In 2016, Matt would find his way back to furniture and back alongside his father, 80 years old at this point but still working in his furniture shop daily. This presented an opportunity to hone his skills and knowledge of the tools and machines in the shop and to soak in the wisdom from his fathers 40 years of experience designing and building custom furniture. While this was Matt’s first experience working full time as a furniture maker, the shop was not a foreign place to him as he had often used it for small projects for himself as well as an informal design consultant when his father was in need of a fresh set of eyes. This experience reignited Matt’s love of wood as a material, and it also inspired him to think of the common crossover areas of these two materials: Wood and Clay. Being that one is of the earth and the other sprouts from it, Matt felt it was only natural to work in both fields, at times even blending them into singular projects.
About
Matt Johnson grew up in and around his father’s furniture shop. He was surrounded by the smell of fine hardwoods and the sounds of those woods being shaped by hand tools into beautiful pieces of custom furniture. Through this experience, he gained an innate understanding of the amount of patience and respect for the process that it takes to transform raw woods into beautiful, functional pieces of furniture. As a teenager, Matt was introduced to the ceramic arts in a high school class, and he immediately recognized a part of himself imbedded in these processes.
Continuing these studies in college alongside art history, painting, block printing and literature, Matt began a journey in finding the commonalities that were intrinsic in all of these art forms. His love of organic, figurative work began to come through in both the ceramic forms (both sculptural and functional) he was working with as well as some of his early wood sculptures and furniture designs. After his formal education, Matt moved to the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado in 1998 and took on the directorship of a small non profit community ceramics studio, where he would teach all ages of children and adults while pursuing his own sculpture and pottery.
“Surrounding oneself with furniture that is custom designed and built from beautiful hardwoods brings one’s attention to how we move through space, and how we connect to that space when we are still.”
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