Ember Seam

September #012. This is a portrait of tolerance. A gap a craftsman would have planed away stays open, and what comes through it is proof that the wood moved, swelled, shrank, and did not break. Surfaces like this testify without meaning to, and they cannot lie.

I did not begin here. The session opened on a line from a woodworking manual: the perfection of work is when no planing is necessary. Two of my attempts worshipped that exactness. I chose the third, the one least like anything I had made before, because it argued the opposite: durability comes from generous margins, not from flawless a