The Future of Woodworking: Alison Croney Moses

The curved staves of her featherlight, bent-laminated Shell (above), each composed of multiple layers of Italian beech veneer and one interior layer of walnut veneer, emerged from a very heavy MDF bending form.

Beginnings

Craft and kids are two constants in Alison Croney Moses’s life. When she was a kid herself growing up in North Carolina with her parents, both originally from Guyana, her home life was infused with craft. “I have so many memories from childhood of making things and having constant support,” she explains.

At the Rhode Island School of Design, where Croney Moses studied furniture making, a class in bent lamination with Don Miller opened up an aesthetic exploration of shell-like shapes that she continues nearly 20 years later. Some of her teachers encouraged her to more clearly address function in her pieces, but she resisted, continuing to follow a more sculptural muse.

Even so, pure aesthetics weren’t her only aim. “I was also thinking about how to use my skills to produce things that have a little larger impact than what happens in the woodshop,” she says. For her senior thesis, she developed a project that involved working with high school students to design soft plush furniture for an elementary school.

Later in life

In 2013, teaching and making came together for Croney Moses when she took a job teaching woodworking to middle schoolers at the Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts in Boston. She spent 10 years there, teaching, administrating, and making her own work in the school shop.

Several years ago, with her sculptural career taking off, she decided to leave her job at the school; since then she has been working full-time in her studio. But with a six- and an eight-year-old at home, she’s still teaching.

In describing her recent wall piece When We Are Together (above), made with veneer and a bending iron, Croney Moses says, “Our time is brief, but when we get together, who knows what happens?”

You can see more of Alison Croney Moses at her studio and Instagram.

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