These bold prints of monochrome sunsets over cloudy oceans, in shades of orange and black, are embossed to give the clouds a beautiful depth and texture. These striking images are hand-rubbed prints on Japanese paper, pulled from wood blocks carved by nature.
Andrew's father cleared a lot on Bunker Hill Road in Canton, Connecticut and milled the trees himself into live-edge slabs, set to cure for ten to twenty years. Ten years in, fine dust began appearing between the slabs — powder post beetles, hardwood-only eaters, had moved in. Rather than carve a pattern himself, Andrew used their tunnels as the pattern source: each print records where a colony of beetles once lived.
The prints are made in two stages — first hand spoon-rubbed in ink onto handmade Japanese paper, then, once dry, embossed using a vacuum-veneering-press process Andrew invented, so the tunnels "puff out like clouds." A small handmade companion book, the Beetle Book, documents the beetles' life cycle and the guilt Andrew felt at both felling the trees and later killing their tenants, before closing on the line that gives the piece its name: "Are their vaulted free form cloud cathedrals inspired by earth, the home we all share?" The gallery here includes the book itself, page by page, alongside the prints.
The same beam used to print these was later milled into the base of the Cloud Cathedral Love Seat — printing block first, furniture second, completing, in Andrew's words, "the cycle my father started 25 years ago."