Abigail Castañeda works with wood as one might approach a sleeping god: carefully, reverently, and with the knowledge that it might speak back. The trees she turns have already lived one life, felled by storm, time, or necessity. “What remains is matter embodied with memory, dream, and weather patterns.” Born in the Philippines and now based in New York’s Hudson Valley, Castañeda creates vessels at the threshold of art and devotion. Her approach is intuitive and rooted in traditional woodturning, yet attuned to something specific: the felt sense that trees carry ecological histories we cannot fully translate, only witness. Through the subtractive art of hollowing on a lathe, forms are slowly revealed through carving. “The process becomes a kind of divination for what lies dormant in the material itself. The wood asserts. It resists, remembers, veers toward its own becoming.”

What distinguishes her work, beyond its clarity of form, is its elemental surface. Using hand-mixed mineral solutions and earth-based compounds, she coaxes reactions that reveal the hidden chemistry of wood. Fugues of graphite that glint with quiet luminosity across the grain, bone-white reminiscent of ivory or ancient Eleusinian marble, and grey weathered stone pulled straight from orbit. The result is often disorienting. The surface becomes metallic, ancient, otherworldly. The viewer may not recognize it as wood at all, but as something carrying the memory of another element. What emerges feels closer to alchemy than to craft. Alchemy, a symbolic process of inner and outer transmutation, where the vessel is both container and mirror. Castañeda’s long study of Jungian depth psychology informs this approach not only as metaphor, but as praxis. The tree becomes vessel. The vessel becomes mirror. The elements begin to speak through one another. 

“Through the devotional labor of making by hand, I hope my work returns to the world bearing the wild, poetic spirit of the forest, the impulse toward rebirth, and a deep instinct for the union of spirit and matter.”