Maple burl vase
One of one · St. Boniface century maple

A century,in your hands.

This vase is one of four pieces that survived a hundred-year-old maple's decade on the ground. This is its whole story, from standing tree to your shelf.

I · The tree

It stood in St. Boniface for a hundred years.

Through every winter this city could throw at it. Families moved in and out of the houses around it. It outlasted most of them. Then one final winter, the winds took it down.

II · The years on the ground

Then it lay there, decaying, for years.

This is where most stories end. But something else was happening in the wet wood: sugars oxidizing into streaks of flame red, fungi drawing fine grey boundary lines through the fibres. The tree was being ruined and made extraordinary at the same time, by the same process.

III · The rescue

Most of it was already gone.

When my arborist friend finally cut it up, nearly the whole trunk was past saving. Out of a hundred years of tree, four pieces of usable wood came off that ground. Four. This vase and its companion bowl are two of them. There is no fifth.

It stood here.

600 St. Jean Baptiste Street, St. Boniface. A hundred years on one corner of one street. The pin is the spot.

Where the maple stood
What remains at the site, photographed on the salvage visit.
IV · The making

Now carve it yourself.

Scroll slowly. Scroll back up and time runs backwards.

The making
The carving film joins this page shortly. The finished piece waits below.

Read the wood.

Three rare things happening in one vessel. Touch the marks to know them. Tap the wood to fall into the grain.

Macro of the vase surface
Bird's eye burlChaotic, tightly swirled figure packed with small eyes. Burl only grows where the tree endured stress, and it never grows the same way twice.
Red flameFormed while the fallen tree lay wet: sugars oxidized and pigment-carrying fungi stained the fibres flame red. Only possible in the window between a tree dying and rotting away.
Grey spalt linesThe boundary walls fungal colonies drew between each other as they moved through the wood. Nature's ink drawing, fixed the moment the wood was dried.
Tap the wood to zoom · move to wander

Maple Burl Vase

St. Boniface century maple · 13 inches · One of one
CA$1,600
Four pieces exist from this tree. When they're gone, they're gone, and this is the largest of them.
Acquire this piece
Its companion survived too.
The 7 inch burl bowl, from the same fall of the same tree. Small enough to hold in two hands, which is the point.
CA$1,100 · Its story follows the same road →

The next one goes to the list first.

Every piece is one of one. When something new leaves the shop, the list sees it before Instagram, before the shows, before anyone. No noise. Only finished work, a few times a year.

You're on it. The next piece finds you first.
That didn't go through. Try again, or email artist@seanphilips.com.

The wood finds me. I just listen.

I'm Sean Philips. Every piece I make starts as a Manitoba tree that was coming down anyway: storm-felled, disease-struck, or in the way. Nothing is harvested. Everything is rescued.

I carve alone, in Winnipeg, one vessel at a time. No two trees have the same story, so no two pieces can exist twice, and I wouldn't want them to.

Sean