I have always made art, but it wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realized I could earn a living by making ‘functional art’.

I studied art and philosophy in school – I never took a single design or architecture class. I didn’t pay much attention to design during the the first ten years or so I lived in NYC, and the objects I made were exclusively for art. My sculptures, which were sometimes used as elements in installations or conceptual art pieces, had gradually started to resemble utilitarian objects. Around the same time, people started asking me to build them things. I realized that there might be some overlap between the so-called artistic and the utilitarian and that my thinking about space and form was well-suited to design. Establishing limits is important in art, and I discovered I liked the constraints imposed by design: that the object, no matter how eccentric or expressive, still had to be capable of performing a function.

My creative process is organic and non-linear. Drawing and sculpting are important to my practice, but these often occur fairly late in the game. I spend a lot of time walking, reflecting and daydreaming; I try to open myself to ideas that occur through randomness and chance. Concepts born from these more aleatory moments usually bounce around in my head for a long time before I sit down to actually sketch them out. Occasionally a specific idea motivates research in a new direction – for instance, recently I became interested in the geological process of erosion, and I needed to learn about the geomorphology of erosion before embarking on design ideas.

I usually spend my mornings at home, reading, writing, and working on my computer. I arrive at my studio in Dumbo in the early afternoon. I’m often occupied with multiple projects at once – for example, right now I’m working on a couple of different commissions while at the same developing a new design for a lighting piece. Because many of my pieces involve a lot of gluing and clamping, I tend to jump from task to task in the studio. I might set something up to glue and then work on sculpting or sanding a piece that’s further along. I also take breaks to play the drums.

Since the early 2000s I’ve worked almost exclusively with stacked-laminate construction, a technique that relies on the careful laying- out of alternating grain patterns on parallel pieces of wood, overlapped in successive layers to build out a form. This is a process that is both additive and subtractive: once the layers are laminated together in a stair-like or topographical form, they are sculpted with handheld power tools to obtain the final, smooth surface. If engineered properly the stacked-laminate method can achieve outstanding strength and stability, while at the same time allowing for delicate curves and sinuous lines.

Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Guiseppe Penone, Ruth Asawa, Olafur Eliasson, Ron Nagle, Louise Bourgeois, Martin Puryear.

15. Is there anything you would like to add?