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Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Making a connection with wood

by

20140511

"I trip on size. I like mas­sive pieces."

Scot Sardinha is talk­ing about wood. And wood is his work.

Grow­ing up in Glen­coe, Trinidad, surf­ing the seas sur­round­ing the is­land, hol­i­day­ing in Cape Cod on the windswept east­ern seaboard of the Unit­ed States, Sardinha would stum­ble up­on drift­wood. Mys­te­ri­ous, beau­ti­ful, thick pieces of the nat­ur­al world, washed up on the sand, dark­ened to a deep brown colour by the ocean waves.

"From the time I was able to get a feel for wood in my hands I im­me­di­ate­ly con­nect­ed with it and loved the en­er­gy of wood."

Lat­er in life, while do­ing a de­gree in fine art at Rut­gers in New Jer­sey he re­alised the pow­er­ful sim­plic­i­ty he could achieve by "turn­ing plants in­to art and de­sign. Think­ing of the idea and ex­e­cut­ing it to a fin­ished prod­uct."

His fin­ished prod­ucts cur­rent­ly con­sist of a spec­tac­u­lar range of cof­fee ta­bles called In­ha Liv­ing. "In­ha" be­ing the last four let­ters of his name.

Look­ing at the ta­bles it's hard to imag­ine they are made of ply­wood–usu­al­ly thought of as the ma­te­r­i­al of cheap flat­pack fur­ni­ture–they are so sol­id and beau­ti­ful­ly carved. One piece, Wave Ta­ble, weighs a stag­ger­ing 685 pounds and mea­sures 6.5 feet by four feet. The un­du­lat­ing wood sup­ports a ta­ble top made of three-quar­ter inch thick am­ber-coloured glass. These cof­fee ta­ble­s­colos­sal by any fur­ni­ture stan­dards.

It al­so re­quires a head shift to get round the fact that these things were cre­at­ed by a com­put­er de­sign and a me­chan­i­cal router which fol­lows his pre-pro­grammed de­signs.

They are made to or­der, of course, not mass-pro­duced. And they aren't cheap–each piece costs five or six fig­ures in US dol­lars.

He thought care­ful­ly about the mar­ket he want­ed to aim for and weighed up the pros and cons of "the mass con­sump­tion mod­el ver­sus the niche mar­ket," be­fore de­cid­ing he want­ed to pen­e­trate a unique mar­ket. He doesn't rule out pro­duc­ing lines for com­mer­cial re­tail­ers in fu­ture but for now, his artis­tic fur­ni­ture has an em­pha­sis on the word 'art'.

"The strug­gle be­tween be­ing an artist and a man­u­fac­tur­er is an on­go­ing ne­go­ti­a­tion," he says.

Sardinha's client list in­cludes A-list Hol­ly­wood celebri­ties like Will Smith and Ja­da Pin­kett. Sardinha has been friends with the cou­ple for years and has been based in Los An­ge­les since 2002, a place he now calls home.

LA is a place where this kind of ex­pres­sive and ex­pen­sive art has a ready-made mar­ket–a place built on style where in­ter­ac­tions with agents and pro­duc­ers are con­duct­ed over swanky cof­fee ta­bles.

It's al­so fair to say there is now an emer­gent (if small) mar­ket of wealthy Tri­nis with good taste in art and fur­ni­ture. Sardinha would love to see his work in peo­ple's homes in his coun­try of birth.

He vis­its Trinidad reg­u­lar­ly with his fam­i­ly and has a strong net­work of friends and fam­i­ly here.

"As a Trinida­di­an na­tion­al I'd like to get the brand es­tab­lished here. I on­ly did two group shows (ex­hi­bi­tions) here be­fore I bounced out," he says.

"But a big part of my in­flu­ence is from Trinidad with its mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and the colours of the Caribbean."

He's al­so in­to sim­plic­i­ty of de­sign. The min­i­mal­ism of the work is some­thing you would see amongst the oeu­vres of mod­ernist Eu­ro­pean de­sign­ers. "I like sim­ple lines, they com­mand more at­ten­tion from the eye. Some­times I'll see a root of a tree and think to my­self–just one cut and a piece of glass..."

It took him a while to get to the min­i­mal­ism he's found. From 1993-2004 his work was more in­tri­cate, dec­o­rat­ed. Then he changed style, but it was a sev­en-year process be­fore In­ha Liv­ing.

The process of pro­gram­ming his sketch­es in­to the com­put­er and in­vest­ing in the equip­ment took time. By 2011 the line was fi­nal­ly fin­ished.

I ask why he cut back on the in­tri­cate de­tails. "Some­one told me," he says, sim­ply.

Like in writ­ing, ar­chi­tec­ture, mu­sic, some­times sim­ple works best, and of­ten artists on­ly re­alise this through crit­i­cal ap­praisal fol­lowed by self-re­flec­tion. Some­body in­tro­duced him to the Bud­dhist mantra "sim­plic­i­ty is the way of the el­e­vat­ed mind," and it stuck.

In some ways, Sardinha's lat­est work achieves a mid­dle ground be­tween Eu­ro­pean and Caribbean (or African) art.

The piece Pink Poui shows the colour and dis­play of the trop­ics, of na­ture. But there are al­so the flat smooth edges of the in­dus­tri­alised north.

In New Brunswick, New Jer­sey, Sardinha lived in an up­per floor apart­ment where no fur­ni­ture could be de­liv­ered up the stairs. He be­gan mak­ing every­thing for him­self from wood–bed frames, kitchen work sur­faces, lamps. Soon friends be­gan ask­ing where he got them and when he told them they were his own cre­ations, they want­ed some.

Those ear­ly be­gin­nings are echoed in the way his com­mer­cial set-up op­er­ates now. The movie di­rec­tors and style mag­a­zine ed­i­tors who buy his work show it to their cir­cle of friends and so it grows, or­gan­i­cal­ly so to speak.

Work­ing in an art gallery in his se­nior year at Rut­gers, he re­alised that there was a meet­ing point be­tween wood­en fur­ni­ture and art. "The on­ly way you can see a piece is to do it from be­gin­ning to end," he says.

His work is en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly, it con­tains no nails or screws and he us­es formalde­hyde-free glue. And as well as ply­wood (which is ide­al for his pur­pos­es, as its mul­ti­ple lay­ers can be ma­nip­u­lat­ed) he has plans to work with some of his favourite–woods, teak, tapana and bal­a­ta, found in Trinidad's rain­forests.

"Tapana is so hard it bends nails," he says, "I think they were used for the rail­roads."

The rail roads were ripped up long ago but this son of the soil's art is en­dur­ing.

To see more of Scot's work vis­it www.sardinhas­tu­dio.com


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