Goods Goods
Brooklyn, NY
Jenna Goodman is a woodworker and furniture-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. She works out of Makeville Studio, a community woodshop in Gowanus, where she is both the Studio Manager and a Woodworking Instructor offering group classes and private lessons.
Jenna works primarily in wood and is driven to create by an insatiable curiosity about how things work. She is inspired by mathematics, color theory, and the ingenuity of craftspeople and toolmakers, past and present. Her design philosophy focuses first and foremost on functionality. She aims to produce contemporary yet classic furniture, always with a playful, and preferably colorful, twist.
She holds a Bachelor’s of Engineering from the University of Michigan and, prior to falling in love with woodworking, worked for half a decade as a mechanical test engineer.
A Conversation with the maker
Tell us about your practice and how you came to making?
Making is more or less a compulsion for me. I’ve been making art, food, objects for as long as I can remember. I suspect the impulse started with encouragement (and genetic intervention) from my parents, an aerospace engineer and an interior designer. Exploring the connection between my brain and my hands is what makes me feel alive and engaged and fulfilled. Making is very human for me.
Do you have a ritual when it comes to making/designing work?
My process for making and designing isn’t particularly ritualistic. I think of it more in terms of inertia: I’m the body in motion and my influences and inspiration are the forces that affect change in my motion, sending me down one path or another. I tend to follow the momentum in a given direction until it putters out, or until something pushes me in a different direction. My work is largely driven by curiosity regarding form, materials, and processes.
Your educational background is in mechanical engineering. How do you think this plays a part in your woodworking practice and how you approach making?
Working as an engineer convinced me that I can always find a solution! Problem solving is a huge part of both engineering and woodworking. I think that my engineering background helps me build things in a very literally structural and mechanical way, I’m just aware of a lot of hardware and tooling that can be helpful for making things. As a test engineer, a lot my engineering work relied on experimentation, which has definitely played a role in how I design!
You’ve spoken with us about making playful objects in your free time—can you expand on playfulness and how it folds into your work?
I spent years pursuing a degree and a career that I didn’t vibe with, worrying whether or not I was doing things “right,” and taking myself very seriously. I sort of forgot how to have fun during that time, and how to be creative. It has taken a lot of effort for me to feel comfortable pursuing an idea without knowing how it’s going to turn out, and to me that is playfulness: attempting new things, reducing expectations, giving myself the chance to try and see how things go. I hope that being playful in the design process helps me to produce objects that aren’t quite what people expect.
Your work often plays with edges and boundaries. Taking things that can run straight and bending them, or forming them to a new shape. Can you talk about how this form making came into being a part of your practice?
I love that you pointed this out, it’s something that I hadn’t really examined in my own work! I think this is what happens when my attempts at simplicity collide with my boredom with tradition. Sometimes I challenge myself to build something entirely rectilinear and more often than not I find the resulting design dull. I want to take a straight line and send it somewhere else. I think too that my tendency to push a boundary in a new direction is a reflection of my desire to make things that are still function-focused but different from what I’ve seen before. Ultimately I’m drawn to stools and chairs because I think there’s a lot of flexibility in what can constitute a stool, a lot of options for how to shape a chair, and the possibilities are exciting and fun to explore. I admire cabinet makers who are able to find the same creativity and expression with boxes, and I hope to find my way there soon.
You teach woodworking classes at a local community studio in Brooklyn, how do you think this impacts your growth as a woodworker and the creation/evolution of your own pieces?
Teaching has been huge for my confidence and I’ve learned so much from my students. I teach mostly adults (and a couple of very cool teens) from a wide variety of backgrounds and levels of experience, so I often need to have a handful of explanations for any one concept ready to go. I think teaching like this has encouraged me to be more flexible in the moment and helped me to think on my feet. There is a performative aspect to teaching that I find very fun, too. Ultimately many aspects of teaching help to keep woodworking playful for me!
What’s next for you?
More colorful wood furniture for sure! I recently came around to turning and I’m hoping to explore some funkier, sculptural, turned forms in my work. I’m additionally quite excited about a small collaborative collection I’ve been developing with a close furniture friend.