Steve Noggle, Woodworker
Steve Noggle is a woodworker and turner in Morganton, North Carolina. His workshop is a depression-era clapboard building, a store his family built to sell their farm produce during the 1930’s.
Steve creates lathe-turned bowls and hollow vessels using primarily local domestic hardwoods such as maple, cherry and walnut. He also works with exotic burl wood from Australia, Africa and South America.
Steve Noggle
A lifelong love of wood and trees led to training as a forester, a career in the furniture industry and finally to woodturning. Uncloaking the beauty of the wood grain and forming a shape worthy of the tree it comes from are the goals for each piece created.
The hardwoods I use are both local and exotic, straight grained and figured. All my work is lathe-turned using local domestic hardwoods. Favorite local woods include maple, cherry and walnut. I also work with exotic burl wood from Australia, Africa and South America. I often use the natural edge of the burl, bark included, for the open edge of the finished piece. Many of the hollow forms as well as the natural-edge pieces often have openings and voids created by insects or are figured with patterns created by spalting fungi or ambrosia beetles.
The choices I make while developing the shape of each piece come from the patterns revealed inside the wood itself along with the form that flows from carving.
