A series of playful free-form rectangles, their corners softened into curves, flow together into this compact coffee table. Worn and shaped like ancient stone, the practically petrified hickory is carved all over in a future language of squares, giving the piece a sacred-tablet essence and a smooth, bumpy texture that feels almost like a massage running your hands over it — hence the name. Simple half-lap joinery lets the slabs come together in overlapping, jutting layers, building complex geometry out of humble tablet shapes. Those layers shift as you move around the piece, catching different shades of light like a sunset-lit mountain range fading into the distance.
It's made from extremely hard hickory, urban-salvaged from Bunker Hill Road in Canton, Connecticut, which also carries its own history of insect damage — Andrew calls the carving a layer on top of the insects' own carving. He later used the finished table itself as a printing block, hand-rubbing a set of ink impressions from its surface onto handmade Japanese paper — the same idea already at work on the Marshmallow Box Bench and the Cloud Cathedral Prints, furniture and print reinforcing each other in a kind of foreshadowing.