This fall, Sylvie Rosenthal will be returning to Penland to teach a concentration in the woodshop. Her course focuses on furniture and sculpture, but its audience is far wider than that. Anyone fond of whimsical details, anyone interested in conceptual ideas made tangible, anyone eager to prototype and problem solve—all will find something to inspire them in this 8-week laboratory. After all, as American Style noted in a profile of her, Sylvie specializes in being able “to combine function, style and humor in one clean package.” Her work is intricate and detail-oriented, often kinetic, and, in her own words, “steeped in the impossible.” It’s a pretty remarkable combination.

There are still spaces left to take part in the workshop this fall from September 20 – November 13, 2015. Register here.

Going Deep: Sculpture & Furniture Laboratory

Sylvie Rosenthal – In this fun and fast-paced workshop, we’ll work in and out of the studio as we make furniture and sculpture for interior and exterior settings. While exploring experimental and traditional construction techniques—including lap, mortise and tenon, and dovetail joints—we’ll make forms, structures, masses to carve, and literal and metaphorical frameworks to support your ideas. Our main material will be wood, but we’ll use other materials—plaster, metal, ceramic, found objects—as projects necessitate. Thinking creatively, solving problems, and keeping safety in mind, we’ll use additive and subtractive processes as we cut, glue, join, shape, break, and fix. Risk taking will be encouraged. All levels. Code F00W

Sylvie Rosenthal is a studio artist specializing in woodworking and sculpture. She has taught at Haystack (ME), Anderson Ranch (CO), University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Penland. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design (NYC) and the Mint Museum (NC) and is in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, the Fuller Craft Museum (MA), and the Kamm Teapot Foundation (CA).

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Desk and stool by Sylvie Rosenthal — Birdie Suite, 2007. This desk and stool set features a kinetic bird sculpture perched next to the mirror. Ask the bird if you look good, turn the crank, and watch it nod a yes. Photo by Steve Mann.

Whale sculpture by Sylvie Rosenthal — Ballena, 2011. This 11-foot long “whale with a roof rack” is part of Sylvie’s series of “edificios imposibles,” or impossible buildings. Photo by Ramon C Purcell

O'Possum Whiskey, 2005. As Sylvie describes, "The whiskey cabinets beckon as kinetic skulls agree, you should have another drink." Photo by Larry Stanley — O’Possum Whiskey, 2005. As Sylvie describes, “The whiskey cabinets beckon as kinetic skulls agree, you should have another drink.” Photo by Larry Stanley

As the images above make clear, Sylvie has a strong background in wood and fine furniture, but she doesn’t let materials or traditions hold back her designs. As Andrew Glasgow put it in American Craft magazine, “Her sculpture has a fine-furniture maker’s sensibility while her furniture…possesses a sculptural quality that exhibits utter ease at flowing between the genres.” Come bend the rules and blur the lines with Sylvie this fall at Penland.

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Dustin Farnsworth’s studio is stage-bright when we walk in. He’s working on three headdresses, and brings our attention to one: three coopered towers to be mounted on the head. To see the expression on the figure’s face is to know something about where this is all going: not only to the world of “players and painted stage” but somewhere much darker and much more strange.

Ah, the “dark” and “strange”–all of it has been commodified in clever ways (Tim Burton, anyone?)–and Dustin’s work nods–and then brilliantly subverts any pop-culture context, favoring more risky considerations of poverty, angst, race. The souls in his headdresses are inexpressibly clear and burdened by what they have to wear (twenty-seven essays could be written about the faces alone), and what they wear is a profound architecture.

As we look at the headdress-in-process, Dustin tells us he’s been inspired by Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse–the three headdress sections evoke water towers: signifiers of how we once handled water, and possible indicators of our future demise. As Dustin talks with us about his Michigan roots–“the burn’t out” feeling of Detroit arriving in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan– it’s hard not to see disaster abiding in all his work.

But the apocalypse hasn’t happened yet. There’s a lot to do. This, too, is part of Dustin’s sensibility. He shows us a system of walkways that will cross the towers in the headdress, a kind of back-and-forth plank-work. As he talks us through how it will go, the work immediately shifts. There will be an imagined cross-way, the kind that invites a child in. A little Borges in the gloom. A smile in the wince. On a side wall of Farnsworth’s bright studio, behind a door, he’s left a book open. The heading is: “The End Which is the Beginning.”

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Photographs by Robin Dreyer; writing by Elaine Bleakney

Going Deep: Sculpture & Furniture Laboratory with Sylvie Rosenthal

Going Deep: Sculpture & Furniture Laboratory

Winter Studio Visit: Dustin Farnsworth