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Portland Saturday Market, a mecca for handicraft producers, has been running from March to Christmas Eve since 1974. Photo: Alamy

Why Portland, Oregon, is to handicrafts what Los Angeles is to movies – think nature and geography

  • The city has had an artisanal heartbeat since its first Arts and Crafts Society was set up in 1907
  • Portland’s weekend market, a showcase for crafters, has been running from March to Christmas Eve since 1974

Portland, in the American state of Oregon, tethers its identity to arts and crafts in the same way that Los Angeles claims movies and San Francisco commandeers high technology.

The artisanal mindset embedded deep in the West Coast city’s grain is the natural by-product of a dramatic urban landscape defined by wood and stone; a skyline of Douglas fir trees and snow-capped mountains represents an open invitation to connect with the natural elements and make something by hand.

For more than a century, local residents have done just that.

In 1907, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, which evolved into the Oregon College of Art and Craft, was founded by Julia Christiansen Hoffman, the daughter of Danish immigrants and the wife of a bridge builder.

The Timberline Lodge, on Mount Hood, featured in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Photo: Alamy

The handicraft movement she pioneered was picked up and driven by two other visionary women, also with well turned triple-decker names.

Her daughter Margery Hoffman Smith – aka “the grand dame of arts and crafts” – led a Great Depression project to hand-build the interior of the Timberline Lodge, on Mount Hood, the exterior of which is best known as the hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining.

In 1937, Lydia Herrick Hodge founded the Oregon Ceramic Studio, which would become the Museum of Contemporary Craft (which closed in 2016).

Every weekend from March to Christmas Eve, Portland Saturday Market (established 1974) is open for business in the Old Town.

In the shadow of the Burnside Bridge, a trail of tented stalls fills several city blocks west­wards from the Willamette River, offering a window onto Portland’s home-made, hand­crafted soul.

Here you’ll find makers of wood inlay skateboards, shapers of beehive-style rope birdhouses and brewers of small-batch kombucha (a fermented drink with a strong Portland following), among a thriving subculture of jewellery-makers and fine illustrators, and a one-man band playing songs by The Monkees.

In 2011, the city’s post-millennial saturation in craft was given a satirical nod of recognition by television comedy-sketch series Portlandia, which lampooned the idea that anyone could become an artisan by indiscrimi­nately adding the silhouette of a bird to any household object.

A mural on a store in downtown Portland. Photo: Alamy

“Portland is a very vibrant community, creatively and artistically,” says Jim Piper, a self-described “wood artist” who lives in a forest to the north­west of the city.

Piper has a deep connection to his surroundings; his garden is a bucolic riot of wild birds and chipmunks, and his workshop is a large shed built into a clearing behind his house. He shares the workspace with his wife, who makes ceramics.

Piper uses wood ­turning, carving, delicate sandblasting and hand-painting to create objects that blend intricacy and elegance in a way that seems wholly organic rather than painstakingly man-made.

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Having abandoned a career as a commercial photographer in 2000, Piper sells his work online and through Imogen Gallery, in estuary town Astoria, which is the oldest American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains and a two-hour scenic drive northwest of Portland.

“I was spending way too much time at the computer. I really liked the process of traditional photography. This woodwork is in some ways giving me the opportunity to focus that attention to detail.”

That is a sentiment echoed by Kurt Mottweiler, who makes lensless wooden cameras and other beautifully crafted objects in the partitioned carcass of an East Portland furniture factory, affec­tionately nicknamed The Hole.

Anyone curious enough to seek out his Sullivan’s Gulch workshop – located down a side road, across a set of railroad tracks, through a warren of rickety corridors – is welcome to visit.

Here, he created the limited-run P.120, a panoramic pinhole camera incorporating the same kind of lamination used on Mosquito aircraft, during World War II, and the Novena Heirloom, a laptop cover that would not look out of place on the work­bench of an 18th century cabinet maker.

A lensless camera by Kurt Mottweiler.

“We live in a world that’s preoccupied with digital everything,” says Mottweiler.

“If you take a picture with an analogue camera it slows you down; you’re so relaxed and concentrated on what you’re doing that the rest of the world disappears.”

Hilary Pfeifer works in a home studio at the heart of the Alberta Arts District, where pretty much everything is handcrafted, from the pies served at Random Order cafe to the public sculpture of a giant beaver, frozen in an expression of permanent bewilderment, hand on head, as if trying to remember the location of misplaced car keys.

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According to the plaque, the beaver is in fact “looking for a day when humans and nature harmonise”.

In addition to sculptural commissions, Pfeifer makes whimsical, handcrafted animals under her cottage brand, Bunny with a Toolbelt.

“I call them adorable critters,” says the fifth-generation Oregonian, who has set up a miniature museum, the Window of Wonders, in a former storefront on Alberta Street – a low-rise and defiantly unassuming parade of shops, bars, food carts and restaurants – to showcase her distinctly Portlandian “zoo”.

Hilary Pfeifer’s Walking Stick for William Bartram. Photo: courtesy of Hilary Pfeifer

“When the economy went down, I started working on bunnywithatoolbelt.com because I use all reclaimed wood and it’s the same method as my installation work. As long as I have a stash of wood and the right paint and glues, I can make whatever I want.”

Several clicks east of Alberta, in the basement of a suburban home framed by a monkey puzzle tree and a grid of vegetable boxes, Bill Wessinger makes sculptural whales and birds from steam-bent Oregon white oak, using techniques he developed as a “skin-on-frame” boat builder.

“It all started with kayaks,” he explains. “It’s a wonderful building method – very meditative, a lot of joinery. Skin-on-frame boat building is something that was done by cultures all over the globe.”

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Wessinger is working on a rowing boat inspired by American East Coast designs as well as so-called pilot gigs from Cornwall, England. He also makes furniture.

“Most of my stuff is Danish modern in inspiration. I really like the work of Finn Juhl and Hans Wegner – those guys were rooted in a woodworking background and cabinet making. I like to stick with local woods as much as possible.”

A selection of Wessinger’s furniture and sculptural work is for sale at Sitte Modern, in the Pearl District, an over­­hauled neighbourhood of former ware­houses to the west of the Willamette River that now house apartments, bars and restaurants.

On the other side of the river, which bisects Portland north to south, Sarah Wolf has turned the basement of her parents’ home into a mini-factory for beautifully handcrafted tableware.

She designs and makes usable, everyday objects that are also highly collectible.

Ceramicist Sarah Wolf in her Portland studio. Photo: Jessie Talavera

“I’m obsessed with geometric shapes,” she says. “It’s very satisfying to come up with designs that are bold and interesting but use very few elements. It can be very modern and also kind of classic at the same time. And timeless because it’s so simple.”

Wolf, whose work is sold at a hand­ful of stores in central Portland, belongs to a family with a tradition of arts and crafts in the city.

“All of my mom’s friends were painters and we were always doing crafts,” says Wolf. “That was very much a part of my community and it still is.

“Portland has an incredible mingling and crossover of craft and art and food and culture.”

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