Laura Mays Woodworking

Laura Mays Woodworking Laura Mays is a woodworker and educator in Northern California.

Obsidian “Sid” Mays, November 4 2009 - November 26 2025Sid had a wonderful ful life. He made friends easily, with his se...
11/28/2025

Obsidian “Sid” Mays, November 4 2009 - November 26 2025

Sid had a wonderful ful life. He made friends easily, with his self-confidence and charm, effortless good looks, athleticism, focus, intelligence, and kindness. He was a beautiful easy-going constant companion.

Sid was born in Loughrea, Co Galway, the darkest of his mother Ruby’s last litter. In January of 2010 he moved to Salruck in Connemara, where he bounded on Glassilaun beach and learned his traffic skills on the one-lane road out to Little Killary. In the summer of 2011 he moved to California, briefly to Caspar, then to Fort Bragg. He loved the bluffs and beaches of the Mendocino coast as much as he had enjoyed the west coast of Ireland. He could find a ball or pine cone or block of wood or other projectile in every situation, and a person to throw it. He is loved and missed by his family forever.

Photos

10/16/2025

A birthday bluff-buns present for my sweet❤️ Dunya, who loves the sounds of the coast.

Speaker from
Sinker OG redwood from one of the Mendocino rivers: the Navarro, the Albion, Big River, the Noyo…

Penland, part 2. Walking home in the dark on the penultimate night of the two week session, and every workshop, every bu...
07/28/2025

Penland, part 2. Walking home in the dark on the penultimate night of the two week session, and every workshop, every building, was blazing with last-minute energy. As I went past the ceramics studio. I heard what I thought was Viking carousing, and I imagined the group cheering each piece as it emerged from the kiln. I later learned that they were doing line dancing, and that seems every bit in the spirit of Penland.

Better photos and more information about this recent piece…“Like wings, like leaves, like feathers, like leaves”Black wa...
05/22/2025

Better photos and more information about this recent piece…

“Like wings, like leaves, like feathers, like leaves”
Black walnut, shellac, oil, hinges from Sanderson Hardware
315mm w x 160mm d x 560mm h
12.5” w x “6.3 d x 22” h

“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
Richard Powers, The Overstory

The mass at the center of a tree, essentially dead though providing structure, is the heartwood. In a walnut tree, the heartwood is rich and dark, like chocolate. The sapwood is the outer layers of the tree, just below the bark, and this where the sap flows between the roots and the leaves. In walnut the sapwood is a lighter color, and more grey than brown. Between the sap and the heartwood is the cambium layer, the cell producing layer: it is the alive part of the trunk. Each year it creates one new ring of heartwood. In this walnut the cambium is the almost bluish line than runs between the dark rich heartwood and the lighter sapwood.

My intention was to utilize these three conditions of the wood to make a tall, narrow and curved cabinet. The coopered doors curve inwards towards the heartwood. The cambium layer runs like a racing stripe through the interior and exterior.

Throughout this series of recent cabinets the intention has been to draw out a sensuality from the wood, and with that sensuality, hints of other things, whether those be parts of the body or other natural forms. Humans have a seemingly insatiable thirst to find likenesses, metaphors, to tell stories about the objects around them.

The name of this piece is taken from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, a fellow Dubliner, and a huge influence on my outlook on life.

It’s Spring! It’s Fundraiser time!How about a Mendo-Cabin-style Free Library to share the love of books and the local vi...
04/22/2024

It’s Spring! It’s Fundraiser time!
How about a Mendo-Cabin-style Free Library to share the love of books and the local vibe with neighbors and passersby?
It’s to raise funds for Montessori del Mar, the great little school where Thea is in 6th grade, one of a kind on the coast. The Montessori model of education is working so well for her, she’s able to pursue interests and projects with intrinsic motivation and determination (of which she has no lack), guided by her wonderful teachers.
I made the Free Library: it’s shingled in recycled old growth redwood, and has a vintage recycled window as its door; it has a solar light for those long evenings and a hand-shaped clasp/pull. I’ll throw in delivery on the coast from Eureka to the Bay Area, and advice about installation/mounting.
Tickets are $5 each and can be bought through Venmo
Write “Raffle ticket[s]’ in the comments.
The drawing will take place on June 14th.

Good luck! Tell your friends!

Later the same day, when the rain had set in harder and heavier, we drove through the depths of Armstrong woods, near Gu...
03/25/2024

Later the same day, when the rain had set in harder and heavier, we drove through the depths of Armstrong woods, near Guerneville on the Russian River. Dark dank, dripping. Hard to believe that much of it burnt in 2020. Moss nearly a foot thick in places. Then up and up , twisting and turning on a single lane, dubiously paved road to Pond Farm pottery in Austin Creek State Recreation Area. Another iconic, remarkable institution, run by the formidable potter, Marguerite Wildenhain from the 1940s until 1979. She fled from the N***s -twice - and ended up on a northern California hillside, passing on the pedagogy and principles of the Bauhaus to a generation of younger American ceramists. Every summer a group of devotes would arrive on the hilltop to work in the barn under her very particular tutelage, which involved much repetition until the movement became embedded in one’s hand and mind. The space itself is magical: an old, fairly modest barn, given an iconic outline with the addition of of a kind of peak or brow by the architect Gordon Herr (who was also the instigator of the whole enterprise). Beautiful vernacular working spaces, fascinating California history, craft pedagogy, engagement with material…what a fantastic afternoon!

Immense thanks to , who showed and me around her house in Inverness CA built by her father, JB Blunk. Blunk seems to m...
03/25/2024

Immense thanks to , who showed and me around her house in Inverness CA built by her father, JB Blunk.
Blunk seems to me to be at the same time the epitome and the peak of the land-based Northern California arts and crafters of the 50s 60s and 70s. He came back from Japan in the 1950s, with a bunch of almost arcane traditional ceramic skills which he transmogrified into an entire life, including the building of his idiosyncratic and beautiful house. I had seen photos of the house before, but I don’t think I had ever realized the degree of light and shadow in the spaces, nor the perfect modest scale. It was a rainy spring morning and the contrast between inside and outside light was strong.
The house is gorgeous: weird, inventive, fun, humble, perfectly poised on its beautiful site looking down into a misty wooded valley.

This little 510 stool has gone off to join a stellar line-up in the show “Seating Assignment: Women in Contemporary Chai...
03/15/2024

This little 510 stool has gone off to join a stellar line-up in the show “Seating Assignment: Women in Contemporary Chairmaking and Craft Education” at the wonderfully named Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem NC.

Here’s a little bit about the show:
“The inspiration for this exhibition came from another partnership: Salem’s Chair Library, a collaborative effort between the Sutton Initiative for Design Education (S.I.D.E.) and Salem College, is a unique resource not found at any other college or university in the country. The SIDE Chair Library is a growing archive of almost 50 chairs still in production and considered historically significant in the design field. Salem students, scholars, design professionals, and community members can not only visit the library to study these chairs; they are encouraged to interact with them—sit in them, turn them upside down, measure them, and ponder their design, construction, and materials.
Salem College’s women art and design students are the primary users of The SIDE Chair Library; however, their gender is not equitably represented by the designers featured. Initially conceived as a presentation for students from furniture maker, craft advocate, and Sawtooth’s 2023 Gondring Resident in Woodworking Rebecca Juliette-Duex, Seating Assignment has evolved into a first-of-its-kind survey exhibition highlighting contemporary female woodworkers and providing students and community members a practical opportunity to see themselves reflected in the field of contemporary craft.”
The show runs Saturday, March 23, 2024, through Saturday, May 11, 2024.

It feels weird to be sharing about this stool, this show, however benign and useful the show is, on this platform, where we can also witness in real time, a genoicde. What is going on? The powers that be, the people that are elected by us, could stop this, but yet they don’t listen. They obfuscate, they put in place ridiculous insubstantial measures that attempt to mitigate the violence and destruction. Where is democracy? Where is humanity?The cognitive dissonance is high, the tragedy is real. Permanent ceasefire now. Let the food in. Free Palestine.

03/13/2024

We’re excited and honored that the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah is curating Deep Roots, Spreading Branches, a show about all 43 years (and before, and into the future) of the Krenov School. More than just beautiful work (though there’s plenty of that), the show explores the philosophy of the school, the community it creates, why it draws people from far and wide to the little blufftop town of Fort Bragg to become immersed in wood and working it.
The show runs March 30 -August 18, with the opening party on April 5.

01/17/2024

It’s that time again: a new year, and the countdown to the Midwinter Show, the fruits of the labor of the first semester, unveiled, dusted, shiny (or not, as desired), and on view to the world.

The Show will again be the TC Space in Fort Bragg, as last year. 324 North Franklin Street. February 3-11, 10am - 6pm daily, with an opening reception on Friday, February 2nd, 5-8pm.

The beautiful, enigmatic, ambigram image is by Julia Farner, First Year student.

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Fort Bragg, CA
95437

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