Style and substance, form and function. The 2020 Port Townsend Woodworkers Show is set to again marry utilization and aesthetics in a showcase of varied creations from members of the Splinter Group and staff and board members of the Port Townsend School of Woodworking.

Cool cabinets.

Stellar stools.

Terrific tables.

This year’s offerings, however, have been freed from their usual venue at the American Legion Hall and dispersed among several shopfronts on Tyler Street for social-distanced viewing.

“Hosting the show in our usual venue ... with 20 [to] 25 different exhibitors and up to 2,000 visitors is not practical, nor responsible during  the COVID-19 pandemic,” organizers said.

Works will be on display at Olympic Art & Office and Coldwell Banker from Saturday, Nov. 7 until Tuesday,
Nov. 15.

Both locations, organizers said, are opposite the Rose Theatre on Tyler Street, just off Water Street, in the Fountain District.

The show, now in its 14th year, is the work of the Splinter Group, a kind of semi-formal club of local woodworkers of various disciplines.

Longtime member and show co-creator Tim Lawson (who is also founder and founding executive director of the woodworking school at Fort Worden) said the yearly exhibition was born out of a desire to diversify the common notion of what constitutes regional woodworking.

“The idea behind the show was really to show that there’s a whole other side to woodworking in Port Townsend and Jefferson County,” he said. “From the outside, the wooden boat community and trades sort of dominate, but Port Townsend has a remarkable number of really good woodworkers. Whether they’re furniture makers, boat makers, guitar makers, violin makers, carvers, turners — there really is a deep breadth of woodworking experience here.”

In addition to Lawson, among this year’s exhibitors are Lacey Carnahan of Chimacum, and John Edwards, Steve Habersetzer, David Kellum, Kevin Reiswig, Seth Rolland, and Matthew Straughn-Morse, all of Port Townsend.

Work-wise, Lawson said, the group is incredibly diverse, with each artist specializing in a different sort of woodworking.

“There’s Steve Habersetzer who’s lived in the county I think 40 years and he will make you anything from a Gypsy wagon to a coffin,” Lawson said. “He made all the doors in my house.

“There’s Seth Rolland, who I think is one of the leading contemporary studio furniture makers in the country. We’ve got Kevin Reiswig, who is an up-and-coming sculptural furniture maker and a really, really remarkable person. David Kellum, who makes just simple but beautiful furniture.”

Despite their differences, though, the Splinter Group shares a common philosophy.

“A passion for wood and how to work it and expose the beauty that’s inherent in wood, I think, is the common theme amongst us,” Lawson said. “But even within the group, there is just such a diversity of woodworking talent and that’s what we wanted to show was here in Port Townsend.”

The annual show has grown immensely since its inception, Lawson said.

“We’ve been running the show since 2006 and we’ve had up to, I’m going to say, 2,000 visitors attend the show,” he said. “And I think that’s pretty phenomenal.”

One returning participant is Straughn-Morse, 38, a professional woodworker since 2007 and originally from Wisconsin.

He relocated here in 2011 to attend the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building, and said a shift in priorities among younger generations bodes well for independent craftspeople and likely contributes to the show’s swelling attendance.

“A friend of mine in the Baby Boom generation from Wisconsin said that her generation could be described as the sort of generation of mass production; everything was the same, everybody wanted the same car, the same house, the same this and that,” he said. “And this current generation is in a mode of personalization, where everything is individualized and you don’t want something that everybody else has.

“I think that plays well for custom furniture and craft in general,” Straughn-Morse said. “I see my generation as much more interested in buying a set of pottery that’s made one-off. And it might cost a little more but it will last a while and it’s unique. I think that might be the biggest salvation of craft in our generation.”

Straughn-Morse said JeffCo is packed with crafty talent in every section of what he thinks of as the spectrum of woodworking.

“I really think that this community particularly is kind of shockingly full of talented work workers — craftspeople in general, but woodworkers particularly it seems to me for some reason gravitate here,” he said.

“If you look at a spectrum from pure art to pure utility, there is a huge range of people working in that spectrum in town. And one of the things that the show seems to do, in my mind, is offer up a good cross-section of that. I tend to fall, I think, somewhere in the fully functional but at least, I believe, aesthetically pleasing realm, kind of more to the utilitarian end. I also like that there are people on both sides of that spectrum from where I’m at, people that are building things that are affordable and functional, beautiful in their functionality, and also people who have gone the other direction and, I don’t want to say that the pieces aren’t functional, but the aesthetic impact is more important.”

For his own work, Straughn-Morse said function is always the prime concern.

“For myself, I really have to start with the function and purpose of a piece of furniture before I can embellish it or make it something interesting,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to work for me going the other direction.”

As for the necessary adjustments to the show’s format this year, Straughn-Morse said he is still very much looking forward to checking out the work on display and that it may actually prove a boon.

“It’s a little bit less of an event, so that’s not a positive necessarily, but the fact that it’s going on for most of the week and that it’s sort of a passive engagement seems at least to me like a really big advantage,” he explained. “For me, one of the things that is always kind of in the back of my mind is that this show is a really good way to be seen alongside your work and I think that in a small town, that goes so far. Because you can put your work up in a gallery, which a lot of people do and I think that works out well, but without being able to put a name and face to the work, it’s a little bit tricky. In a small town I think it pays really big dividends to be able to talk one-on-one with potential clients or even just community members.”

To learn more about the 2020 Port Townsend Woodworkers Show and this year’s exhibitors, as well as the Splinter Group, visit www.splintergroup.org.