Intrepid Makers: Kristina Madsen – FineWoodworking

One tiny chisel tap at a time, Kristina Madsen has built one of the most powerful and inspiring bodies of work in contemporary furniture. Sitting in her workshop in Southampton, Mass., with window light flooding over her left shoulder, Madsen uses a painstaking chip-carving technique she learned from traditional carvers in Fiji to create the multilayered moiré patterns that embellish her furniture.

Beneath the carving, you’ll find classical furniture forms and impeccable traditional craftsmanship, both of them rooted in Madsen’s apprenticeship with the talented and eccentric English furniture maker David Powell. Madsen was 18 when she discovered Powell, who had emigrated from England and was then working alone in a former potato barn in central Massachusetts. Powell wasn’t a teacher, but Madsen, who had left college after one semester to seek out a woodworking mentor, kept…