John Morris approaches wood carving with an almost obsessive devotion to preparation — each sculpture emerges from an exhaustive process of sketching and research before a single cut is made. This methodical foundation allows his finished works to feel simultaneously deliberate and alive, as though the fantastical creatures and surreal forms he envisions have been coaxed out of the grain rather than imposed upon it. The natural material is never incidental; it is a co-author, lending its organic warmth and textural complexity to figures that exist nowhere in the natural world.
What makes Morris’s work particularly striking is the tension he builds between opposing qualities. The inherent warmth of wood is set in deliberate contrast with the cool gleam of brass and stainless steel accents, producing pieces that feel both ancient and precisely engineered. This material dialogue amplifies the unsettling elegance of his subjects, many of which draw on skeletal anatomy and the heightened aesthetics of fashion photography — sources that pull his sculptures toward a realm where beauty and strangeness become inseparable.
The result is a body of work that occupies a space no single genre can fully claim. His carved forms are too uncanny to be purely decorative, too refined to be called raw fantasy, and too structurally rigorous to be dismissed as ornamental craft. Morris positions wood — a material most associated with tradition and utility — as the ideal vessel for the deeply imaginative and the quietly unsettling, proving that the most unexpected creatures can feel most at home in the oldest of materials.
More info: Facebook, Instagram (h/t: Lethbridge Gallery).
in Bahia.