Artist Highlight - Theophane Ingold

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.