Makers

Deep in the Wood

Raul De Lara coaxes sculptures from wood that appear to move, shine, and squish—both embracing and defying the rules of nature.

By Jennifer Vogel
February 14, 2025

Spring 2025

Features + Profiles

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Raul De Lara

Artist Raul De Lara Like the Ones Back Home / Como Las De Mi Tierra, 2024, walnut, oak, cedar, 108 x 84 x 36 in.

New York City–based sculptor Raul De Lara remembers the first time he was struck by the metamorphic qualities of wood. He was 21 and in a community college woodshop class in Austin, Texas, surrounded by saws and sanders. “The teacher took a square board and turned it into a cylinder,” De Lara says. “I was like, this material can be anything. Something for me really clicked.”

In the 12 years since then, De Lara has deepened his knowledge of wood, approaching it as a scientist, a poet, and a magician. He can create the illusion of softness from wood as hard as mesquite, as with his “tufted” Soft Chair (M1) (2023). He can make a steel and ash shovel look droopy and exhausted, as with Cansado (2022). In 2024, he fashioned a 9-foot-tall sculpture of a potted monstera plant that appears supple and alert, called Like The Ones Back Home / Como Las De Mi Tierra. The walnut leaves are attached to curved stems with realistic-looking nuts and bolts, which also are made of walnut.

“I think wood is very much alive,” says De Lara. “It never stops moving. It moves its whole life. The more I work with it, the more I learn its personalities, how it structurally fails and doesn’t fail. How it wants to work with you.”

De Lara was born in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico, where his dad was an architect and his mom an interior designer. “At the architecture firm, my dad had a wood shop that was half of the building. A team of people would make furniture with him,” he says. “Being exposed to making and exposed to the material from a young age did something for me that sparked curiosity.”

The family moved to Austin, Texas, in 2004, when De Lara was 12. There he picked up freestyle BMX bike riding and competed throughout his teenage years. “During that time with BMX—besides the sport, the injuries and stuff—I started really getting into the language of things, the language of the world, thinking about materials and shapes in a way that to this day really, really informs my practice.”

Wooden chair with the illusion of tufted upholstery

Photo courtesy of Raul De Lara

De Lara's functional, hand-carved Soft Chair, 2022, Siberian elm, cedar, walnut, 32 x 21.5 x 18.5 in.

Photo courtesy of Raul De Lara

De Lara’s 20 Years Later / 20 Años Después shovel, 2024, walnut, ash, steel, 39 x 8 x 5 in.
Photo courtesy of Raul De Lara

Cavelle II, 2023, with Hermès saddle, walnut, cedar, hemu, horsehair, 50 x 19 x 64 in.
Photo courtesy of Raul De Lara

19 Years So Far / 19 Años Después , 2023, tzi-te seeds, red string, Douglas fir, hemu, 38 x 29 x 6.5 in.

After community college, De Lara studied studio art at the University of Texas at Austin, where he took a trajectory-changing wood design class with professor Mark Maček, a master woodworker and furniture maker. From there, he went to the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Michigan and then moved to Chicago, where he worked for two years with sculptor Nick Cave. “He’s still a mentor of mine and a good friend,” De Lara says. In 2019, he earned his master’s in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

“I’ve lived a few different lives,” he says. Through it all, De Lara’s appreciation of what wood can do and be—fueled by what he calls his “inner fire”—expanded. “I grew up in a world made of wood in Mexico,” he says. “It’s very much part of the built world. It’s treated with more respect there than it is here. Chairs are built to be repaired. I was lucky enough to grow up in a world where wood had equal footing with any material. It’s one of the great things we use to make the world.”

Clearly, his work resonates. In 2024, he was named a distinguished fellow at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and won the Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft. And he’s booked through 2025 with museum and gallery shows.

De Lara says he wants to keep Mexican and American woodworking traditions alive while also propelling them forward. His pieces tell stories, sometimes drawing on his personal history, such as with his tired shovels, which evoke the immigrant experience. He accomplishes astonishing technical feats while satisfying our innate desire for the tangible. “There is something deep down in everyone’s mind with plants and furniture that we connect with but don’t realize,” he says. “I think my work taps into that a little bit.”

Wherever De Lara makes his home and studio, he learns the local “material language.” Since 2021 he’s lived and worked in Ridgewood, Queens. He sources wood from a sawyer in Pennsylvania who rescues downed trees and mills and air-dries them. And he walks through Central Park picking up leaves he uses as models for his sculptures. “I’m the weird guy with a bag collecting leaves I like,” he says. “It’s a way to connect to a place in a physical sense. That tree grew here.”

De Lara’s sculptures—elegant, surprising, and a little mysterious—carry a quality of eternity. “I have found a material that really speaks to me,” he says. “The more I know, the more there is to know. Wood, poetically speaking, when you see wood, it has time on its skin. It’s the only material that literally has time on its skin, the passing of time. What a strange, cool thing to hold. It’s like a talking little fossil.”

Jennifer Vogel is a contributing editor to American Craft.

See De Lara’s work in person at two upcoming exhibitions:

Raíces/Roots
SCAD Museum of Art
Savannah, Georgia
January 15–July 6, 2025

The Contemporary Austin
Austin, Texas
Opens in September

Wooden sculpture blending a cactus and a rocking chair

Photo courtesy of Raul De Lara

Lotion in Your Lungs, 2019, pine, oak, US/Mexico border sand, 72 x 50 x 24 in.

Visit Raul De Lara Online

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