Yuri Kobayashi needs to see the seasons. It’s part of why the artist lives in midcoast Maine. Here, she can witness the “up and down” of the temperatures as well as the rising and falling of a mountainous landscape. After spending her childhood in Tokyo and then her adulthood in California, the woodworker realized her artistic practice was strongest when she could closely observe the shifts of an ecosystem. “I like the sense that I’m living with the life cycle that I can actually see in everyday life,” she explains. “It gets green, then the flowers bloom, then the colors change, then it snows. That’s a part of the landscape I enjoy and incorporate into my work. It’s being surrounded by nature. That’s closer to my heart than skyscrapers.”

Kobayashi has wanted to work with wood since she was a kid. “I thought when I was little that I would be a carpenter,” she says. “I was born and grew up in Japan, and I always liked visiting the wooden buildings, like the temples, shrines, and residential houses in the mountain areas.” While her immediate family lived in Tokyo, Kobayashi frequently traveled outside the capital city to see her grandparents. “I was fascinated by the puzzle-like nature of the structures,” she recalls. When Kobayashi got to art school, she decided to give architecture a try, but it didn’t feel quite hands-on enough. Then she looked into crafts, from papermaking to ceramics, but these didn’t fit quite right either. “Then I found woodworking school,” she says. “That was the beginning of the end for me. I fell in love with the smells in the woodshop. And with what others were doing.” She decided to “shift gears” and dive into furniture making. Art school in Japan led to graduate studies in California. “And that’s where I started bending.” 

Learning to bend wood, particularly ash and white oak, changed Kobayashi’s style significantly. Many of her earlier designs are grid-like and orderly, elegant in a restrained way. “The lattice work was a direct interpretation of the puzzle-like structures of Japan,” Kobayashi says. “Lately, I’m trying to stay away from that. I still like solving puzzles, but less in a grid or lattice format. I don’t like to make the same thing over again.” Right angles have been traded for sinuous curves and curls, shapes inspired by sea creatures and seedpods, resonant of waves and wind. 

From a shared woodshop at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Kobayashi crafts unique pieces of furniture, many of which are commissioned directly by clients, as well as large-scale installation pieces and smaller, stranger sculptures. Her furniture is, she admits, more profitable than the fine art, but the practices are clearly linked. Kobayashi’s chairs and tables are set apart by their unexpected swings and swoops, bold shapes that make one wonder how, exactly, she created such a thing. Her sculptures are even more abstracted and bizarre. Visually, they wander around a space, strips of wood climbing up the walls and over the ceiling. Some of her pieces even move, twisting in midair like a spindly, many-limbed acrobat. 

These effects are all created using ordinary hardwood. Or perhaps not so ordinary, considering that few species suit Kobayashi’s needs. Among them: white oak and ash. “I’m picky,” she says. “I select wood that has straight grain because I am trying to stress the forms I create more than the color or grain of the tree.” Ash is good because it takes to bending well, and like oak it is light in tone. “Not quite bone white,” she says, “but very light.” It has taken the artist 25 years to perfect her bending technique:
“I like to use the steam bending technique to bend and twist wood. The inside of the steam box needs to reach around 200 degrees. Depending on the thickness, you steam it for a few hours, then bend over a mold and let it dry.” Each piece is still an experimentation. “You may fail,” she says. “It takes a lot of practice and testing. And there’s a lot of waiting.” 

After each piece of wood has been molded and dried, Kobayashi must join it with the other components. “I mainly use wood, but I use some hardwood fasteners, some leather, and some string,” she says. “I typically describe myself as raw and low-tech.” Even during the generative phase of the process, Kobayashi prefers to work with her hands: “I don’t do computer drafting. I’m kind of old-school. I like to bend and cut.” Using wire, clay, and paper, she creates small-scale models of her works, little three-dimensional sketches that seek to evoke a visceral response in the viewer. While she finds inspiration in the flora and fauna of Maine, she’s not trying to copy the creations of Mother Nature. “I’m not simply taking that form from plants or animals and trying to match it. It’s the emotional entities that fit the form or shape,” she explains. 

While there’s a lot of loveliness in Kobayashi’s pale, organic, abstract works, not everyone sees them the same way. The sculptor recalls an instance when a viewer stopped in their tracks, staring at her egg-shaped, many-tentacled piece titled Curio. “Often people in galleries and in museums will call things nice or beautiful,” she says. “But I heard it called disturbing. Or naughty.” 

Fortunately, the artist took no offense. “I want to use my personal experience to make other people feel something that is shareable. Even if it’s totally different from my experience. That’s what I’m looking for,” she says. “To hear something not quite complimentary, for me, that’s a ‘yes’ moment.”