"When the Hammer Has a Hole"

These are custom wooden elements that my sister, the incredible fiber artist Kira Dominguez-Hultgren, and I concocted for her piece: "When the Hammer Has a Hole", featured at the Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco.

I used local New Jersey black walnut, pinned together with custom dowels made of salvaged beech (street score!) and oak.

I needed to use joinery that was strong enough to carry the strong tension of the weavings, but also remain knock-together/ knock-apart for easy onsite assembly & disassembly. As an aesthetic piece, it also needed to be beautiful but not distracting. I dig the joint that I came up with to solve this challenge:

Once I'd built everything, I rolled it all up in 5 layers of cardboard and shipped it in a giant poster tube built from concrete forms to San Francisco. This apparently is Kira's usual (and original) method for shipping her pieces across the country, but for me, as a first timer, I got a huge kick out of leaning this massive dinosaur leg against the tiny counter at FedEx and saying, "hi, um, I'd like to ship this, thing, to San Francisco?"

Kira describes her piece, and our collab, excellently on her website and Instagram:

+1 for sibling power!