In The Studio: Two Tree Studios
Photography by Philo Cohen for Speciwomen
Photography by Philo Cohen for Speciwomen
A few months ago, I met with designer Allison Samuels at the head and origin of Two Tree Studios. We met in Allison’s workshop and studio in Bushwick on a weekday morning. After settling and drinking a few sips of coffee in the sunbathing main room where Allison stores her work, she and I spent an hour in conversation about New York City and the notion of home, nature, working sustainably and the importance of recycling material, starting your own business as well as being woman and more fluid notions of gender.
Philo Cohen for Speciwomen: Can you talk a little bit about your earlier years?
Two Tree Studios: I grew up in a little town on Hudson. It’s north of here. And is a suburb of the city. That particular town and the house that I grew up in is in the woods. It is full of lush trees. You can walk down the street into the forest and then down a path to the lake. I spent a lot of time growing up outside and exploring and also in the river and in the rocks, just playing. Also, one of the features of the house I grew up in is the back wall that faces the yard, which is the forest, is almost entirely glass. The indoors and outdoors - there is very much a distinction - but having visual access to space has always been a part of life for me. And so being in the city now is quite different.
PC: How long have you been here [New York City]?
TTS: I’ve been in Brooklyn for about 5-10 years? A little over.
PC: And the house you grew up in?
TTS: I lived there until I went to college. That was in Baltimore. And then after Baltimore, I moved to Philly for a very short amount of time for a job. And then I got another job in New York again and so I moved back. My plan, or hope, for myself is that I would stray further. And then I didn’t.
PC: Stray further from New York?
TTS: Yeah.
PC: That’s good. That’s a good plan. I feel like after five years - I’m also at five years this year - and that’s kind of the moment where you’ve seen it. You’ve felt all the seasons many times. You kind of want to go for a second.
TTS: I think because I - so also, my family is from Brooklyn, or half of my family is from Brooklyn and the other half is from White Plains, so everybody is from New York, or at least, a couple of generations - and so I think that when I first moved back, I really felt that. I don’t want to be here already and there’s a good chance I’ll be here for a while. And I had a lot of trouble adjusting to living in Brooklyn. I think not actually being here was the problem so much as rationalizing being here. And so close to family or so close to the place I grew up, but not also just being another white person who’s moving to Brooklyn. I’ve had a really hard time for the first three years, I would say. But I was here…
And then maybe last year is when I started to feel like I am building my own life and I am trying to engage more intentionally with my community and I need to stop thinking that I don’t belong here until I decide to leave. And if I’m not going to leave, I might as well just embrace being here.
And I think having begun building a business is the thing that’s keeping me here now for a while.
PC: But you have physical root here. I feel like that’s the thing that keeps people here. I know that to have your own project and your own business is really what - on the days when you’re like “what am I doing here? who do I belong to?” - you become like yourself. Where would you go if not New York?
TTS: I have lots of ideas so that’s why I say I’m not sure. I don’t know where next. If I go to a smaller town or city in the States, I would likely not move to (besides somewhere further upstate because I’m trying to move out of New York) but I feel like I would just be another person gentrifying a city. And so because I feel like I have roots to New York (family roots and since I’ve been here for a little while), I am able to justify my presence in the city in a way that I don’t feel as though I could do that in another place. And that is something that I’m concerned with. So, that leaves small towns or rural areas and that is certainly a possibility for the next chapter of tiny home buildings which is what I’m working towards. Otherwise, doing some program, some sort of further education in another country or another city in the states would be how I would justify moving next.
PC: That’s great. I mean, it’s really hard to live here.
TTS: It’s also expensive. Unreal. Life is hard.
PC: It’s very solitary. It really depends though, on the day. I feel like some days when I leave it for too long I’m so happy to come back. But to come back to the rooting aspect about having a business here, I also am super interested with how a lot of people use their name for their work, but you have chosen to build moral structure. So what’s the studio?
TTS: While I am the only person making the things and doing all of the things, I am marketing, I am a financial team, I am the toiler. Working under a company name that’s not my own even if it’s (I worked for a textile artist [something something something]) but it’s helpful for me to create some distance from what I already feel - I already feel like I am the work. But, it’s helpful for me to have some sort of separation even in a titular sort of way. I ideally want to do all of it all the time at some point. And while I think it’s interesting for people to know that it’s made by a person, I don’t need that to be the story of the company. But, I am the face of it because it is me but I don’t have so much egotype to being the person. And also that’s secondary to me. People knowing that I am the company should come after we’ve had a conversation about the work itself. And I think that whenever the name of the company is a person’s name, it just feels like there’s too much ego involved. And it’s harder to let go. And it’s already hard for me to let go. But that’s just because I’m obsessive. But I don’t need to add my name to anything.
PC: I also feel like in our world and in our society where everything gets sort of labeled and gendered still a lot, it’s very interesting to have a name of a studio that’s sort of neutral and we have no idea who’s behind it. I thought that was also great. I knew your work from Picture Room. It was kind of a surprise because Sandip had told me about you. So I didn’t know the studio. But, I feel like when someone first looks at the website, it could be a lot of different people, then we know we have found a…It’s a funny balance. At the same time you seem very self sufficient because you do it all on your own. Is there a reason why you don’t have some staff?
TTS: Money.
PC: It’s the same for me.
TTS: If I could afford to hire people or a person, I absolutely would.
PC: Sometimes, I sit down and I wonder if everyone struggles with the same thing.
TTS: Honestly though, that has become a more recent development in how I think about working with people. And by recent, I mean starting in February. Only a couple of months old. I think I had never wanted to work with other people. I have worked for a lot of people. I have had so many jobs. I’ve been working since I was very little. In lots of different industries. I’ve had lots of woodworking jobs. And my background is in cabinetry. So, I’ve worked at a lot of shops. All with men. But, starting my own company and working the way I do - by myself - has felt really critical to develop a new [something] for working. I am particular about everything. I have high standards and that has been informed by many of the places that I’ve worked who also have very high standards. I’ve learned from the best. But I don’t necessarily want to emulate the way that they run their companies or the way that they interact or interface with employees. While I know that I am the only person doing this right now, ideally, when there are other people, I want to be thinking about how the group functions. And not relying on easy, hierarchical power structure or the way of working. I think that giving people agency is really important. But first of all, I need to know exactly what I’m doing and exactly how I want things so that I can say “okay, this is what I’ve seen and these are the reasons for why x,y,z things haven’t worked for me in the past. Once you know what we’re doing, please make this yours.”
PC: That’s great. I guess that’s the next step. I think it’s true, that you need to know what you want and really define things to other people to direct people. I wonder how you first started your own structure. Because you worked mostly with men, maybe you wanted to create a different environment. But also the way you seem to have wed the material and choices of materials, that you do seem much more sustainable than a lot of woodworking.
TTS: In all of the woodworking and cabinetry jobs that I’ve had, there’s an extraordinary waste produced. And, in addition to the fact that we’re not conscious of how we’re getting out materials, dumpsters are filled everyday. And it always hurt me to participate in that. And so part of what I do now, I purchase a lot of my material - not all of it, but most of it. Otherwise it’s found or given to me. But, my utensils are made from scraps, scraps of wood. And that’s why I started making utensils while I was working at one of my bosses shops at night because we had so much scrap wood that was going to be thrown away. I said, “I can’t watch this happen. I’m going to make something of it.” And so that process of looking at a piece of wood and thinking about what can happen to it, what can be it’s next life. That has been a philosophy in way of it being a business model. It’s a practice of working from the very beginning. That’s partially how I’ve landed with some of the shapes that I have.
PC: Great. I feel like in all of the art industries the amount of waste is crazy. It puts a constraint on your colors and shapes of the material to work with recycled material. I feel like there is a very linear aesthetic and that you’ve worked into creating your own aesthetic that’s also the branding aspect of it. How do you work from finding things into making them into its body of work?
TTS: So I do furniture and cabinetry. That is a very different process for me from making smaller things. When I’m doing furniture, that’s all designing it on paper and visualising and sketching and making models. But once I go to touch actual wood, or material, I know exactly what’s going to happen to that. So that’s less of an organic. I mean there’s always some shifting when it doesn’t work the way I think it’s going to work. I design in tandem with working. But that is a very different process from, let’s say, I’ve been making these wooden vases. Yes, I began with drawing and sketching. What are some shapes that I can start playing with? These are my stars and my thoughts and where I thought I wanted it to go. But then, those are the pieces of wood that I had. So now, looking at that (the wood), how am I going to get this (the drawing)? Or vice versa. If I see this but I have that, what needs to change? And so that’s why it partially always begins with something 2D. And then, once I see the material, then it inevitably shifts. Because there’s big knot in that, and therefore it will explode if I try to do the thing that I thought I was going to do. That’s partially why I love the vases in particular - an experiment where it’s very much a dialogue of material/form and what is physically possible.
PC: Yeah. It sounds like a very different process from the spoons, the use of utensils, the vases, all the circular things, or desks, or the shelves that you make. You started with cabinetry. Is there one design you constantly find yourself going back to?
TTS: So the vases are new. Since January or February. I think it’s important for me to have all of it all the time. Or to have a mix because then I don’t get bored. I get bored easily.
PC: There’s also just this one question that I always ask people I have a conversation with. So I started Speciwomen three years ago as an online platform only and the print only came out last year. I remember starting it and to do a platform with all female artists was very forward and very in the time and feminist and really politically great. And as the years have gone by, and with the political times that we’ve been going through, all the changes in New York, I find that saying that I have a platform for women artists is almost archaic. It’s a very strict square. It’s actually going to be the theme of the next issue - sort of redefining the storm of female and what it means to be a female artist. Have you felt either your gender, or how you feel in your body has affected your experience in some way, like when you said you were working with only men for example.
TTS: I also minored in Gender Theory in college so I have been thinking about what gender is for a long time and have gone through shifts of how I identify my gender. Currently, female. And while I feel pretty secure in saying that, unless I’m thinking about myself in context to other people, I don’t think about my gender. I’m not aware of my gender. We’re just humans. But then I think gender is when we’re put next to other people who feel something about gender. That said, woodworking has historically been a male dominated profession. With the exception of one job, for a couple months and it wasn’t a woodworking job it was a set thing, I have worked only with men ever, and I have had a lot of jobs. People have various preconceptions about my abilities as another cabinet maker coming into that space. Of course, I need to prove myself every time. I need to doing the things better and more meticulously, faster. I need to hold more shit. Everything needs to be done so much better in order to be respected. And, that’s exhausting. I think women do that all the time, in every profession. I don’t think that is a cabinetry centric experience. But I do think in the world of traits, it’s more likely to see [something] working with women. So there is a fair amount of sexism, either indirectly or not. So part of working for myself has been experiencing what it’s like to not have to prove myself everyday to other people. Or to only do that in social settings. But that’s just normal. I know what I’m capable of, and there is no need to have to show that to other people to project that everyday all the time. And to be schooled by people who know far less, which is another frequent experience. So, I think what I’m thinking about now is building a community of people. I only want to work with women woodworkers. And I think it’s really important to skillshare and to teach and to make this more accessible so that more women gender non binary people can walk into the world and not feel like they’re doing something wrong just by stepping into the door.
PC: Yeah, for sure. And how it plays out. I’m trying to shape the question as the years go.
TTS: Ideally, that’s where we’re headed. But also, we’re far from it.