Alexandra Climent and her time spent among trees: A love story
By Alison Green
Photography by Nicholas Routzen
Creative Direction Laura Ferrara
Alexandra Climent’s story has many layers, much like the extraordinary material she uses to make her art. As the self taught woodworker walks me through it from the sun-soaked living room of the new home she shares with her partner and pup in Narrowsburg, I catch myself interrupting to gasp out awestruck questions like, “how did you not give up?” which I asked not once but twice during our conversation. Her answer is accompanied by a hearty laugh and an easygoing humility that comes naturally: “I still ask myself that! I asked myself that yesterday.”
Her story is about many overlapping things: resilience, resourcefulness, the hard won magic of chipping away at something the world didn’t think you could do, the lifelong practice of carving out space for yourself – mentally, physically, and creatively. It’s an adventure story that opens in the dense rainforest of South America and comes full circle to the idyllic, tree-lined hamlet of Narrowsburg. But most of all, her story is a love story.
Like all juicy love stories, it took a few twists and turns to get to where she is now, designing and hand carving exquisite wooden objects from her home studio, harmoniously surrounded by a sea of trees. It’s a cosmic coincidence she has clocked: “It’s crazy that I’ve gone all the way down to the jungle to find nature, and it’s been so close this whole time, only two hours away from the city. I’ve found myself working with material from the jungle in my own personal forest. Just to be up here and have so much space and feel nature all around me and let that be something that’s coming into my practice is inspiring. I’m excited to see what that’s going to bring out in me as an artist.”
In order to understand what’s behind Climent’s craft, which ranges from bowls, boxes, and worry eggs to stunningly sculptural music stands and commissioned furniture, you first have to understand a feeling. There are certain parts of nature that, when you bear witness to them, feel a bit like falling in love. It’s an inexplicable feeling, both humbling and expansive, reshaping the soft core of you just by being in the presence of it. I felt this way this past spring, as I watched two tiny hummingbirds poke their beaks out of a nest on my porch. These things make the world go quiet except for the thrum of your own heartbeat. Every piece that Climent painstakingly crafts is a love letter to that feeling, which she experienced when she first laid eyes on a rare dense wood native to the tropical jungles of Panama.
She was in college at the time, working at a construction firm in New York City and found herself in the jungle sourcing a certain type of tropical hardwood so thick and heavy it’s nearly indestructible. She had never been to South America, barely even been on an airplane, and her only experience with rainforests was the Rainforest Café. She knew nothing about woodworking. But she has always been curious and courageous, and her father, who was a musician and one of her biggest influences, had instilled in her an artistic sensibility, though she had never really tapped into it. That all changed when she saw the wood. Call it fate, call it magic, call it the muse – what happened was that feeling. What happened was something about that wood spoke to her.
“Just to be up here and have so much space and feel nature all around me and let that be something that’s coming into my practice is inspiring.”
“I saw how beautiful it was and just wanted to find some way to share that beauty with other people. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do with it but the fact that it could just go to waste or never be seen was crazy to me. It was like finding a gemstone when you’re mining.”
For Climent, the material has always been the medium and the message. The function has always been about spotlighting the form. Even now, years later, as she takes on large commissioned projects, she returns to that feeling and lets the wood guide her work: “My designs are intricate but I also keep them simple to showcase the wood. I follow the way the grain is moving and the way it naturally flows. I don’t want the design to take away from the beauty.”
The wood is undeniably breathtaking. Thick as bone, it’s naturally dyed with rich russet, brown, and grainy blond hues that blur together warmly. It’s one of the things that makes Climent’s pieces so entrancing – you want to touch them. They radiate something mystical, something magnetic.
But like all living things in rainforests, which cover only about 3% of the earth’s surface but house almost half of our animal species, these trees are constantly facing the threat of deforestation and looming climate catastrophe.
That’s one of the many twists in this love story – the beauty of the wood woke her up to the beauty of the rainforest, and inspired a staunch desire to share this sublime wood in a way that encompasses the rainforest itself, a way that was responsible, respectful, and sustainable. She didn’t want to be another person cutting down trees.
So she started working with local tribes to find fallen trees (the arrangement was mutually beneficial: the dead trees would often block rivers and roads) and pledged to only repurpose wood that had “lived its full life.”
The wood felt like a talking point, albeit an aesthetically striking one, for the larger issue at hand. “It felt like the wood has served its purpose and now it’s my duty to show it to people, because the different characteristics of this wood speaks so much to climate change. This wood is some of the most dense in the world, so it’s difficult to work with, but one of the paybacks of that is just being able to look at it and see the rainforest. Looking at this piece of wood, seeing all those years within each line, how could you ever want to destroy this part of the world? You can see the drier years when the rings are more open and the wetter years when it was raining a lot. A tree just has so much to tell us, especially when it was living in the jungle.”
With help from locals, including a family with an organic farm that she returns to a few times a year to plant seeds and aid in reforestation, Climent was able to ship two containers of wood back to New York City, after fighting through a few years worth of red tape. But neither bureaucracy nor hardwood can match her steely willpower. “Everything I’ve done with the wood has been difficult,” she laughs. “But I’m stuck with it! There’s just something about that wood and the life that it’s lived down there that is so special to me.”
“I walk out the door and breathe fresh air and look at trees and all that energy flows into my work.”
Stilllife Photography by Nicholas Mehedin
Back in New York City, her love story started looking more like a modern day remake of The Sword in the Stone. She spent months driving around the tri-state area to different woodshops, and kept getting the same answer: the wood was impossible to work with. It was too strong for their blades to cut. “It was heartbreaking,” she sighs. “These carpenter guys would try to impress me and run it through a saw and it would just totally rip the blade. It made me realize it wasn’t just all in my head. A lot of their skills didn’t even apply to this kind of material. I had to make up my own process as I went along.”
She kept her full time job, and threw herself into following the divine call of the wood in her spare time. She finally found someone willing to cut one of her thick slices of wood (known, charmingly enough, as cookies), which left her with a thinner cut that she sanded into a tabletop. From there, she continued to learn and evolve. “I would just experiment with different power tools. I broke lots of blades and eventually started using things that were made for metal.” Finally, after a humbling amount of trial and error, and an unhealthy amount of blood, sweat, and tears, Climent honed in on her practice.
This is the point in our conversation where I ask again, incredulously, what kept her from giving up. “I was just too far gone that point! Once I started sanding and seeing those unbelievable colors come out, it kept me going. I couldn’t believe nature produced this. I couldn’t believe woodworkers used stains!”
As her following has grown, sustainability remains a touchstone in Climent’s work, attracting a clientele that appreciates how her careful craftsmanship rebels against our consumerist culture: “Most people I sell to are interested in the story of how the wood got into my hands. Hopefully, whoever has them in their home is able to contemplate their beauty and how we can’t afford to let that beauty go. I hope they serve as talking points to bring these issues up. Also, the wood being so dense is another aspect of sustainability. It will last for generations – it will last forever.”
Climent’s story is not one of man triumphing over nature. It’s a story about two forces of nature – wood and woman – and the strange, special beauty that occurs when you follow what speaks to your soul, no matter the challenges you face. It’s a story about those certain parts of nature that feel a little bit like falling in love, and how we must work to honor and protect them, because they save us from ourselves.
After years of toting wood down crowded Brooklyn sidewalks, it feels serendipitous that Climent has ended up in peaceful Narrowsburg, with its vibrant artistic community and ample room for creativity to roam wild. Here, she is never too far from a tree. And though none can compare to the wood that changed her life, that isn’t to say they aren’t working their magic. “I love that the woods are right in the backyard. I walk out the door and breathe fresh air and look at trees and all that energy flows into my work. I never thought I could live in the country, but I came up here and I almost felt like I was able to be more of myself. It was just a sigh of relief.”
