Amanda Yoder was born and raised in a small town outside of Raleigh, NC to a family of DIYers. After studying musical theatre at East Carolina University, she moved to NYC to continue pursuing a career in the performing arts. When the world turned upside down in Spring 2020, all bets were off. Newly married to another southerner, she left the big city and settled in the mountains of her home state, where she and her husband Blake started a small urban farm and adopted a Victorian farmhouse. The massive amount of change and uncertainty caused by the pandemic and other personal circumstances caused Amanda to reevaluate the trajectory of her artist career. Having grown up around power tools and figure-it-outers, she was only a weekend project away from considering woodworking as the next leg of her creative journey. Things just clicked when Amanda started learning about fine woodworking techniques that could produce something on a totally different plane than a 2x4 bed platform. Amanda is now in her final year of Haywood Community College’s Professional Crafts program and recently launched her furniture business, Coda Wood Studio.
StatementI fell in love with a historic farmhouse in the mountains while on a journey of self-discovery away from my childhood comforts and adolescent ambitions. Soon after I settled into that house, the handcraft of woodworking found me, bringing with it a new language to explore what it means to be human - myself - in an embodied life. Scouring antique furniture in warehouses across the southeast, I sense myself in a present time and place reaching back across time and space to see who it was that used these pieces for furniture - why did they have this particular one and how did they find it delightful or useful? How can I identify with those why’s and how’s today?
Designing and making home furnishings is for me both a practice of embodied living - expressing myself in a way that unifies the physical and spiritual - and a study of people now and before. We have so much in common with our collective ancestors, as much as we may protest our differences with them. Perhaps everyday objects and furniture in the home can show us how much our stories intertwine. I often use design to explore this bridge between past and present, placing traditional details on modern shapes, then bringing the designs to life with practices and materials that honor the wisdom of old.
