An Honorable Mention, and Very Good Company

Rubio Monocoat USA put out a call this year for work made in America, and asked the trades to send in what they had been building. They received a lot of entries. Six projects made the final post, and one of my pieces came away with an honorable mention.

The others tell you what kind of company I was keeping: bamboo cabinetry, hardwood and softwood decking, an oak bar, a mahogany chair with hand-woven Danish cord, a hickory conference table. Cabinetmakers, deck builders, furniture makers. Real trades, real shops.

Mine was listed as a sculptural wine bottle holder and glass display. I will take that description, and I will take the honorable mention.

Why this one landed differently

These pieces sit in an awkward place. They are sculpture — a single continuous line of specially processed white oak carried into a bend that white oak has no business holding — but they are also asked to hold three bottles and a set of glasses without wobbling, without marking the labels, and without ever being touched up. Sculpture that has to work for a living.

That is the part I was glad to see recognized. Not that a curve looks striking in a photograph, but that the form and the function are the same decision — the bend is what makes it beautiful and the bend is what makes it hold. Landing on that list, alongside a conference table and a hand-woven chair, judged by people who look at wood all day, told me the idea reads to the people best equipped to see through it.

On the finish

The pieces were finished with Oil Plus 2C and sheen enhanced with SheenPlus. On a form like this the finish has to do something unusual — follow a curve through its full travel without pooling, breaking, or laying down a line where one pass met the last. A film finish would fight that geometry. This one goes into the wood and stays honest to the grain, and the SheenPlus gives the curve just enough light to read across the whole travel of the bend — which is the point when the shape is doing the talking.

What I actually took from it

I work alone. There is no shop full of people to tell me whether a piece is any good, and the customers who buy these are wine people, not woodworkers — wonderful, but they are judging the result, not the method.

An entry like this puts the work in front of a different jury. They know exactly how hard the bend is. That is a rarer kind of feedback, and I am grateful for it.

Great wine deserves something worthy to hold it.

You can see all six projects in the announcement post. Thank you to Rubio Monocoat USA, and congratulations to everyone else on that list.