My name is Nicole Sweeney and I live in San Francisco, CA. I am originally from Vermont: a tiny little town in the middle of the mountains. That's where I studied ballet for 15 years and that was my first art form, that was the beginning of my artistic journey. I studied architecture in college and that's where my love for woodworking began.

I chose wood as my material, it's something I've always been really connected to. Wood has a very living, dynamic quality to it. No two trees are the same, no two pieces of wood are the same and it makes the work that I do interesting. It is perfect and imperfect.

Most of my pieces are made out of redwood. I love it, it is a softer wood with a lot of different tones to it. So some pieces have that really deep redwood color, other pieces are a lot lighter the grain is really different: some needs to be sanded a lot some doesn't need to be sanded a lot. I can get a lot of variation out of this one kind of wood. It is also nice to work with a material that is native to the place you are creating in.

Each thing that I make inspires the next. I didn't know what my work would become when I first got all my tools and started playing, but it has really taken on it's own form.