Intrepid Makers: Kristina Madsen – FineWoodworking

One tiny chisel tap at a time, Kristina Madsen has built one of the most powerful and inspiring bodies of work in contemporary furniture. Sitting in her workshop in Southampton, Mass., with window light flooding over her left shoulder, Madsen uses a painstaking chip-carving technique she learned from traditional carvers in Fiji to create the multilayered moiré patterns that embellish her furniture.

Beneath the carving, you’ll find classical furniture forms and impeccable traditional craftsmanship, both of them rooted in Madsen’s apprenticeship with the talented and eccentric English furniture maker David Powell. Madsen was 18 when she discovered Powell, who had emigrated from England and was then working alone in a former potato barn in central Massachusetts. Powell wasn’t a teacher, but Madsen, who had left college after one semester to seek out a woodworking mentor, kept asking if he would show her a few things. After finally consenting to teach her, Powell trained Madsen in the traditional European cabinetmaking skills he’d learned in Edward Barnsley’s Arts and Crafts workshop in England. (Other aspiring woodworkers heard about Madsen’s arrangement with Powell and began signing on for lessons, and in 1977 Powell and John Tierney opened Leeds Design Workshops in the One Cottage Street mill in Easthampton. The school produced excellent makers through the 1980s.)

Fifteen years into her career as a furniture maker, Madsen spent nine months in Fiji on a Fulbright grant studying freehand intaglio carving with Makiti Koto, a master of the traditional Fijian style. Since then, she has used those carving techniques to decorate the surfaces of all her furniture. Madsen’s work has had a distinct impact on the field of contemporary furniture, inspiring many other talented makers to explore the use of carved and incised patterns and color in their work.

Madsen’s devotion to careful handwork as well as some of the patterns for her carvings derive in part from the lacemaking and other needle arts she learned from women in her mother’s family. Her great aunts and grandmother showed her how to make things well and patiently and how to fold them away for the future. Lacemaking, chip-carving, cabinetmaking: Kristina Madsen’s furniture is a beautiful braid of three traditional crafts that she binds together to produce strikingly original furniture.

In the late 1990s, Madsen moved home to devote herself to her mother’s care. She built her shop next door to the family home, working there when she could spare the time. Since her mother’s death, Madsen has gone back to woodworking full-time. Despite the wide acclaim her furniture has received—it is in a number of museums and many private collections—it can be difficult to find clients for pieces whose heart and soul is handwork. Yet Madsen is uncompromising, often devoting half a year or more to a single piece. She and her work both evince profound integrity. She works with consummate skill, unstinting dedication to her craft, and a strong personal vision.

The decorative carvings of Kristina Madsen

Kristina Madsen gets her carving inspiration from textiles, nature, tradition, and some amazing and distinguished mentors. See the results and get an inside view of the process.

Gesso Highlights Carvings

Kristina Madsen embodies her carvings by scrubbing tinted gesso into the facets of naturally finished or painted surfaces to create contrast.

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