Four-Tier Birch Bowl

What is it about a big chunk of wood that is so interesting? It must have to do with some unconscious attraction to unadulterated nature. Maybe that's why we like working and living with wood--a natural material that reminds us that we're part of nature too. It's familiar in a deep sense.

Well, that's all I could come up with for why I like this Four-Tier Birch Bowl from Finnish wood artist Markku Kosonen. He's got a lot of interesting and beautiful things on his website, most quite different from this bowl. The only thing that have in common is that they're made of wood.

[Thanks Offset blog]

Designer Firewood

As readers of this blog know, I enjoy just about everything that's made of wood, and typically appreciate the more unusual applications. But I think I found the limit to my appreciation. Boing Boing Gadgets featured a piece this week about a Berlin-based artist, Nicolas Fischer, who created a sculpture of the world's gross domestic product with the worlds derivatives volume as a statistical map cnc-milled in wood. Kind of a neat idea. But when the result is that ugly, there's only one place for that sculpture: the fireplace! What am I not seeing here? Click image for larger view, or better yet, don't.