When Kieran Kinsella chainsaws a 2-ft. length off a log, rolls it into his shop, and hoists it with a gantry crane up onto his lathe, he’s thinking, “What can I get out of you? Let’s see what’s hiding in here.” Soon enough, he gets an answer in one of his curved or faceted stump pieces, stools and tables made with green wood harvested within a few miles of his home in New York’s Hudson River Valley. He has worked wood in a variety of other ways—making doors and windows, building cabinets, doing carpentry­—but gravitated back toward the reductive, sculptural approach embodied in his early experiences crafting timber-frame joinery and carving canoe paddles. His stump-making tool kit, in addition to chainsaws and a Powermatic lathe modified to accept logs up to 28 in. dia., includes an angle grinder, a power planer, files and rasps, spokeshaves, chisels, and gouges. And a roofing torch. That would be the long-nozzled device he deploys when he chooses to char one of his stumps.

Although he says the charring process leaves him looking like he works in a coal mine, the results on the wood are worth it. “Maple comes out like licorice—deep black, and so smooth; oak looks even more okay, its end grain contrasty and its ray flecks shimmery and silver-toned.” Making the stumps, Kinsella says, is a little like writing haiku. To function as furniture, they need to stand up and have a flat area on top; “but between these two constraints, the only question is, what can I have the most fun carving?”

 

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