This was the first time that Mark Gorey stood alongside his wood works for public sale. At Maker’s Mart, a semiannual, handmade craft fair, Gorey set up shop with large tables he had made displayed behind him. One was made from dismantled barn wood, another from pieces of an old horse fence, and another table—charred beneath the gloss finish—was constructed entirely from the fallen lumber of a burned-down building.
Gorey’s work—he calls his project Toledo Native—is entirely his own; each piece without duplicate. Every table, bike rack and picture frame is built with vintage wood he finds, sorts, carves and glues together. All of his wood has original paint that has weathered, or in the case of the burned-out building, forever altered.
An unknown talent
Mark Gorey never knew he could build. His experience with woodworking began with shop class at Anthony Wayne High School, and ended with a couple of makeshift skateboard ramps. Then, a couple of years ago, he got married and needed furniture for his new home. He found some wood and went to work. He figured out his own leg design and made a coffee table. He tried again, and made another table. They not only worked well, but looked like nothing that IKEA could offer. His wife told him that he should keep building.
Gorey speaks of his talent with an ‘aw-shucks’ humility. This is partly because he was always discouraged about creating art, despite the fact that his work is now pretty enough to be hung. He enrolled in art school at BGSU, but painting and drawing did not come as naturally as he had hoped, and he changed his major.
He went on to study social work, and got his master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati before returning to Toledo. Still looking for jobs, he and his wife had a furniture need. “I kind of stumbled into it,” said Gorey.
Old and new
Gorey invited me to see his workspace. It is a metal-covered barn just south of downtown on Broadway Street. Piles of lumber sit outside in what he calls his “wood graveyards.” There are more piles of wood inside. “I like working with what’s been discarded, and seeing what I can make out of it,” Gorey said.
His main tools are a table saw, a bandsaw and a chop saw. Their cutting is quick and severe. He bought the table saw at a discount, after the prior owner carelessly cut off four of his fingers. When the saws are in use, clouds of wood dust fill up the room. Gorey handed me a breathing ventilator and goggles to strap to my face.
To assemble a table with reclaimed wood requires a lot of patience and creativity. One of his tabletops requires as many as two dozen pieces of wood, each to be carved with different specifications. Every board is arranged to create a new whole; every color and line selected to create a new pattern. “It’s like a weird puzzle that doesn’t have a predetermined end,” Gorey said.
To find more materials, we drove to what looked like a FEMA disaster, a detour after following a Craigslist ad for “free wood.” Debris sat in a city-block-sized pile under the moonlight. Gorey dug and pulled, testing the strength of planks that still had nails and insulation attached. He handed me one with beautiful smoke-stripes banded to it, like a raccoon tail. It reminded me of something Gorey told me back at his shop, about how all wood carries a story, even if you don’t know what it is.
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Dorian Slaybod is 28, a local attorney
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and happily living in Toledo.
