About

I am Nadia Ellsworth. I make furniture and small objects out of a rented bay behind a tire shop in Providence, and I write here about the parts of that work that do not photograph well.

The studio is one room, badly heated, with a bench along the north wall and a window that faces a parking lot. Most of what I build is commissioned: a desk, a set of shelves, a run of stools for a cafe that opened and then closed. The rest is practice, which is a polite word for the pieces I make twice because the first one taught me something.

This journal is where the process lives. Jigs that worked, jigs that did not, finishes that looked right under shop lights and wrong at home, the long stretch in the middle of a build where nothing is interesting enough to post but everything is being decided. I try to write the entries close to the moment, before I have smoothed the story out.

Most of what I make leaves the shop and I never see it again. The journal is the part I get to keep.