Kurt Gohde is a professor of art at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky — the kind of professor who treats his Friday class to warm, fresh-baked bread. Dr. Gohde teaches Sculpture, Digital Imaging, Community Engagement through the Arts, Creative Disruption, Visions (exploring visionary people and ideas), Corporeal Commodity: the Body in Science, Religion and Art. And he also finds time to engage in the meditative, sensual art of wood carving — specifically, spoons. A collection will go on display at the Pam Miller Downtown Art Center on Friday, April 11. We wanted to know more about this.

You are noted for making art that invites conversations about contemporary social issues. Why wooden spoons?

I began teaching sculpture students to carve spoons during the pandemic year of online teaching. The process involved small movements with sharp tools. It was something that demonstrated well on Zoom, I could fill my entire camera with my hands and the piece of wood becoming a spoon. Similarly, I could easily watch, and through feedback, improve a student's technique over Zoom. Students really enjoyed the process and I continued teaching it when we returned to in-person courses at Transylvania. Though I have enjoyed teaching spoon carving since the early days of the pandemic, I didn't find my own connection to it until I began working with green wood, trees and branches that had recently fallen. People started contacting me to let me know about losing a beloved tree and I began to realize some of the many ways trees hold the memories of our lives. These memories and stories live within the tree for as long as it stands, where it has witnessed our lives. Why wouldn't the memories live on in the wood of these trees? I am making spoons from the wood of trees collected from spaces where they lived alongside us.

Do you prefer a particular species?

I do not. I am working to learn the unique properties of many different trees. Cherry carves best after sealing and seasoning in the log. Redbud demands a large part of its core to be removed. It carves beautifully but there are many riddles to solve to stop it from cracking.

The toxins in walnut that kill nearby plants cause my skin to burn if I carve it too fresh. I am fascinated by the contrast between catalpa and tree of heaven, two trees that are part of the same story for me, based on where my first samples of each came from. Catalpa, a beloved tree, lost to a falling tree of heaven branch, is beautifully grained, but nearly as soft as cork. Tree of heaven, a weed tree that no one wants in their yard, is golden, dense and more stable than any other wood I have carved into a spoon.

Do different species influence the way you shape these objects?

Yes. They will over time, anyhow. To this point, I have been experimenting with form, with function and with the different processes required to carve different woods well. If I were working with kiln-dried wood from a lumber store, the varieties would be more similar.

Working with green wood means every species carves differently. Maples and fruitwoods are able to remain strong even when the form becomes really thin. This is great for eating spoons because we are used to spoons we eat from being made from thin material. That feels good within our mouths. There is a hackberry eating spoon in the show; it may be the thinnest eating spoon I have made, and it is still really strong.

Where do you source your wood?

Sometimes I find wood that has come down during a storm. Sometimes people contact me to tell me they lost a tree they have long loved and could I make them a spoon or a bowl from it. Sometimes I travel to far-off places to collect a fallen branch from a tree that lived alongside a person of interest. I have wood from a live oak that lived alongside Flannery O'Conner in Savannah. I have maple from a tree in Allen Ginsberg's yard in upstate New York. I have trees that lived alongside John Steinbeck, Henry Clay, Robert Frost, Governor Blackburn and Shirley Jackson. These trees are part of a longer project that is still underway. They will be made into coffee spoons, so one can have coffee with these people from our cultural past.

One of your spoons has an interesting curvature to its shape. Was the shape influenced by natural curvature in the wood? Do you begin with an end in mind?

Sometimes the initial shape of a small branch does inform the shape of the final spoon. This is most visible in spoons that still have some of the bark on them. More often, the shape is informed by the heartwood and sapwood and the line that separates the two within a tree. These features (hidden within the tree) often cause me to create forms that sway more from back to front than a wooden spoon you find in most stores. I do begin with a final form in mind, but that form is often changed by features and flaws within the wood. Sometimes the shape of a spoon changes to include details found deep within the log once I start carving it, sometimes to avoid them.

Another pair of spoons feature the “stumps” of branches. Why did you choose not to carve away those features?

There are a handful of spoons in this show that include the entire branches of a tree. One of these is 11 feet tall, and I am not yet sure how that will fit into any display format in the gallery. I will probably have to cut it. An 11-foot-tall spoon isn't very useful, of course, but it is interesting to me — and may, therefore, be interesting to others — to see how spoons fit into the spaces of a tree. The strongest spoons come from the place where one branch connects to another or to the trunk. Some of the spoons in the show still have a lot of their bark on to let the relationship between the branch and trunk remain visible. There is a feeling of immediacy I like to spoons that still have a lot of the bark and branches still visible, but these spoons also tell a story of seasons, because most woods will only hold their bark if the tree or branch fell in the cold months when the leaves are no longer in place.

Do you predetermine the designs of your spoons, or are the designs guided by the level of hardness and grain?

You will see in this show that I am working toward a few different spoon types, experimenting and refining their forms. There is a long cooking/serving spoon form and a short ice cream spoon. There are others as well. The strength and density of wood could inform the shapes I make with it. Maybe in time that will be part of my process. For the spoons in this show, it was not. I am gaining confidence carving different woods into different kinds of spoons and would like to imagine a future where someone says to me, "This tree that came down was where all of our family photos were made. Our mother took all of those photographs. She loved to make cookies every Sunday and this was her favorite wooden spoon." I hope to be ready to make spoons strong enough for mixing cookie dough that I can give to everyone in that family, the people whose lives were photographed in front of the tree. I prefer to design spoons with this in mind and think less about things like which woods are "easy" to work with for any specific spoon type.

Do your spoons represent stories? Can you share one with us?

Yes. The stories with most of the spoons are longer than anyone would want to hear, but here is one I hinted at above. On Friday, Sept. 27, a storm came through Lexington. We lost power at the Transylvania Studio building, I injured myself cleaning sculpture tools in the dark and had to keep a zoom meeting with people from other cities by having it in my car so my phone could charge from the car battery. Before we lost power, though, I had finished two loaves of bread (because I make fresh bread to share with students every Friday). Still warm, these loaves filled my car with the smell of fresh bread during the Zoom interview. I watched trash bins rolling down the street in high winds. I received a text from Pat Gerhard, a friend I carve spoons with. She shared a post with me that was made by Mary Ginocchio, her neighbor and owner of Mulberry and Lime. Mary lost an old and beloved catalpa tree in her front yard. It came down in the storm when a much taller, not loved tree of heaven lost a branch. The branch came down, crushing the catalpa. I wanted to make a spoon from that catalpa for Mary and realized I could go there right away and trade her a loaf of still warm, fresh bread for a piece of her catalpa tree that had fallen. I would eventually give her that spoon but would also try not to promise that, because I am slow at turning things around and it is better as a surprise than something she would wait for. The tv news was interviewing her when I arrived and, walking in with a fresh loaf of bread, I found my offer captured on camera — and later that night — televised. I think Mary may have forgotten about all of this and am certain she has no idea that there is a spoon from both of those trees in this show — one from the catalpa and one from the tree of heaven. The catalpa spoon is hers. It is one of very few spoons I designed for a specific person. Mary and her catalpa spoon are both very tall.

Is carving wooden spoons meditative? Satisfying?

Yes. I have met spoon carvers from other countries that lead "carving for recovery" workshops. The meditative nature of carving is something many people experience, and it is why there are growing numbers of green wood carving communities around the world. It is a compelling experience to carve green wood with nothing but sharp-edged hand tools. All of the spoons in this show were carved with an ax, a straight knife and a curved knife. No power tools. No sandpaper. It is a quiet, slow, reflective process that is full of riddles due to every piece of wood being different, posing different problems of grain pattern and direction.

Kurt Gohde's hand-carved spoons go on display at the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center on April 11. An opening reception will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.