ARTIST PROCESS // KATHLEEN STUDEBAKER // PREPARING FOR THE APOCALYPSE
Heartwood
Seed circuitry preserves and protects
by Kathleen Studebaker
Volume 7 // Issue 2 // Fall 2025 // Conservation
We tend to think of wood as a beautiful material, but with a muted palette, limited to variations of brown. Its beauty is in the complex patterns of its grain, but its color is a subtle thing. Back in 2018, while working as the woodshop technician at the University of New Hampshire, I watched students discover that wood can be bright and colorful as well. Purpleheart, for example, absolutely lives up to its name when freshly worked. But over time, with UV exposure and oxidation, those bright colors invariably fade.
This is an unfortunate reality of woodworking that I had come to terms with myself as a student, and watching my own students face it led me to the question: What would it take to preserve the color? To keep it pristine and bright forever? Before my time at UNH, I spent a few years working at a custom trophy company (yes, that’s a thing). One regular part of that job involved casting clear resin, and I knew that some types of clear resin are highly UV-resistant.
So I came up with what I thought was a pretty simple project: encase a 1-inch cube of wood within a 3-inch cube of clear resin, and preserve it forever. //
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