The Tectonic Box
The Tectonic Box is the largest box I have produced up to date. It is a big box in the spirit of Akio Kamei’s “Apricot” and “Phoenix” Boxes. I’d been drying a very special slab of Amboyna for a few years and it was ready to use. The chunk of burl was a bit too big for any of my tools to handle and I asked to drop by a friend’s wood-shop to make the initial cuts. I wanted to use as much of the burl as possible and maintain its live edge, so the box was scaled up accordingly to match this. I worried about disrupting my friend’s work space with new dust. Later they told me they really liked the sweet and fragrant smell it left behind and invited me to come back anytime!
This box is a sequential discovery puzzle. Surrounding the surface two continents seem to be floating past each other. Herein lies the first challenge on your quest of gaining access to the interior. Before you get to the main large storage space, four small compartments await to be unearthed. You will need to find a variety of hidden wood tools and think creatively about how to use them to unlock each new compartment. Fifteen different steps are needed to grant access to the final challenge requiring a terrifying “leap of faith” to unlock the main interior at the heart of this box. The Tectonic Box is meant to keep you on your toes and uses a wide range of puzzle mechanisms and ideas. It will challenge whatever assumptions you make along the way and require a lot of creative problem solving. I believe some of these tools are new in how they are used too, so I feel quite excited and proud of this.
The Tectonic Box comes packed in a soft wood Paulownia case along with a blanket to set out under it while solving. It is a conversation piece and I recommend having friends over for a celebratory evening to solve it together. I hope it becomes a social piece that many people get to experience over the years. It tells a story as a visual sculpture, but also as a mechanical interactive experience too. I feel it pushes the limits on what is interactive art, craft, and puzzle.
Over the last five years I have been practicing how to work with burl wood. It is truly a different beast than typical straight grain lumber and truly mesmerizing visually. Burl wood grain is wild and essentially scatter shots in all directions while straight lumber grain is always in one uniform direction. Burl wood must be treated a certain way to maintain its strength and also it requires a different finishing process up front. I have dedicated a large amount of time to experimentation on finding a suitable finish process for burls and I feel I have finally cracked the code on an excellent way to do this! Ultimately these are base coats and the final top coat polish uses the same layering of shellac, sanding, oil, and wax I use in all my pieces. I have collected a number of different types of burl over the years. Expect more to pop up in future pieces too.
Amboyna starts out as large bumps on Narra, Padauk and other Pterocarpus tree species in Southeast Asia. The burl wood is so completely different in appearance from the straight grain trunk lumber that it earned a separate name all unto itself. Amboyna is a legendary burl, considered the most valuable and precious for its intense color, wild stormy figure, and stability. The name, “Amboyna” hails from “Ambon Island” in Indonesia, where it was once believed to be exported long ago.
Because burl grain is so chaotic, all the Amboyna pieces surrounding each of the 8 Tectonic Boxes will differ making them unique in appearance. Rather than flip and book-match the material, I opted to rotate one a half turn from the other. I originally did this when I built the Pipe Organ Desk top and have been wanting to revisit the idea ever since. I feel this creates tension and movement and shows a beautiful “dance” between two similar organic shapes.
Much of the wood inside the box is Karelian Birch, also a very wild and colorful wood formed by a genetic defect in Silver Birch trees. Like Amboyna, it looks completely different in color than the typical birch wood. It is hereditary and quite a rare occurrence. I ordered a very small log of this from a tree farm awhile back and was told only one out of every thousand trees on their farm is Karelian. It is also quickly becoming one of my favorite woods!
