"As a woodworker I'm always looking for something challenging to make," says Brent Rourke, who began making historic, reproduction, Shaker oval boxes as Christmas gifts for his family about 20 years ago. He’s bent more than 30,000 pieces of wood for his oval boxes and carriers since he started his business just over a decade ago.
"Chairs are very challenging," Rourke says, pointing to an antique chair he picked up at a Sussex community yard sale, "That’s what I like. There is nothing straight or linear about a chair. My wife says I have a chair fetish. She might be right. Hopefully this year I will find time to make a few children's Shaker-styled rocking chairs.
"I have a small shop, so I make small products," he explains as he taps a copper tack securing the finger on a cherry wood oval box. "Big things need bigger space." Neatly-piled bundles of precision-cut wood strips and oval box tops and bottoms fill the shelves of Rourke’s basement workshop. "This house was built in the early 1900's. The foreman who worked at the G&G Flewelling Manufacturing Company, a match factory and sawmill operating here in Hampton, lived in this house."
Upstairs in the Rourke family kitchen, an array of cherry, walnut, and bird’s-eye maple Shaker oval boxes line the handcrafted kitchen counters and cupboards. They look as natural there as they would have back in the 1800's. Rourke, who began his woodworking career as a licensed cabinetmaker, explains, "The Shakers were very well-organized people. Utilitarian oval boxes helped keep everything in its place. They were known to have labeled their buildings with names like 'sister's house', 'brethren’s shop' and so on. Often rooms, drawers and cabinets were distinguished with numbers or letters."
There are 17 steps involved in making a wooden Shaker oval box. Each box is sanded six times before it gets its final finish.
Rourke is following his passion for woodworking by producing a new line of square and rectangular boxes. He explains that the construction uses a box joint and each box has a sliding lid. "This design concept was inspired by the traditional, wooden, pencil box. They are boxes well suited for the contemporary market. We are making them to fit everything from collectible treasures to mp3 players."
"I love working with wood," he says. "Bending soft pliable wood strips is very therapeutic. Even after all these years, I'm still amazed by the grain in the figure of the bird’s-eye maple. The bird’s-eye is a defect in the wood, an anomaly. Nobody knows why it's there, it's just there."
His finely crafted Shaker oval boxes and carriers can be found throughout North America. "Here in New Brunswick they are at Handworks, Saint John," Rourke says, "Serendipin Art, Saint Andrews, Edgewater Gallery, Miramichi and Botinicals, Fredericton."
94 Kennebecasis River Road
Hampton, New Brunswick
Canada E5N 6L2
506 832-3716
1 (877) 503-4440
info@shakerboxesnb.com
www.shakerboxesnb.com