technē and poiēsis

I am staining my pine boards with a pigmented oil. The label on the can says "oak". I am quite conflicted about this.  This blog began from the premise that every material has essential qualities that should not be imitated. These qualities are much more than visual- they include texture, density, reaction to outside forces (weather), and methods of working and tooling. There is absolutely no way of making an oak shelf from a pine board.  In French, the word for "species" of wood is "essence". But in English, the word means a core substance that concentrates all the qualities of something. By colouring my boards, am I denying their essence- in both senses of the term? But it is sometimes hard to decide what actions suppress the essence of a material, and what actions simply bring out its latent characteristics. For example, when I oiled my door handle , the wood became darker and more lustrous. I was amazed to see and feel how different the walnut wa...

My current project is to make a set of open shelves to divide my one-room apartment into 'eating' and 'sleeping' areas. I've learned from experience that when it comes to making, I have to simplify my initial concept until it can be reduced no further- economy of labour, material, and the clarity of the finished object all dictate this minimalism.  I thought for these shelves I had done my thinking well. One vertical post. One inclined post. Five horizontal surfaces. One inclined surface. I just need to make a few cuts and it will be done, right? Of course, it seems simple, but there are a whole series of small tasks that take time to do properly- time that I don't often have between working full time and not being around a whole lot. As a result, four months later, the few cuts I need to make still need to be made. Well, I've done most of them, but there are still some left. I've been learning a lot about working with pine. The difference betwe...