Chiseled from wood, Aleph Geddis’ spindly, playful, vaguely alien wooden sculptures evoke an enigmatic tension between identity and glyph. His organic, hand-worked objects teeter between abstraction and figuration like retrofuturistic icons. The artist lives between Japan, Bali, and Orcas Island in Washington. “This split has been incredibly generative, allowing me to carry my practice with me and respond to very different environments and energies,” he tells Colossal.

Scale is a constant source of fascination. Geddis has recently been working on a series he calls Littles, which are “inspired by the way children disappear into dreamy, imaginative worlds while playing with toys,” he says. “They feel personal and secretive, almost like talismans.”

On the larger side, Geddis is lately considering how pieces may transform into site-specific responses to environments. He’s also currently working on a large-scale project for the Burning Man festival amid Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which people will be able to walk through. “I love the idea of these forms existing in the clean, open environment of the playa, where they can be experienced at a completely different scale and in relation to the vast desert landscape.”

Some of Geddis’ works are currently on view at Crow Valley Gallery on Orcas Island alongside the work of his aunt, Kate Geddis. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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Misato Sano’s studio is replete with piles of wooden offcuts, heavy lumber, woodworking equipment, and flowing natural light. The Miyagi-based artist has been sculpting charismatic dogs for several years, steadily adding more distinct characters to her growing pack.

Self-portraiture remains a consistent theme within Sano’s practice. Each dog evokes a different emotion mirroring the artist’s personality, ranging from shy and skittish to excited and silly. “Visualizing my inner self through expressions and gestures full of charm and humor has also become an opportunity to deepen my self-love,” she shares.

Sano’s distinctive woodcarving techniques are exemplary of the artist’s signature style. Dimpled surfaces, for instance, evoke different types of dog coats and allow for color variance to come through upon the finishing application of oil paint. Working with camphor wood, the sculptural exaggeration of physical features such as limbs, bulbous tufts of fur, and even nails add to the body of work’s playful appeal.

These rhythmic textures and amusing design choices have also lent themselves to explorations of embroidery and illustration. Meditative stitches and repetitive, gridded ink drawings are a continuation of the artist’s dialogue with herself.

Sano is gearing up for an exciting year. Later this month, her work will be on view in a duo exhibition at the Kan Hai Art Museum in Taiwan. In August, the artist’s work is traveling to the states for Nucleus Portland’s 10th anniversary show, before a third exhibition at Igoone Arai in her native Miyagi, Japan. Keep up with the artist’s tail-wagging adventures by following her on Instagram.

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As speculation about humans colonizing the moon and Mars ramps up, it’s increasingly likely that we’ll see attempts at living in places previously unthinkable. For Henry Wood, the potential for inhabiting Mars, in particular, has inspired a series of wooden figures with quite a turbulent backstory.

“The premise of this growing body of work is that in the not-too-distant future, humanity will establish a doomed colony on Mars,” he tells Colossal. Each figure has a specific history, their difficulties and demise carved into wood. The character he refers to as Scott, for example, found himself stranded at the South Pole, while an onslaught of ice from the sea buried Franklin. The title of the series fits this ill-fated adventure, too: We went to Mars and it was a disaster.

The idea for the collection began about a decade ago when the artist visited a Cairo museum and witnessed how conservators had reconfigured broken objects. “I am in awe of relics from Antiquity and wanted to imagine what it would be like in the distant future doing archaeology on other planets long after we had terraformed them,” he says. “I imagine them as statues or artifacts depicting great figures from Antiquity, resurrected from the ground and reconstructed to piece together the story of what went wrong on the Red planet.”

Each long-limbed adventurer takes several weeks to complete, with most of the pieces meticulously planned. Wood shares that sketchbooks are essential in mapping out his projects, and so is travel itself—although the artist doesn’t venture as far as his explorers. “I am visually interested in people, particularly in what their clothes say about them and their beliefs and values,” he says.

Wood prefers to gather materials as he travels or encounters objects that have a story. “I am always shipping bits of wood back to the workshop from wherever I am in the world,” he adds. Recent trips to the Pacific Northwest and Oaxaca allowed him to incorporate new tools and traditions, too. These emerge in the ways he often highlights the texture and grain of the wood and juxtaposes various techniques. “I love the contrast of tight acute angles alongside organic tears, splits, and fibers,” he adds.

Follow the artist’s process and keep an eye out for the latest adventurer to be added to the ranks on Instagram.

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Around a decade ago, Shinsuke Inoue sourced a piece of Japanese wood and carved a depiction of his child, “wanting to preserve their likeness in three dimensions,” the artist tells Colossal. The affectionate expression of a loved one in sculptural form spurred a new passion for woodcarving, specifically with an emphasis on the human figure.

Inoue’s pieces possess a kind of elemental groundedness or gravity that makes their restrained, sometimes hard-to-read expressions remarkably alluring. The figures often look straight ahead, and at the right angle, they make powerful eye contact with the viewer. And not unlike the way a small, meaningful smile or tiny frown can emerge from the most minute twitch of facial muscles, the striking characters are physically diminutive, but their inner emotional worlds are infinite.

Inoue works intuitively, allowing the material’s natural qualities to guide his hand. “I have virtually no idea what the finished piece will look like until I actually begin working with the wood,” he says. “As a result, the form often emerges as I carve, and I frequently change my plans midway through the process. Naturally, I keep the many failures a secret.” He always carves using hand tools and rarely titles the pieces.

The artist also references people he’s close to, along with strangers he passes on the street or sees photographs of, but his sculptures aren’t realistic depictions of specific individuals. Instead, Inoue concentrates on capturing a kind of universal expression of “the very essence of human existence… I hope that the inherent appeal of the wood, combined with its form and color, resonates to convey the essence of humanity itself.”

See more on Instagram.

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