Statement:
For my personal practice, the finished object is itself a record of making rather than its purpose — tactile artefacts I wish to bring into existence. Each object carries the weight of a material and the slow emergence of form from under the hand.
As a teenager, I first developed my craft through surfboard shaping in my dad's shed. The objects I make carry that inheritance: hydrodynamic profiles and contours, shaped by the slow removal of material, crafted by hand. My references are typically gathered from archives of nomadic surf culture — documents of coastal communities between the tropics, from West Africa to the Pacific — cultures whose relationship to material and making I find endlessly instructive.
Tristan Maussé and Fantastic Acid have been a formative presence since my early teens: a model for how physical craftsmanship can hold genuine philosophical weight.
My individual work sits in deliberate contrast to my collective practice, which prioritises accessibility and democratic making. Here the ambition is different — formal risk, deep refinement, and the pursuit of something irreducibly my own.
James Stephenson Shaping a surfboard.- 2022