Putting Nature in a Box
...or rather, affixing it to one.
I worked for a summer as an apprentice at a high-end cabinet- and furniture-making shop in Nashville, TN. While the shop lacked A/C, it did afford it's own set of perks. Two pieces of cherry stood out to me. Obviously hewn from the same tree, and both were beautifully figured but useless for our commercial work. Oddly, what drew me to them were the very properties that rendered them unfit for purpose: the ample natural edge, the distinct bowing and the irregular figuring.
Between sanding and sweeping and sanding and sweeping and gluing and carrying and sweeping again, I sketched a design that would provide a strong geometric structure that would both flatten the tabletop and give the more sinuous elements of the cherry a datum from which to move. (These drawings, done in construction pencil on the back of a wood glue-stained cereal box, are unsurprisingly lost to time.)
[cue Benny Hill music]