The knots
Every design begins with a knot.
Not a metaphor — the mathematical kind: a closed loop turned through itself, ordered, endless, impossible to untie. Mathematicians have studied them for more than a century. I find them quietly beautiful.
It started with symmetry
When I built my second machine — the one that has carved every piece since — and discovered these woods, I wanted to cut something symmetrical into them. I’ve never fully understood the pull; symmetry simply feels right to me, a kind of safety, an order in the chaos of the numbers.
So I went looking for patterns a machine could carve. Through Arabic geometry, through Celtic knotwork — and somewhere in that search I found the mathematics of knots. One knot could become a thousand: turned, folded, combined, an endless family of forms. That was the whole world I’d been looking for.
The knot disappears
From there, each knot is transformed — in code, turned and folded and combined — until it can be carved in wood and worn. Transformed so far, in truth, that you won’t find the knot in the finished piece. It dissolves. What’s left is its essence: the symmetry, the balance, the quiet order it leaves behind — the way the frame of a house vanishes once the house is built.
Why it matters
You don’t need to see the knot to feel it. There’s a calm in that hidden order — and I wanted to be able to hold it, and to give it. Each piece is, in the end, a small and steady order you can wear.
That’s the whole idea behind the kp project: warm symmetry.
And a knot is also a tie — and these are all endless ones, with no beginning and no end. Maybe that’s the quiet thing each piece does: it ties itself to whoever finds it theirs, and won’t be undone.