Other Voices

Jennifer Black looks at a log and sees how it could become a bird or a lighthouse or a bear.

With a chainsaw in her hands, she has a running conversation in her mind, changing what she creates as she carves. “My mind switches on me so quickly,” she says.

Black will be creating her sculptures in front of onlookers next week at the Altamont Fair. What she does is both an art and a sport, says Black in this week’s podcast.  Black, who lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, used to host competitions and has worked with chainsaw carvers from all over the world.

She loves doing her work in front of an audience. “I love their discovery at the same time as mine,” she says. “We are discovering what’s in this log together.”

As she travels to fairs and festivals, she especially likes it when there are children in the crowd. Black looks them in the eye and says her parents were surprised she is not a librarian. “We all can do whatever we want,” she tells the children.

She is one of very few women in the field. When she traveled with her grown son — both of them wearing T-shirts proclaiming she was the carver with a big banner announcing the same thing — people would look past all of that and shake her son’s hand as if he were the carver.

Black, who has herself been at it for nine years now, says she is in pain all the time. She did the podcast interview on the way to see her chiropractor whom she visits twice a week. “My hands right now are burning … from running a chainsaw six to eight hours a day.” She likened chainsaw carving to playing pro football, which has an expiration date. But Black keeps at it because she loves it. “If you can’t love what you do, you need to stop,” she says. When she’s carving, she says, “The pain melts away.”