Harry Siter at Coup

ABOUT HARRY SITER Since the early 1990’s, I have been immersed in my own development by using trees to make furniture and art. To create an esthetic, I shape them with different-sized chain saws and then use some simple, classic approaches to surface and finish. Over the years I have learned how to stabilize these thick slabs of wood, and have discovered ways to manipulate and combine them with metal to make new shapes and forms.

I like the creation aspect; inventing, engineering, and the process of discovery itself that truly defines me as a person. I challenge myself by using this process and remind myself of life’s puzzle. It makes me feel alive to work with materials that have their own will, and it is this willfulness itself that brings me great joy and pain. I never thought that I would find life in a dead tree or hot metal or plaster or earth, but they continually test my will and I find myself learning from the experience.

For me, the excitement of using a tree’s organic nature in furniture and art has moved the limitations from the limitations of dimensional lumber at the yard, to the limitations of “How can I get what I need from this tree?” Now it becomes an experience of cutting, shaping, and paring down a tree to its new form, and the remaining limitations are the size of the tree, my own physical and mental capabilities, and what I can endure through the experience.

As an artist, I would have to say that my life has metaphorically created other lives again and again – in the form of inanimate objects that speak.