14 March 2026
Artist Highlight - Theophane Ingold
Interview and Review
Theophane Ingold (1996) is a French artist working with wood, light, and material experimentation. He trained for four years with the Compagnons du Devoir as a timber framer before completing a Bachelor in applied arts and traditional chairmaking at École Boulle in Paris. He later attended La Cambre in Brussels for postgraduate studies in industrial design, before returning fully to workshop practice.
He spent a year and a half training with Nicolas Souchet, one of France’s leading chairmakers, and has been based in New York since 2024, working at Atelier Jouffre.
Alongside this, he develops an independent research practice around a translucent wood material made from hand-planed shavings ; a hybrid of craft, light, and surface.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. Shavings Column transforms hand-planed wood shavings into a luminous surface. What first drew you to treat these by-products of woodworking as a material in their own right?
Woodworking is often associated with loud machines and technical precision. But what I enjoy most in the workshop is a very simple gesture: planing wood and watching the shavings curl out of the blade.
There is something almost childlike about it ; long, light spirals of wood appearing from the surface of the board.
At some point I realized I simply wanted to keep doing that gesture. Instead of sweeping the shavings away, I began looking for a way to make them the material itself.
When light passes through them, it is no longer wood we see, but the inside of the tree, almost as if it had been placed under a microscope.
2. The process begins with the repetitive gesture of planing wood. How does this slow, physical action influence the development of the final form?
Woodworking usually demands great discipline and precision, and my mind has never been very good at that. It tends to wander, and I struggle with the strict logic of measurements or symmetry.
But planing wood engages the body differently. The gesture requires attention and sensitivity rather than calculation: the body adjusts constantly, balancing relaxation and control to produce a perfect shaving.
The composition of the shavings continues this logic. Placing them one by one on the cylinder is a slow process where the mind can drift freely and intuition takes over. In that sense, Shavings Column almost reverses the traditional codes of woodworking.
3. Wood is typically understood as a solid and structural material. What interests you about exploring its fragile, almost paper-like qualities?
In the workshop we already know that wood can be made flexible. Techniques like steam bending or laminated wood rely on this property by reducing the material to thinner layers.
My initial interest was to push this plasticity further. By working with shavings—the thinnest layer of wood produced by a hand plane—I could explore this flexibility at its extreme.
Over time my perception shifted. Instead of seeing wood as a structural material, I began to treat it like a skin wrapping around a form. At that scale the patterns of the wood become central—something our contemporary aesthetics often try to hide.
4. Within The Invisible Made Visible, your work reveals hidden qualities of wood usually lost in finishing processes. What do you hope viewers begin to notice differently about the material when encountering the piece?
What fascinates me about wood is that its appearance is never neutral. The color, the grain, the structure are all the result of survival strategies developed by the tree.
Oak produces tannins to protect itself from insects and fungi, this is why it's wood became ideal for wine barrels. Maple, which grows in colder climates, develops extremely fine vessels to resist freezing, creating the delicate speckled patterns that appear in Shavings Column.
Every wood looks the way it does for biological reasons.
Through the shavings and the light, I hope people begin to notice this hidden story, realizing that what they see is not just a material, but the trace of a living organism adapting to its environment.
LIGHT, GESTURE, AND THE INNER LIFE OF WOOD
REVIEW BY CHIH-YANG CHEN, ART DIRECTOR
Theophane Ingold’s practice emerges from a deep engagement with traditional woodworking while extending beyond its conventional boundaries. Trained as a timber framer and chairmaker, Theophane brings a strong understanding of structure and craft into a body of work that explores wood as a material of light, surface, and transformation. In Shavings Column, he turns one of the most overlooked by products of woodworking into the central material of the work, revealing an unexpected visual and sensory quality within the process of making.
The piece is composed of hand planed wood shavings carefully arranged around a cylindrical structure. In a typical workshop these thin curls of wood would be swept away as waste, yet Theophane treats them as a material in their own right. When layered and illuminated, the shavings form a translucent surface that captures and diffuses light. The result is a soft luminous column in which the material appears almost weightless, transforming the familiar solidity of wood into something delicate and atmospheric.
The making process plays an essential role in the development of the work. Each shaving begins with the repetitive gesture of planing wood, a movement that relies less on measurement than on sensitivity and rhythm. This slow and physical action continues in the careful placement of each shaving onto the surface of the column. Through this accumulation of small gestures, the work grows gradually, guided by intuition rather than strict structural logic. The process reveals a different relationship between craft and attention, where the act of making becomes a reflective and open ended exploration.
At the same time, Shavings Column invites a reconsideration of wood itself. Typically valued for its strength and structural capacity, the material is here presented in its most fragile state. Reduced to the thinnest layer produced by a hand plane, wood begins to behave more like a flexible skin than a solid mass. Patterns of grain and fibre become visible through light, exposing subtle details often hidden within finished objects.
Through this material transformation, Theophane encourages viewers to look more closely at the biological origins of wood. Grain patterns, colour variations, and textures are not simply aesthetic features but traces of the tree’s growth and adaptation. By allowing light to pass through these fragile layers, Shavings Column reveals the internal story of the material itself. The work becomes both an object of quiet contemplation and a reminder that wood carries the memory of a living organism within its surface.