Sam Perry first learned how to sculpt wood as a teenager in his family’s Honolulu canoe shop. His father is a competitive paddler and master canoe builder who has dedicated his life to the art of canoe construction and restoration. His grandfather was one of the founding members of Lanikai Canoe Club (established 1953), dedicated to maintaining and strengthening Hawaiian culture through fostering the indigenous sport of outrigger canoe paddling. In the canoe shop he learned that wood is not lumber; it’s a being with a legacy of its own.

He left Hawaii in 1982 to come to the mainland for college.  As the director of installation and conservation at Runnymede Sculpture Farm for over twenty years, Perry has planted seeds, watched saplings grow into young trees, and cleared away trees that have fallen in storms, from old age, or from disease. Perry has lived and worked in Oakland since enrolling in California College of Arts and Crafts to study ceramics in 1983. Around 1999-2000 he changed mediums from clay to wood. All of the wood he uses in his work has fallen naturally, and much of it comes from Runnymede. It takes up to three years for the logs he collects to cure before they are ready to be carved.

The work of Sam Perry is refined and raw at the same time - created from a single piece of fallen wood, each sculpture seems to tell its own origin story. Sam Perry’s carved wood sculptures are testaments to the passage of time and are imbued with a respect for craft and precision. Sourced from fallen trees, the wood has already lived a lifetime before Perry begins transforming it into sculpture. With patience and precision, Perry carves, sands, polishes, and splines with an awareness of the material’s history and a desire to“find”the sculpture hidden within the bole. This sentiment reflects his thoughtfulness as an artist and a deep respect for his chosen materials.

The temptation to anthropomorphize is strong when looking at Perry’s sculptures, and becomes profound in the context of the breadth of his work. The grounded solidity of the most recent pieces feels mature, settled, close to the earth; they are often self-contained, inward, and reflective. This is evident in loops curving in on themselves, melding together to form autonomous units, and in individual forms overlapping to create new ones. This differs from the sense of searching found in some of his earlier works which tend to reach outward in questioning gestures to the space around them. While the investigation continues, a sense of maturity has been realized through time and experience.