This piece is titled "Catching the Wave", when I first saw the piece of driftwood it looked very similar to a wave getting ready to crest. I knew that I wanted to have a board slicing the wave, but it seemed a little too simple. I decided to make a traditional Polynesian fish hook to frame the driftwood and board. I did quite a bit of research on how the ancient Maori, Samoan, and Hawaiian people created their fish hooks or Matau. I found that often the hooks were created from wood and bone (sometimes human) that were lashed together with flax twine. The Hei Matau represents good luck and safe travels over water.

The hook is fashioned from pine and white poplar which are lashed together with traditional flax. The base is created from knotty pine, western red cedar and, ancient kauri wood that is 50,000 years old. Kauri Wood which is from New Zealand, are trees from a forest that was leveled by some kind of catastrophic event and then covered by bogs roughly 45-48,000 years ago. These trees grew for almost 2000 years and were often 40 ft in circumference and 200 ft tall. Today these trees are excavated from under bogs and farmland, carbon dated, laser measured to determine how to utilize as much of the wood as possible, and then cut. The top of the base is 1/2" of resin with varying beach items such as sand, sand dollars, and sharks teeth.