For years, I had blue-collar envy, because with all my schooling, I felt educated but didn’t know how to do anything important – like frame a house or grow food. When I worked in the ‘professional’ world, the only moments that seemed significant were when I rode my bike home at the end of the day and had to avoid being hit by cars. When I moved to the trades, I found that significance often exists in surprising, human moments; on one particular day a friend shared a biscotti recipe moments before snapping a cigarette in half to stuff in his ears because he forgot his hearing protection. This mixture of culture, crudeness, masculinity and utility is the rich material of a storied life, and fodder for certain explorations in my artwork.

‘The Writer’s Cabin’ is an attempt to bring these nuanced worlds together in a concentrated example of how they collide in real life: the hermit who cares about design, the bachelor who isn’t content with dainty, plastic coffee pots, the egotistical writer who fights his mortality, etc. Henry David Thoreau spoke of “living deliberately” – a vital message when nearly everything in our lives now comes shrink-wrapped.