"Metal Gear Solid"

Metal Gear Solid is Sean pandering to mountain bikers.

Sean doesn't mountain bike. He doesn't ride. He's never logged a trail in Bend or anywhere else. But the city he's from is full of people who do, and one of the things he likes to do with his work is build something specifically for a community he isn't part of — to see if he can earn the appreciation of people who actually live the thing he's making. The fishing collection was for fishermen. The motorcycle collection was for riders. Metal Gear Solid is for the mountain bikers of Bend.

It's also the next entry in something Sean has been doing across the catalog: turning the sculpture itself into the switch. Catch and Release used the reel. The rest of the fishing series did the same. The motorcycle pieces used different mechanisms again. Metal Gear Solid takes it further. The pedal is the switch. Push the brass bike pedal, the two large metal gears turn, the chain runs, and the Edison filament bulb at the top of the slab comes on. The whole drivetrain is functional, and every component of it is a lamp part — gears, pedal, chain, crank, socket. Not one piece of bike hardware. Not one piece from anywhere other than a lamp.

The challenge Sean set himself was simple to describe and very hard to do: build a working pedal-actuated lamp switch out of nothing but antique lamp parts. The result reads instantly as a piece of cycling machinery, but it isn't. It's a lamp pretending to be a drivetrain. That's the point.

The base is a hand-carved reclaimed wood slab — dark, live-edged, with a charred bottom edge and a pale natural edge at the top. All antique lamp parts. No welding, no bending, no solder.

Wall-mounted. Fully functional. The piece for people who would understand what it took to make.

The reclaimed wood base of this piece was sourced from Natural Kinships, a small family-owned mill in Bend, Oregon. The family — a father and two sons — fell trees themselves, mill them at their own shop, and turn them into countertops, tabletops, and live-edge slabs. Sean has worked with them for years; over time, they began setting aside cuts specifically suited to his work. Every Natural Kinships base carries a piece of that story.