Malcolm Fages

Mt. Pleasant, SC
Woodturning

The artist is a retired Navy Vice Admiral. He commanded nuclear submarines and served in a variety of political-military assignments during a career of 36 years.  Precision, attention to detail, and patience were defining characteristics of that service and transferred well to his woodturning. His work has been recognized each year for the last five at the Annual Palmetto Hands competition, the largest juried craft show in South Carolina.

His work explores the dialogue between precision and nature, the meeting point where deliberate geometry intersects with the organic histories held within wood. Whether beginning with a single solid block or hundreds of individually cut segments, each piece is a study in balance: between structure and spontaneity, refinement and rawness, design and discovery.

In his segmented turnings, he constructs patterns that would never occur in nature—radiating motifs, interlocking forms, sweeping curves built from hundreds of pieces. These works celebrate the architectural side of woodturning: the precision of joinery, the rhythm of repetition, and the satisfaction of creating larger sculptural wholes from many smaller parts. The process requires planning, patience, and exactness, yet the final forms remain warm and organic, grounded in the material itself.

His single-block turnings reflect the character of the tree. Beautiful grain patterns, voids, inclusions, and growth anomalies are preserved as reminders of time, weather, and decay—natural events that no design could replicate.

Ultimately, his goal is to craft forms that merge technical precision with the natural beauty of wood—objects that invite touch, reward close observation, and reflect the quiet harmony that emerges when craftsmanship and nature meet.