Harwood makes career out of unconventional craft

Contrary to an all-too-popular assumption by many Charlestonians, when Ashley Harwood sits at her Turning Native booth at the Farmers Market in Marion Square on Saturdays, she is selling her own work.

For three years now, creating quality, long lasting handmade bowls out of native and otherwise abandoned wood has been Harwood's full-time job. Always artistically inclined and particularly compelled to work with her hands, Harwood graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 with an art degree and a focus on sculpture and installation. Harwood's intentions to blow glass for a living quickly took a change of course due to the resource and funding intensive nature of glass blowing, which requires a furnace to stay at 2,100 degrees at all times. Harwood's father had been turning since she was a child and when she asked him to teach her how to make a bowl he was immediately supportive. However, Harwood says that her glass blowing background has informed her wood turning technique in regards to thoughts of practical shaping and techniques when dealing with spinning a medium.

"This (woodturning) ended up being something that is still a lot of equipment, but it's easier to do in my garage," Harwood said with a chuckle.

That garage in West Ashley is indeed bursting with the implements of her labors: shelves of drying bowls, work benches with tools, face masks, respirators, a network of cords and hoses, two large lathes that are used for actually spinning the wood as Harwood shaves it down and everywhere a layer of dust and wood chips anywhere from a light dusting to two feet deep. A defeated broom leans against a wheelbarrow overflowing with curly strings of wood shavings.

Harwood's time and labor intensive process begins when she finds a piece of wood on the side of the road or notices someone taking down a tree, like the live oak being cut down in the Byrnes Downs neighborhood that she rescued from a going to the landfill. Other times people hear about her work and offer their trees to give them new life.

"I really like being able to reuse these things that would have been discarded," Harwood says. "I don't want to sound like a hippie or whatever, but I think that trees are really important."

Instead of importing exotic species of tree like many woodturners, she chooses to highlight the beauty of the Lowcountry's native trees in an effort to spread her appreciation to others.

Carefully choosing how to cut pieces of wood to showcase the natural features of the wood, be it the feather design found at the crotch of a tree or the intricate weaving pattern found in the large bural growths, is the most important design process, and accounts for 80-90 percent of the artistic decisions.

Harwood then mounts the 75-100 pound, moisture rich chunks of wood onto the lathe, which she received from a fellow woodturner in New Orleans who had no use for the rusty fixer-upper that had weathered Hurricane Katrina under his porch. To prevent accidents, Harwood slowly rough turns each piece in about four hours before she lets it dry for six to eight months. For some pieces, though, she speeds the process along by placing the bowls in a 115 degree kiln which she fashioned from a used $10 refrigerator from Habitat for Humanity and a 40 watt light bulb, which can decrease the drying time to six weeks sometimes. Once a piece is dry, a finishing round of turning that smoothes and thins out the bowl can take from two to eight hours.

Another option, that frequently sells the fastest is to do all of the turning while the piece is wet and then hand sand the warped bowl once it dries, enabling Harwood to leave a natural bark-like edge to the bowl.

Though for 40 hours a week she is focusing on cranking out larger quantities of bowls. Since this is her first year at the farmer's market, Harwood has many ideas to experiment with in the future. She is turning some gorgeously perfect spheres into bud vases, while experimenting with paints instead of her typical walnut oil treatment and even contemplating filling some interesting knots, cracks and crevices with powdered glass.

And how did this increasingly successful artist score such a perfect last name for her craft? Well, though there is no "d" in the middle of Harwood like many people imply, hard-headedness is a common trait in the clan of dreamers she comes from. A brand of Canadian whiskey that bears the name said it perfectly in Harwood's opinion: "You can tell a Harwood, but you can't tell them much."

"We've always been known for our creativity, handiness and stubbornness," she said with a mischievous smile.