Weekend – Intro to Box Making

Owain Harris is a self-taught woodworker who operates a furniture studio in Gonic, NH, where he designs and builds custom furnishings for galleries and residential clients. He began his career in wood as a framing carpenter in 1997, and worked as both a finish carpenter and remodeler before moving into the shop full-time in 2008. Owain is a juried member of the League of NH Craftsmen and the New Hampshire Furniture Masters Association. His work has received multiple awards, including a Pinnacle Award from the International Society of Furniture Designers and a Veneertech Craftsman Challenge Award. Owain has been featured in numerous publications, including Fine Woodworking and NH Home Magazine. Owain shares his passion for furniture making and design through teaching at various craft schools and institutions including The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Marc Adams School of Woodworking and the University of New Hampshire. He currently serves as Chair Person for the American Furniture Masters Institute, the nonprofit organization that oversees the NH Furniture Masters and the Prison Outreach Program that teaches the craft of fine furniture making to inmates of the Maine men’s prison and both the NH men’s and women’s prison. His work may be seen at owainharris.com

is a Woodturner/Sculptor who draws upon a lifetime of professional, traditional Woodturning/Woodworking skills to explore sculpture, architecture and relational aesthetics. Her belief in the power of the object drives her work, exploring the idea of memory locked in objects, and the creation of object as a visible symbol of memory. Working alone and collaboratively she delves into the anthropological meaning of making in our modern lives.

Laura Mays has a degree in architecture from University College Dublin and a higher certificate in Furniture Design and Manufacture from GMIT Letterfrack (Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology), both in Ireland. She followed that with two years in the Fine Woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School) in Fort Bragg, Calif., where since 2011 she has been the program director.

I come from a very creative household, my mother is a textile artist and my father is an architect. Throughout my childhood they instilled the value of making things by hand, quality work comes from attention to detail, and to highlight imperfections and irregularities instead of trying to hide them. Prior to woodworking I worked as a cook in restaurant kitchens. In those environments I learned that the finished product can only be as good as the quality of the ingredients you start with. You must treat the ingredients and the tools of preparation with reverence and respect. You can learn an infinite amount from the people who have come before you but you also cannot let previous experience stifle your creativity. I have found that all of these principles apply to woodworking and furniture making. My ultimate goal is to transform a natural product into something that brings someone comfort and happiness.

With a background in photography and graphic design but a lifelong love of woodlands and wilderness, I started teaching myself woodcarving in early 2015 as a way to spend more time in the small woodland that I manage in the mountains of North Wales. Using only the tools that I already had for looking after the woodland, my axe and a knife, I began carving wooden spoons from wind-fallen trees and branches that I would find and forage for on the woodland floor. After twelve months I abandoned my life as a designer and photographer to pursue my wood carving full time.