Andy
McConnell

The work carries the labor that built it

Andy McConnell, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, came to sculpture from the construction trades — and the path remains visible in the work.

Scribing trim became carving forms; gluing up counter slabs led to making large, stable carving blanks; finishing blackened steel developed into the staining of split or charred cedar. McConnell scrounges his materials. Much of the wood arrives from job-site dumpsters or neighbors calling when a tree comes down. The salvaged source is itself part of the practice.

His current work pairs the centuries-old Japanese surface technique known as shou sugi ban (yakisugi) — wood preserved and intensified through controlled charring — with embedded black glass and end-grain disc inlay. The result reads at multiple registers: as architectural object, as geological time, as a kind of cosmography. Where the charred surface goes textured and dimensional, the inset green discs turn the wood's own growth rings outward as discrete, almost lunar forms.

McConnell studied poetry and painting at Fairhaven College in a multi-semester independent study with the poet Robert Sund, conducting interviews with elder Northwest Art figures Mary Randlett, Guy Anderson, Bill Cumming, Lisel Salzer, and William Radcliff. His master's degree in Applied Behavioral Science from Bastyr University grounds the work in a longstanding interest in how people relate to one another and to material.

Acknowledged influences: Mark Tobey, George Tsutakawa, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore. Based in West Seattle.