Forrest Solomon Hudes (they/he)

Forrest is a craftsperson, artist, and designer focused on participating in the making of meaning with wood in the contemporary world.

Forrest currently lives and works in Hamtramck, MI and is represented by I M Weiss Gallery.

For all inquiries please email forrest.hudes@gmail.com

Thank you!

Artist Statement:

  Trees are ancient creatures, and they are amazingly sexually diverse. Some trees are male, some female, some varying amounts of both, some exclusively create flowers that are sexually self contained. In more anthropomorphic terms - trees are both strong and beautiful, robust and delicate, simultaneously digging deep into the soil and reaching wishfully toward the sky. 

     Wood, though - in its modern American conception - is masculine, tough, strong, linear - hell we are so insecure we have to call the sticks we build houses with “studs”.

     I work in wood as an effort to restore treeness to what has been cut down and sterilized into beef, to re-endow the tree with its sexual dynamism after the mill has tried to make it straight, to give softness back to woods that have been designated “hard”, to feminize and sensualize a craft that has been shackled to masculinity.

To me, wood represents the potentials of the body. By shaping it, I can change, undermine, reverse, and expand those possibilities. My work operates as a site of inquiry into the complex and fluid nature of queer identity, wherein the tension between internal and external realities becomes palpable. In the context of crafting with rigid materials, such as wood, the act of form-finding becomes particularly significant. While the material imposes certain limitations on the creative process, the quest for form can serve as a means of transcendence, a way to push against those boundaries and expand the material's possibilities. It is in this process of form-finding that I can subvert dominant notions of what the material can do, and in doing so, reveal the inherent multiplicity and fluidity of its nature. 

My early life and education was in the performing arts, and from that place I approach my craft practice with an idiosyncratic methodology, one that privileges intuition and responsiveness over the rigidity of planful construction. In doing so, I seek to destabilize the linearity and planarity inherent in traditional woodworking techniques.

Thus, my work is not only about the body, but it is also a critical intervention into the discourse of woodworking itself. Through my furniture and sculpture, I aim to challenge and broaden the conversation around this craft, creating objects that invite a plurality of bodies, identities, and perspectives into the conversation. 

Ultimately, my practice is driven by a desire to change the toxic masculinity that is so often embedded in traditional woodworking (from aesthetics, to nomenclature, to the design of the spaces in which woodworking is carried out), and to create a more inclusive and expansive space for the practice of woodworking in the contemporary world.

 My practice centers the tension between inner and outer, that which is felt and that which is perceived, that which is expected and that which is yearned for - and especially the limitations of matter, the constraints of material, and the edges which you can push that up against. I make functional and dysfunctional objects out of wood to this end. While being highly recognizable, my objects also deviate from expectations in ways that imbue the familiar with newness.

I know that whatever the road to queer utopia looks like, when we get there we are going to need a place to sit.