sticks and stones The functional art of Jiri Kalina and Traudi Thornton OBy Cole Dittmer | Photography by Allison Potter ne bakes vessels formed from carefully measured ingredients and the other crafts tools shaped from their raw form. Though no relation, two artisans find joy in creating from nature and offering uniqueness in the kitchen landscape. Local residents by way of the Czech Republic, artisans Jiri Kalina and Traudi Thornton fashion graceful kitchen utensils; one out of clay, feldspar, flint, glaze and heat, the other out of every scrap wood available. Inside his shop Jiri Kalina bounces around bins, nooks and shelves, showing off various wooden tools he has created, like a boy eager to show off shiny new toys Christmas morning. “Ah, I have to show you this,” Kalina says as he whips out a ladder and reaches for two wooden bowls carved and turned from a piece of magnolia, one with dark brown, almost black lines like veins running through the bowl. Kalina pulls out another tub from an unseen nook, this one full of slender but solid rolling pins. Most are constructed of maple, tiger maple or oak, with black walnut handles. “People probably would never use these but I love them,” he says. Kalina follows a line of woodworkers like his father did before him. A furniture maker, he branched out by crafting bowls, rolling pins and cutting boards, but his real obsession now lies in carving wooden spoons of all shapes and sizes. Some have shallow, wide bowls and some deep, long bowls, but each one is different from the last. “Making spoons has a very deep heritage, thousands of years old from the Egyptians,” he says. “The more I learn the more I see the potential in spoons. I can do this for 100 years and still have a window for evolution. You will never make the same shape and it will never look the same.” 38 WBM december 2014
December 2104
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