viewers like you, thank you.

(rhythmic music) Hello and welcome to Making, the show dedicated to makers and the artistry of their craft.

I'm your host, Matt Burchett.

Thank you so much for joining us.

This week we begin here at Sawdust Studios.

This community workshop and educational cooperative offers classes, apprenticeships and memberships with 24/7 access to all of their woodworking equipment.

- Sawdust Studios is a community wood shop that I came up with.

As a contractor I had people asking for tools and also I saw the need for people to learn woodworking.

So I combined those two to come up with this idea that seemed really crazy, but when I told my wife about it, she didn't think it was crazy.

The idea of a community wood shop really seemed like something that people needed and wanted.

And based off of that we were able to grow and like expand the idea.

And then we started, this wood shop and it's actually worked.

I started woodworking from a young age.

I'm basically self-taught and actually never expected myself to be doing this.

It was just something I like to do on the side.

I never took a shop class, but my dad does work in construction, so I always had access to some rudimentary woodworking tools and I couldn't stop myself from stealing his saws and his leftover wood and just putting together like little projects.

And as I got later into my 20s, I really enjoyed doing it and it became almost therapeutic for me.

And so I started doing more research and just practicing my skills and it's just something that, it's kind of part of who I am.

I've always been good at it.

For me, it just seems like it's so much a part of humanity and like we were meant to work with wood and I want everybody else to be able to do it.

- This is fun.

- If you want to join the shop, you have to take our safety course, Which is a couple hours.

Me or an instructor will guide you through using all the tools safely and you'll start with a piece of wood and you actually get to physically learn how to safely operate the tools.

And then you're pretty much ready to go.

The shop is yours, as long as you're using safely, we're fine with you coming in anytime you want to use the space.

For the most part, even people that are coming in at two in the morning, they aren't being unsafe.

Everybody is following the rules.

There's cameras in here, so I think the fact that like big brother's kind of watching is enough to keep people honest, but it's really, it's been nice.

There's people that want to come in at six in the morning.

I don't wanna be here at six in the morning.

I'm fine with you coming in and starting on a project like if you're just gonna sand, why would I stop you?

If you're just gonna make a few cuts.

For the most part, it's just hobbyists coming in and they're just trying to knock out a thing or two because this is what they love to do and they're trying to squeeze it into life.

So having it open 24/7 allows them to make the time for it.

Instead of trying to squeeze into my schedule, they can squeeze it into their own schedule.

We wanna make it where anybody can come in and use the shop, even if it is for just a two hour class.

I want a mom to come in and feel like she made a cutting board and I don't necessarily want or need her to want to come back and be a member of the shop.

I just want her to have used the shop and had a really good experience and walk away feeling like even for that two hours that she was also a woodworker.

Teaching woodworking is extremely rewarding because there's like a sense of, like I said, having somebody come in in two hours makes something just as good as the thing that they've assumed is like, unreachable for 'em is really cool cause it's just showing people that really anybody can do this.

It really is for anybody.

And I don't know, it just, it makes me really proud to like be able to like kind of give that to people.

But it also makes me really proud to like let them, to see them realize something in themselves that they didn't know they could do beforehand.

- [Female Voice] So here is the finished product.

- Having a community wood shop, like Sawdust Studios is extremely valuable because I think in a society where people know how to use their hands and build things is a much stronger society.

Woodworking isn't going away anytime soon.

Having things made out of wood is part of humanity.

We're always gonna have things made out of wood and I think it's important to know where things come from and it's important for us to be part of the things that we're putting in our home.

Instead of them having them shipped from China or from other country where you have no idea what the working conditions of the people that are doing it are.

I think it's beautiful to be able to not only know where they came from, but to be part of the process of making something beautiful that's gonna go into somebody's home, especially your own home.

And Sawdust allows you the opportunity to create something beautiful and be proud of it.

- I began using found objects when I was a child.

My mother gave me a box of junk just for me to be creative with.

Throughout my life I've just always kind of just picked stuff up off the ground.

Bottle caps or leaves or acorns or whatever.

My mother hated it cause she always had to clean out my pockets as I was growing up with all this stuff.

But I basically made a career out of it.

The textures and forms of the natural objects really attract me.

And over the years I've developed some skills and tricks to imitate those textures and colors.

But in the end, in my sculptures, I really want them to look as natural as possible and as though they grew into those human-like forms as opposed to my sculpting and imitation of the natural forms and textures.

So those objects, like let's say the branches, I'm finding human anatomy in those forms.

So if there's a branch and I see, I'm visualizing, I'm playing and I see a hip, a knee, a shoulder, and I start fitting those together, I try to maximize those natural forms and try to see the anatomical forms.

And then when they start coming together, my sculpting, my goal is to just blend them enough with my sculpting that it looks natural, looks like it grew that way, but still maintain that sense of beauty in nature.

That there's no way that I can fully replicate.

Then the next step is to embed a steel armature into those natural objects that strengthen them and also hold them all together into the human figure.

Then I start sculpting over that steel, hiding the steel armature inside and blending in with those natural materials with a sculpting compound that I create myself.

It is a compound that met my needs that nothing on the market did.

I needed it to air dry so that I could put the natural materials in.

If I was using a traditional clay, I'd have to fire it and then the natural materials would burn out.

I needed it to be really strong.

I wanted it to be lightweight and I wanted to be able to control the color of it.

And my compound allows me to do that.

I sculpt with it just like any other clay like substance.

It's a little trickier though.

There's cellulose fibers inside of it that hang onto each other.

So it's much more difficult to sculpt with than any other traditional clays or sculpting compounds.

But that's one of the things that gives it strength.

After years of working with these materials, I found some that work better for me than others that I appreciate.

I like the forms, I like the strength of them.

And so typically my figures are made out of white oak.

If I put a dress on the figure, it might be a pin oak branch dress or it might be the petals off of a Kentucky coffee tree that I use to create the dress or sometimes the hair on sculptures.

The most popular hair that I use, however is the tendrils off of a wild grapevine.

So the wild grapevines grow all over Missouri.

I just go in the forest, find a vine that's growing and go along and clip off the tendrils.

every 12 inches or so and it takes me about the entire winter to gather enough tendrils to use for the rest of the year.

And I do it in winter because that's when the bugs aren't out and the leaves aren't hiding all the tendrils and the tendrils are at their strongest point.

As soon as autumn comes and they turn brown, that's when I want them cause that's when they're strongest.

There's a whole process of what I've learned about how to gather materials properly so that they're good for the sculpture.

The portion of the sculptures that I am creating with my sculpting compound, I try to keep that to a minimum.

I want those natural objects to be the center of the stage, to be the star of the show.

And I want keep my sculpting to a minimum.

That said, it's still incredibly important to the whole illusion of the piece to making them look as though they grew that way.

So I am simplifying the human anatomy a little bit, merging it with natural textures, say bark textures.

But I do want to try to make them as appealing and for a lack of a better term, lovely as possible.

I do love sculpting faces and so I do take a long time crafting the faces on the sculptures to make them attractive, to be able to express an emotion.

Even though on most of the sculptures I make the face is an inch tall or less, I want that to be a focal point so that people when they look close are pleased.

When I started these sculptures, these natural figure sculptures back in college, I was discovering that I was an environmentalist.

That I really appreciated nature and wanted to preserve it.

And so the base concept through all of my work is that humans and nature are interwoven and deeply connected and we can't live without the natural world.

So that combination of human figure and natural object, although it has been done for centuries in different cultures, even way back to the Greeks, if you think of Apollo and Daphne, those ideas are not new, but I'm finding a new way to present those ideas, I hope.

And combining them with a sense that we are here at the mercy of nature and that we need to be a part of it.

- So we're back here at Sawdust Studios.

I'm standing here with Dean and Dean, you got a whole bunch of stuff laid out here in front of us.

What exactly are we looking at here?

- We're gonna be making shaker boxes.

This is a course that we teach here at Sawdust Studios.

Shaker boxes are the original Tupperware basically.

- Interesting.

- Yeah.

The history of it is the Shakers were a religious sect, many, many years ago that their thing was to try and use everything efficiently and so they had extra scraps and they designed these and they would store their dry goods in 'em and nails or whatever.

The first thing you have to do is create the swallow tails.

These are called swallow tails.

- Okay.

- If you look at the design, it kind of looks like a swallow.

So I have the material here that I've milled up.

So what we're gonna end up doing is we're gonna heat this.

You could either steam it or put it in hot water.

We're gonna happen to put it in hot water today, which is a traditional way of doing it versus having a steam box.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And what happens is, at 180 degrees, basically the glues that hold the fibers together will relax.

- Okay.

- And we're gonna be able to bend them and we're gonna hold them there for a little while, pin it together and then we're gonna put these forms in it and leave it for at least 24 hours.

First thing we're gonna do is just take a pencil and mark out our swallow tails and we pre-drill these holes so that they don't split.

All right, so I have a drill here and we're gonna go ahead and drill those out right away.

(drill noise) And then we're gonna take and (drill noise) cut these on the bandsaw.

(saw noise) There we go.

So Matt, what I've done is I've actually gone ahead and cut the swallowtails and then using the sander, we thinned up the end here.

So whenever it bends around, it's not too bulky whenever it comes to- - You're not just double thick at that point.

- Exactly.

So I'm gonna throw this into water for just a bit.

So it's supposed to be 180 degrees, which we're a little over that, but it'll be okay.

So it's gonna come out of there and you got the lines there and just kind of follow the lines.

See how easy that cuts?

- [Matt] That's nice.

- Isn't that crazy?

There we go.

All right, so these are now ready to go into the water.

These have been sitting in here about 20 minutes and we're gonna take 'em out.

- You're not just gonna reach in there with your paw, I imagine.

- No, no.

I got some pliers, but actually you can kind of grab 'em pretty quick.

- [Matt] How long do you have while they're wet like that?

- Not very long.

So what we have is a form here and it has a mark on it.

You have about a minute.

So, make sure to turn the right direction and you want to kind of hold it and support it all the way around, especially once you get up to the swallow tails cause that is where it will split if you're not careful.

- [Matt] And that's why you want to put those swallow tails on the flatter side, you don't want to put them on the bend.

Yeah.

So you just kind of take your time and you wanna get it around.

And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this anvil, just a simple made anvil out of some pipe that you can get at your hardware store and we're gonna take while we're supporting the swallow tails and we're gonna line up those index line.

And what happens is whenever I drive these through, they hit the metal, these are copper nails, tacks, and once they go through and hit the metal, they mushroom and seal it.

- [Matt] So it kind of rivets from both sides more or less.

- Yeah, exactly, exactly.

(hammer pounding) Here you give it a try.

I'll hold it down.

- [Matt] Those are almost hard to grab.

- They are.

That's why I put 'em in those little cups.

- Okay, there she is.

- All right, so now that we got this together, I need you to take and push this down in there so that it forms it and so this is what it's gonna form it up overnight.

- [Matt] Okay.

- [Dean] All right.

- And so there's not a left and a right, there's just an inside and outside?

- That is correct.

- Okay.

- And remember we beveled those at 10 degrees so that they get wider.

They're like a cork.

So they push down in there and hold it tight and it's gonna dry overnight.

But I have another one that we can go ahead and finish today.

- All right, well let's get to looking at that.

- All right.

So now that we have the top and the bottom in tight, what we're gonna do is attach those.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And we don't glue those.

We actually just use toothpicks, believe it or not, with no glue.

- [Matt] Because right now this is just, we just set that in there and there's nothing going on, no connection.

- And wood's gonna move and so they'll get tighter and looser over time.

And so we want them tight.

And so what we'll do is we'll turn it on.

(drill noise) And just go like this.

(drill noise) All right, you do the other side.

- Is there a certain number or you just doing three?

- Yeah, that's fine.

(drill noise) So what we're gonna do now is actually pin them with toothpicks.

Now these are the square toothpicks.

- Okay.

- Because you want them to wedge in there.

- And so we're still not gluing even the toothpicks?

- Not even a toothpick.

So what you do is just take some side cutters of some kind, tap 'em in there and then cut 'em off.

So just like that.

And we'll get you some out here and just load 'em up.

And we'll just sand these down a little bit.

And then we'll put some finish on.

- Sounds good.

- And basically, you can put as much on as you want cause it'll only accept as much oil as it'll take.

- Anything else you just gotta wipe away?

- [Dean] Yep.

- [Matt] After it's done.

- So there you go.

Pour that on there.

I'm gonna help you along here, I'm not gonna make you do all the hard work.

How's that sound?

Go ahead and put it together.

- All righty.

- You're good to go.

- We got everything fitting nice.

- Look at that.

- There she be.

Dean, thank you so much for showing me how to do all this.

- You're welcome.

- This is awesome.

Yeah, thank you so much.

- [Dean] You're welcome.

- These are made by an animal that extracts silica from seawater and builds their skeleton in life.

When I was very young, I was interested in both art and science and going through school, the counselors and the teachers always said, well, eventually you're gonna have to decide one way or the other because the courses are so different.

And I said, well, it's hard for me to decide which way I want to go.

So all through school, even into graduate school, I took art and science courses and eventually decided I was going to combine the two and form a business.

So Chase Studio is a company that I founded 50 years ago that builds museum exhibits for natural history museums all over the world.

And it combines both science and art.

We actually build more than just models or dioramas.

We actually build complete museums.

We can go into a blank space and do all of the graphics, do all of the computer interactives, build the walls, do the lighting, do all the electronics, absolutely everything there is to do and changing a bare room into a museum.

So that's what we do here at the studio.

And there are basic principles that you follow which relate to human nature on which way they go, which things they're attracted to.

How much light to put on something.

Do they go to the right or the left intuitively so you take all of these basic principles in consideration when you're designing an exhibit.

And of course you have the storyline.

How do you develop the storyline?

Do you do it chronologically or do you do it some other way?

So that all has to be in consideration.

And then you have these wow factors, how are you going to stimulate and keep the interest of the person going along this pathway through the museum?

You have to develop things that will capture their attention.

One of the things that is, I think, most important in designing exhibits is to, develop something that involves the visitor.

These museums that have row after row of dioramas that are basically just pretty pictures to most people.

I've watched people walk through these museums, some of the bigger museums, and they won't even break a pace.

They'll just look from one side to the other, at one diorama to the other, they're like pictures in the calendar.

What you have to do is you have to develop techniques to involve people, participate in the activity of going through the museum.

So you do things like, well we do a lot of computer, touchscreen things where people can interact or you have even simple things where they can touch things or they can press buttons and something lights up or any kind of thing that you can do to involve the visitor, to make them stop long enough to actually absorb at least the basic principle of what you're trying to exhibit is important.

And that's what we try to do.

We try to develop participatory exhibits rather than passive exhibits.

One of the reasons we get all these high profile projects from the big museums, the Smithsonian, the National Park Service, is because of our scientific background.

In many cases, we know as much or more about the science behind the exhibit than the client does.

And so, very often we'll actually write the text for the exhibit and do all of the research and present that to the museum as part of the project.

That's where my science and art background come together in this business.

Everybody is amazed when they come here and they come in and they realize that we have actually done exhibits all over the world.

In fact, we've done exhibits for hundreds of museums, including over a hundred of the national park visitor centers.

When people come here and they realize the scope of what we do, they're just absolutely amazed that a place like this exists.

In fact, we have school groups come through here and I get thank you notes and some of the kids will write things like, it was a life changing experience.

I'm thinking, wow, that same thing happened to me when I was young.

My father took me over to one of his coworkers who had a big mineral collection, this was when I was in grade school and he showed me his mineral collection and gave me a few specimens.

And from that time on, I was just absolutely hooked.

It only takes one little spark to change a whole person's life.

And people going through here, young kids going through here, I always think, wow, I could have changed their whole life just because very few of those people will even be familiar with this kind of work or even think this is a possibility.

But once they come through here and they see, wow, this is something I'd like to do for my life.

- I'd like to thank Cruz, Dean, everyone here at Sawdust Studios and all of our other makers for sharing their time with us.

That wraps up our show for this week.

But I hope all of our makers have inspired you to unlock your creative spirit.

We thank you all for watching and we hope you'll join us here next time to see what we'll be making.

More information is available on social media or online at kmos.org.

This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music)