GRIFFON: Chainsaws are incredibly powerful and versatile and really fast.
[CHAINSAW SOUNDS]
GRIFFON: Something is going to go wrong. However, when you get rid of the things that
you don't need, you kind of find the things that are important to you.
GRIFFON: To be able to take this raw log
and within a day or two days, however long it takes, have a piece of art or whatever's
in my head, that is really amazing. It's an amazing amount of power to, like, have
immediate expression in a solid form.
MARY: Ah, little skinny thing [LAUGHS], a little twig of a girl covered in tattoos
wielding that great big tool like that. I was trying to find people that were doing
large scale pieces of art so I approached her about making a piece for the Legation.
I had a little apprehension. I wasn't sure exactly what kind of an image we would get.
[CHAINSAW SOUND]
MARY: I was just so impressed that she's given me weather and she's given me wind.
It was a very personal piece. It didn't seem
to be coming from some other source. It was something coming out of her.
CHELSEA: It can be really difficult to imbue a sense of dynamism and movement into
something as rigid as wood. She's started to incorporate fine art techniques; she's
burning and she's Dremeling and she's processing and she's painting. I think that really brings
a whole new level of craftsmanship to the carvings that she makes.
GRIFFON: As a kid I used to climb, like,
super tall fir trees, up to where the branches were breaking under my hands. I was a kid.
I didn't realize I could easily die probably.
My grandfather was a whittler. He would give
me little projects because I was always fascinated by it, but I inevitably would, like, cut myself
one time and give up or it would take too long. Maybe if he would've just given me a
chainsaw. My family on both sides were really creative people and I was always told by all
of them growing up, "You cannot be an artist for a living."
I was leaving my old job and
I wanted to start my own projects. I didn't know what I was going to do yet. When I first
met my husband, he gave me a chainsaw. It's kind of a weird thing to end up doing.
It's not everyday that a tall, beautiful woman asks you for a chainsaw, but
when they do, you kind of have to accommodate.
GRIFFON: I like being active and I like
using my body, but it took me a while before I could carve for more than a few hours
at a time just because of the stamina. It is incredibly physical. If I can't move it,
that's a struggle.
GEOFF: I don't think she could physically
allow herself to fail. I knew from the second she cranked it and made her first cut that
she was a chainsaw carver from then on. Like, I could see it in her face.
GRIFFON: There are no classes. You can't
go to college and learn how to be a chainsaw carver. R.L. Blair and Doug Moreland are the
ones to give me my first introduction. Doug Moreland and his family own Cattlelacs Chainsaw Carving
Gallery down in Manchaca, Texas. Doug told me, "Yeah, come on down and embarrass yourself."
Get after it, embarrass yourself.
It doesn't matter. Everybody's gonna support ya for puttin' forth the effort. And she did.
GRIFFON: It was kind of eye opening how different this was from traditional woodworking.
It has it's own set of tools, different lifestyle. They were really the beginning of this carving journey.
Griffon was...yeah, she's natural.
She can take a 2-D cartoon and turn it into a 3-D object.
There's not very many people that are able to do that.
People kind of find chainsaws frightening or at least I did.
Too many scary movies. She can take something so sort of
utilitarian and create something really beautiful with it.
I watched her go from in the span of five years having never started
a chainsaw in her life to winning awards in Australia in the Australian National Championship.
It's really fun to be able to have a front row seat to her career. It's like getting
to watch a cool new movie everyday.
[CHAINSAW SOUND]
I think of chainsaw artists as kind of the rock stars of the art world.
There's this energy that you're
putting out there in front of the crowd. They really feed off that energy too.
Friends, family, people that I haven't seen in years, they'll come up to me and talk to me about
carving. I wouldn't even call it like a calling,
but I think it's just this shared enthusiasm.
For this piece I'm kind of going little bit more freestyle, trying to find where everything is.
Once you get in tune with it and you move with it, it is almost like a dance. I think
it is really tied up with how you're feeling in the moment.
I like how immediate this is
and to be doing something so scary and, like, handling it is really kind of, exciting
and it does make me feel really powerful.
GEOFF: I think until the day that she can
no longer lift the chainsaw physically she will be a chainsaw carver.
GRIFFON: There's something about this that's special. I really just like when you put a
lot of work in something, having something to show for at the end of it.
It's the most satisfying thing I've ever done.