Shop Tour: Tom Small

Lost in the Integrity of Chaos with Tom Small at Deep Woods Studio

This spring we traveled across the water to a place perched like a hawk on Cady Mountain. Here, Tom Small’s Deep Woods Studio is a sanctuary where the “integrity of chaos” isn’t just a philosophy; it’s the bedrock of the work.

Walking through Tom’s shop is less like a gear tour and more like an initiation into a “Neolithic” rhythm. We talked of tool hygiene—the respectful care of our metal friends—and peeked into his “hot cabinet,” where 100-watt bulbs ward off the island’s creeping humidity. Tom moves through his pods and sheds with the quiet confidence of a man who understands that art is often just finding the patterns already written in the forest, the grass, and the overlapping arcs of a mud puddle.

In our day, Tom speaks of stone chairs as “human magnets,” welcoming the redneck and the aficionado alike to sit and feel the “older earth energy” vibrate through their spine. It’s a seductive transformation from the mundane to the sacred, a journey he has been taking since he first threw a rock out of a river in 1986 and eventually found his way to the “mindblowing” fields of an NWSSA symposium.