About
burnHeart is Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney, a furnituremaker, design, writer and educator based in Otego, New York.
He grew up in the northeast, where he learned woodworking and a passion for creativity from his father. At Skidmore College, where Brendan created and pioneered his own major, Sound, he worked as an engineer and builder with Peter Edwards (aka Casper Electronics), as lead recording engineer and supervisor at Skidmore College’s new $50 million Arthur Zankel Music Center, as a student and protégé of Flip Phillips in the Neuroscience department of Skidmore College, technical director of Skidmore College’s radio station, WSPN, and an extra pair of hands in his father’s woodshop.
After college, Brendan moved to San Diego to attend the prestigious Computer Music program at UCSD, where he earned a Master of Arts in Music. Studying under Miller Puckette, Tamara Smyth and Tom Erbe, Brendan studied improvised music, instrument design, signal processing and acoustics. He played saxophone in the Improvisation Enemble, was a Teaching and Research Assistant in the Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major, and worked on projects with other creative minds in the graduate program.
Outside his academic and creative practices, Brendan also worked with Fab Lab San Diego to teach younger students the art of design and fabrication. His work built upon techniques used by his coworkers at the Fab Lab and other great minds in youth education in new technologies to develop curricula that invite young makers to begin their lifelong journey in designing, building and using their own homemade inventions.
From San Diego, Brendan moved to the Mendocino Coast of California, to attend the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking program. Working to hone techniques taught to him by his cabinetmaker father, his work revolved around the use of local wood to create novel, durable furniture, handmade wooden and metal tools and musical instruments.
After training at The College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School) in Northern California, Brendan has spent the past decade working as a cabinetmaker, chairmaker and basketmaker, with an emphasis on holistic craft that starts at the source of his materials. As a writer, he has written for Popular Woodworking and Mortise and Tenon Magazine, and wrote “Leave Fingerprints,” a biography of James Krenov for Lost Art Press, published in October 2020. Brendan has also worked as a designer and contributor on several other published works, most recently as illustrator and aide on Jennie Alexander’s third revision of “Make A Chair from a Tree.” As a teacher, Brendan has taught at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, Port Townsend School of Woodworking, Lost Art Press storefront and in private classes, with a focus on cabinetmaking, toolmaking and green woodworking.
In his personal practice, Gaffney has worked to research and revive old techniques and add to them the capabilities of the modern workshop. This has included green woodworking techniques of chairmaking and basketmaking, pre-industrial cabinetmaking, non-traditional uses of green materials (root, bark and branch) and a slew of modern machines and technologies, including CNC machining and digital design and rendering. He cites indigenous North American craftspeople, James Krenov, Jennie Alexander, Martin Puryear, Chester Cornett, Peter Follansbee and Peder Moos as his deepest aesthetic and philosophical influences on his craft, and looks to approach craft and pedagogy with the wide range of perspectives that these influences impart on life and work in the 21st century.