Hall Quarry furniture craftsman goes with - and against - the grain

When I was a little girl, I used to worry that the animal-themed furniture in our living room would walk around at night. The legs were fashioned after lion claws, atop of which were roaring lion heads. I imagined each piece stalking across the room at night — and it didn’t help that my older siblings would rearrange the furniture to prove the point.

If I had grown up with Joseph Tracy’s studio furniture, however, I’m convinced I would have had more delightful fantasies of water play, dancing and flying. A Tracy table can create the illusion of a waterfall, a draping cloth, or the sense that the wood willfully defied laws of physics and meandered over the edge, freezing into a smooth, shimmering ripple.

Since the 1970s, Tracy has been ensconced on Mount Desert Island, when he arrived fresh from the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology to build a timber-frame house as his master’s degree project. But island life suited him, and he decided to build another house for his family and a workshop for his furniture-making. Along the way, Wendell Gilley Museum of Bird Carving in Southwest Harbor and the Jordan Pond House in Acadia National Park commissioned him to build furniture or other items.

Eventually, word got around about Tracy, and wealthy homeowners hired him to design furniture for their summer places or elaborate mantels for their rustic-chic cottages. Tracy’s signature is a curvy, illusory, reflective or airy quality. A sitting bench makes an unexpected bend. A round dining table folds into a giant shield. A popple stone stands unexplainably beneath a lampshade.

News of Tracy’s woodworking traveled other places, too. His furniture — made from mahogany, cherry, maple and other wood — is in galleries in Maine, New York and in the permanent collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Through March 4, 2007, a grouping of cabinets by Tracy is part of the exhibition “Inspired by China: Contemporary Furnituremakers Explore Chinese Traditions” at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The show combines more than two-dozen examples of historic Chinese furniture with as many works created specifically for the exhibition by artists from the U.S., Canada, Japan and China.

Tracy’s elegant cabinet combines wenge, a blackish wood from Cameroon, split Sequoia redwood from California, Indonesian red palm and Lebanon cedar. The foundation is a wavy bridge, a walkway of sorts between the five tables that flank or hold the three cabinets. The inspiration for the cabinet, said Tracy, is a tangram, or Chinese puzzle table with seven moveable pieces. His folded puzzle cabinet has eight pieces including cabinets, stands and end tables, all of which can be reorganized into a variety of arrangements. He came up with the idea during a three-day workshop held at the Peabody, where the participating artists gathered to view the traditional pieces.

“I’ve never done anything quite like this,” said Tracy, sitting on a bench — a speculative piece with an estimated value of $12,000 — at his Hall Quarry workshop, which houses a random selection of his work as well as Barbie Doll-size models. “I’ve never been challenged to do a piece inspired by culture.”

Yet culture has been inspiring him since 1969, when he saw a contemporary craft show at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., and it changed his post-high-school amble to all-out drive. He saw the show, and also saw his future: in furniture design. Not long after, he enrolled in the program at Rochester with the legendary designer Wendell Castle. During a six-year period, Tracy learned from the master. He also lost the tips of three fingers — a not-so-unusual hazard of the job.

The Chinese show, which features a variety of decorative arts, is not the first time the Peabody curators have organized an exhibition that is as much about cultural exchange as it is about asking living artists to respond to history. In 1989, Edward S. Cooke Jr., guest curator at the Peabody, issued a similar challenge to craft artists who studied American furniture for a show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. China and America have a long history of exchanging furniture traditions, but, in recent years, studio furniture makers in the U.S. have had a renewed interest in Chinese styles, not to mention cultural exchange. After all, creativity and innovation are often stimulated by cultural experiences, said Cooke.

“When we picked the people for this show, we thought we would see responses to the material, the forms, the joinery,” said Cooke, professor of American decorative arts at Yale University. “What we saw was that a lot of people responded to the broader cultural aspects. I thought it was wonderful the way Joe responded to the Chinese interest in natural forms but with a degree of artifice.”

Which brings us back to the walking furniture of my childhood. In his comment, Cooke was referring to three medallions of redwood that bejewel the front of each cabinet. They look like Chinese opera masks, or cascading tresses, or a triumvirate of woodland wizards. The ambiguity, the sleight-of-hand, is very Tracy. So is a sense that any moment, these burls of wood could come to life. Or that you could easily rearrange the cabinets to form a new world.

And in that regard, the wood and the artist are co-creators. It wouldn’t be excessive to say that a few years ago, Tracy, who grew up in Ohio and Michigan, became obsessed with the Great Sequoias in a region of northern coastal California known as the Redwood Empire. “While I was looking at the redwood, I saw some of it split along these curly lines,” said Tracy. “I was dumbstruck by the energy and beauty of these pieces that were basically scrap.” He bought some planks, had them shipped back to Maine and sent a large chunk to a veneer mill in Idaho. He wound up with 4,000 square feet of curly redwood veneer. Or as he calculates: “a lifetime supply.”

It took Tracy three days of splitting redwood pieces, however, to get the medallions for the cabinets. He does not say what they represent to him, but relishes the imaginative fancy of others. “There’s no wrong answer,” he said. “It’s basically your own personal Rorschach test. If there is some mystery, I feel there is a success.”

That’s one of the reasons Joel Avila, Tracy’s one employee, likes working in the large shop that has band saws, jigsaws, sanders, presses — to name only a few of the machines that make furniture construction possible. The repetition of cutting, say, posts of Alaskan yellow cedar for a series of folding screens, can get monotonous. But boredom, said Avila, is “not an issue here because each piece is unique. We reinvent the wheel with each project. There’s a lot of problem solving. It’s a physical and mental challenge at the same time.”

So much so that Tracy constantly contemplates the next step for the undulating lines of redwood. “I’m love-struck by this stuff,” he said. “I just can’t get over it.” He lies awake at night ruminating over design problems. Which is far better than lying awake thinking about lions walking around in shadowy rooms in the middle of the night.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at aanstead@bangordailynews.net.