Kenya-Born Artist Hand-Carves Intricate Scenes Of Local Nature On Wood

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There is nothing quite like these intricately carved wooden vessels that combine the elements of natural history and colorful local wildlife. The wooden vessel in the photo was created by Kenya-born and New Zealand-based artist, Gordon Pembridge. The artist has developed a lifelong bond with nature, and often uses that bond as the main source of inspiration for his impressive wooden vessels. Pembridge obtains most of his timber from storm-felled trees and shapes them using a lathe. But the real magic happens when the artist meticulously hand-carves the incredibly detailed wildlife scenes with a high-speed engraver. Many of the wooden vessels feature flora and fauna from his most beloved places of Africa and Oceania. To finish, Gordon forms the colorful compositions and applies them with an airbrush. You will want to take a look at the gallery of wooden vessels created by Pembridge.

Kenya, which is officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in Africa and a founding member of the East African Community or EAC. The capital and largest city in Kenya is Nairobi. Kenya's territory lies on the equator and overlies the East African Rift that covers a diverse and expansive terrain that extends roughly from Lake Victoria to Lake Turkana and further southeast all the way to the Indian Ocean. Kenya is bordered by Tanzania to the south and southwest, with Uganda to the west, South Sudan to the northwest, Ethiopia to the north and Somalia to the north-east. Kenya covers an area of 224,445 square miles and had a population of about 48 million people in January 2017. Oceanica is a region that is centered on the islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean. There are different opinions of what constitutes Oceania that range from its three subregions of Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia to, more broadly, the entire insular region that is between Southeast Asia and the Americas, to include Australasia and the Malay Archipelago. The term Oceania is often used more specifically to describe the continent that comprises of Australia and the proximate islands or the Pacific ecozone that includes Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, and excludes both New Zealand and mainland New Guinea).

The lathe tool used in these beautiful wooden designs is a tool that has been around for centuries. A lathe is an ancient tool, that dates back at least to ancient Egypt and was known to be used in both Assyria and ancient Greece. The lathe was a very important tool to the Industrial Revolution. The lathe is known as the mother of machine tools, as it was the first machine tool that leads to the invention of other machine tools that we know today. The origin of the lathe turning dates back to around 1300 BCE when the Ancient Egyptians first developed a lathe used by two-people. One person would turn the wood work piece with a simple rope while the other would use a sharp tool to cut the shapes in the wood. Ancient Rome improved upon the Egyptian design with the addition of a turning bow. In the Middle Ages, the lathe used a pedal that replaced hand-operated turning, which allowed a single person to rotate the piece while still working with both hands. The pedal was usually connected to a pole, often a straight-grained sapling.

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