Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture
Website: samperrystudio.com
Sam Perry is an Oakland-based sculptor who works exclusively with naturally fallen wood, producing organic forms that balance the weight and grain of the material against a sculptor’s desire for fluidity and movement. Born in Kailua, Hawai’i in 1963, he grew up in Honolulu spending weekends in his father’s canoe restoration and building workshop — an environment that gave him an early, hands-on literacy with wood long before he considered it as an artistic medium. He moved to the mainland in 1982 and enrolled at California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland in 1983, earning his BFA in 1986 and his MFA in 1990. His formal training was in ceramics, and after graduating he served as studio assistant to celebrated ceramic artist Viola Frey for approximately seventeen years, a working relationship that lasted until Frey’s death in 2004.
Around 1999–2000, Perry shifted away from clay and began carving wood full-time. The transition grew out of his long tenure as director of installation and conservation at Runnymede Sculpture Farm, a private outdoor sculpture park in Woodside on the San Francisco Peninsula, where he has stewarded the land and its trees for over thirty years. He began collecting fallen coast live oak, elm, and bay laurel from the property, allowing the logs to cure for up to three years in his Oakland studio before making the first cut. He considers the wood not as lumber but as material with its own biography — marked by drought, fire, insect damage, and storm — and his sculptures work with those embedded histories rather than against them.
Perry carves primarily with chainsaws followed by grinding, filing, and hand-sanding, moving between two distinct modes: excavating large-scale forms from single blocks, branches, or stumps, and assembling discrete carved pieces into knot-like, interlaced compositions. His sculptures recall the biomorphic tradition of mid-century Bay Area wood carvers such as J.B. Blunk and Alvin Light, and critics have noted formal affinities with Martin Puryear’s restrained abstraction. Perry is drawn to curves that evoke water, rope, fabric, and wave — forms that make the static medium appear malleable. Works like Coiled and Strop Bend read as frozen motion, while his interlaced branch installations create maze-like complexity at architectural scale. Throughout, he is interested in relationships between forms — how one mass interacts or connects with another — as a quiet metaphor for human feeling and social bonds.
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