Aspen Golann is a woodworker, artist, and educator whose furniture and objects bridge traditional techniques with a contemporary perspective. Through her hand-built work, she examines questions of history, labor, and memory. In this conversation, she talks about where her love of making began, how her practice has grown, and the importance of finding and building community in craft.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: When did you first realize you wanted to be an artist and how did you first get into woodworking?

Aspen Golann: I knew I’d always wanted to be an artist, but it took me a long time to get started. I didn’t begin woodworking until my 30th birthday, though I was a crafter much earlier. I used to sit in the library aisles looking at how-to manuals on everything from welding to architectural drafting. But, like many women, I had to figure out on my own that I wanted to try woodworking, and once I did, I had to find a way to learn.

When I decided to give art a real try, I had lots of ideas but absolutely no material know-how. At that moment, all I wanted was to learn to speak a craft language. I wanted all the moves, all the info, and all the options going forward. So I looked for programs that were as technical as possible, and in 2018, I enrolled at The North Bennet Street School (NBSS) in Boston, MA, one of the oldest industrial schools in the country, to study 17th–19th century American hand-tool woodworking.

After NBSS I had the privilege of working with incredible makers who became mentors and friends. I also took and taught classes in furniture, and over the last two years have had the privilege of managing the wood studio at Penland. After a few years there I took the leap and went full time for myself in the studio.

I want to say quickly: it took me a long time to begin to believe that I could actually be an artist. And now that I’m on the other side, I can say that while it’s wonderful, there’s definitely something terrifying about realizing that a dream I never thought was possible suddenly is. It rewrote my plans for the future in an instant. It changed how I pictured the shape of my whole life.

Jessica: What stories are embedded in the objects you make and how do you hope viewers read them?

Aspen: I’d say that both in my studio and in my classroom, my work is about reinterpreting and reclaiming historical craft. It’s about finding avenues of relevance and accessibility, and helping it continue to evolve in new ways and as a reflection of the communities who practice it.

More specifically, I was one of the only queer and female-identifying students in my woodworking program. I thought a lot about what it meant to be a queer woman trained in the aesthetics and processes of early American furniture making, an era and field in which I would not have been welcome. I kept wondering whether the beauty of those objects could really be separated from the classism, racism, misogyny, and culture that produced them. My answer was no. I believe all objects carry with them the cultural context of their creation, and that information is critical to any contemporary reading of them.

Fortunately, right as I became aware of this odd blend of beauty and brutality in the craft I was learning, I realized two things. First, I was being trained in the aesthetic language of white colonial power. Second, I could use that language as a tool to lay bare its history and speak honestly about myself.

The problematic history of these symbols became beacons for me, and furniture became a foil for my socialization as a woman. I now make pieces that use the language of traditional furniture, like marquetry and glasswork, to highlight the parallels between the roles of furniture and traditional female domestic roles: the way both welcome, host, bear weight, and perform invisible labor. I started to look at those 18th- and 19th-century American furniture pieces as bodies, facsimiles of myself, and as vessels for storytelling — not just about colonialism of the past, but about how power, control, and oppression exist today. My large-scale work combines 19th-century clock, chair, and cabinet forms with female subjects, making furniture that is both personal and historical, work that simultaneously celebrates and subverts the history of American decorative arts. My smaller works riff on common domestic objects, while formally stretching the boundaries of function, playfully expressing the internal lives of the people who wield them.

Even as my work has become more abstract, I notice I still play in the domestic sphere. I make a lot of broom, brush, and spoon sculptures, not as furniture objects but as implements of domestic labor.

Jessica: Beautiful. What role does community play in your practice?

Aspen: I know I already said it, but it bears repeating: it can be really hard to find a way into woodworking. Part of it is finding spaces where you make sense to yourself and to others. For me, I made sense to myself when I was making sculptures out of wood, but I wasn’t surrounded by people who I made sense to. Finding that second piece was critical. It’s not just about doing the work you want to do, it’s about finding people who understand what you want, and who deeply respect and connect with your approach to making meaning in life. 

I say that because it became the core of a problem for me. A few years into working for myself, I saw that the more I grew professionally — writing more, teaching more, working on bigger projects — the more demographically homogeneous the field got around me. I began to feel debilitated by the lack of community, and I felt stuck. The invisibility of being the only woman or the only queer person in the space was stunting my faith that I’d ever be seen clearly by the world around me. Existing in a space without community was in turn messing with my capacity to express myself. I was angry but also hopeful.

The Chairmaker’s Toolbox came directly out of that feeling. It was fueled by this mix of anger and hope, the overwhelming knowledge that something needed to change, and the feeling that maybe it really could change. I fixated on Windsor chairmaking because it doesn’t require a large, expensive shop, just a warm, dry place with basic electricity. The process requires way fewer tools than machine woodworking, and while the tools might be unusual, they’re not many.

So I applied for the Mineck Fellowship with the idea of buying not just one set of Windsor tools, but eight. That way I could travel and teach sliding-scale and free classes for people outside the usual woodworking bubble. I won the fellowship, and that’s how The Chairmaker’s Toolbox was born. I started teaching, then other green woodworkers joined in and started teaching free classes out of their own shops. Only four years later, greenwood chairmaking is one of the most diverse areas in woodworking. A lot of new makers on the scene had their first chair experience with us, and now some of them are teaching. Big craft schools are adding green woodworking tools to their inventories.

What I’ve learned is that so many makers were dissatisfied with the way things were: with homogeneous classrooms, with barriers to access, with how hard it is to make a living in this field. But no one really knew what to do about it. The Chairmaker’s Toolbox gave people a mission they could rally around and an administrative system that translated their desire to help into schedulable action. All we had to do to get it started was say, “You could teach a free class.” And people responded, “Hell yeah, I’ll do that.”

At a certain point it got too big for me to manage alone, so I reached out to people who I knew shared a real passion for change. Amazingly, years later many of them are still volunteering their time.

My biggest takeaway is that people want more for this community. Greenwood chairmaking turned out to be the perfect doorway in, but at the heart of it, what people needed was a structure and a community that let them share what they had.

Another more personal way I’ve built my community is through intentional collaborations. I’ve worked on big projects with Greg Pennington, who’s a Windsor chairmaker in Tennessee, with Peter Galbert here in New Hampshire, and I did a museum fellowship with my friend Kelly Harris. Bringing people together through projects has been incredibly fruitful. And then teaching at Penland School of Craft gave me this network of people who also chose the same improbable lifestyle. Practically and emotionally, knowing these people and growing alongside them has meant the world to me.

Jessica: To build off of what you were just saying about how much the field has changed in the last five years, what do you think the future of woodworking is going to be like?

Aspen: I’m starting to feel that the future of woodworking is going to skew toward objects whose form and texture are dictated by the hand, as opposed to being controlled by a metal bed or something that’s always held at 90 degrees.

I guess it’s not really a profound sentiment. Maybe we’re drawn to what feels rare. In a world where handmade objects are vanishing and mechanization blurs the line between natural and artificial, the return of something crafted by hand feels extraordinary. To hold a spoon infused with seventeen hours of someone’s dedicated focus is to hold something spectacular.

Some of it I think is pushback against the omnipresence of highly machined surfaces, smooth molded plastic, and faux finishes. I’m seeing a resurgence of intelligently-crafted objects that proudly display hand tool marks, asymmetry, and other evidence that they were made by a person.

The value in studio furniture and objects of the ’90s was often the maker’s ability to almost delete themselves from the process. A viewer might say, “Wow, that table is amazing because it’s so smooth, so round. It looks like it was made by a machine, how incredible.” But now, machines and their surfaces are everywhere, so it doesn’t surprise me that the value has flipped. Now I think a furniture object is exquisite because of the evidence of the hand and the irregularity produced by skilled labor and real materials.

I see the same thing in my teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. Even among students whose primary goal is to “get it right,” they’re more compelled by skillful marks that reveal the subtle inconsistencies of humanity than by the kind of skill that erases them completely.

Jessica: To close, I'm curious what the USA Fellowship has afforded you?

Aspen: Until I started making work professionally, I thought its main purpose was just to give me a space to communicate with myself — a rare, ungovernable space where I could materialize my inner world. But as I made more and more work that resonated with me, I realized there was another step. I wanted that work to communicate with, and exist alongside, the work other people were making. The desire for my work to have agency in the world wasn’t going anywhere.

That’s where the USA Fellowship has been transformative. As a professional maker, one of the biggest challenges is time — not just time to physically make, but time to reflect on what you’re doing and why. The fellowship gave me that space. It was also a huge vote of confidence. So often it feels like you’re the only one believing in yourself, and then suddenly this group of people — who care not just about individual artists but about the health of the field as a whole — saw my work as relevant, healthy, and good for it. For a moment, I got to see it that way too.

It’s given me more faith in the larger-scale impact of my work, and the courage to invest in more complicated projects. It’s become easier to believe my instincts are valid signposts. On a practical level, it allowed me to slow down, reassess my direction, and point myself toward riskier, more challenging work.

It also connected me to artists outside my direct medium. Because it’s not a medium-specific award, I got to see my work placed in the same cohort as metalworkers, performance artists, and others who are engaging with culture through totally different means. That made me appreciate the specificity of what I do, while also feeling part of something bigger. To feel valid in your specificity and relevant in a broader cultural context at the same time — that’s rare, and it’s been incredibly fertile ground for me.

Jessica: Is there anything else that you wanted to share?

Aspen: Just that if you’ve always secretly wanted to become fluent in a material, and you identify as an outsider in woodworking, you should probably apply for a class with The Chairmaker’s Toolbox.

I’ll also say this: I get really intimidated by a blank page. Too many choices pile up and it feels overwhelming. Furniture isn’t a blank page. When you walk in to make a chair, you’re stepping into a creative space that already has rules, boundaries, and structure. For me, those constraints have been creative catalysts. I actually play more bravely in a fenced area, and I think that’s worth naming because so much of the art education I received was concept-based.

So for anyone who finds themselves drawn to constraints — there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with loving rules and finding yourself more creative within them. Finding a material whose limitations excite you rather than frustrate you has been the keystone for me and for so many craft artists I know who have built their careers.