This Chainsaw Carving Champion Is Cooler Than You

The artist carves everything from Marvel characters to totem poles—with a chainsaw.

August 20, 2016, 11:30am

Ramsey and her Marvel character sculpture of Groot. Images courtesy of the artist.

Picture a rock star—but swap the electric guitar for a chainsaw—and you get Griffon Ramsey, the machine-wielding sculptor. The Austin-based entrepreneur began with an informal mentorship from R.L. Blair in Manchaca, Texas, and after honing her skill, began competing on the state, national, and worldwide levels. In the Australian Chainsaw Carving Championship last year, she won the People’s Choice Award for her rendering of “The Neverending Story.” She's even more popular on YouTube and Twitter, where she interacts with fans and posts videos of her process carving characters like Guardians' Groot and Elsa from Frozen.

Ramsey also uses her chainsaw and sometimes fire to create original works and “wearable” items, much of which she sells on her website. She spoke with The Creators Project about her trajectory and what she loves about the highly-physical art.

The Creators Project: When did you pick up chainsaw art as a passion?

Griffon Ramsey: I’ve been an artist from the start. I tried wood carving when I was younger (in school we had a woodshop with a dremel), and my grandfather was a whittler. So I’ve been interested in the craft for a long time, but I only picked up a chainsaw five years ago. I started gradually, and now I feel like I’ve been doing it long enough that I’m pretty established in the community.

Griffon Ramsey carving a totem pole.

Five years doesn’t seem like a long time—how did you become established that fast?

The nice thing about this craft is that the tool itself moves fast. As in, the chainsaw is a quickly-moving, constantly active instrument. It allows you to get a lot of practice in a brief time span. Plus, it doesn’t take too long to do a chainsaw carving, compared to other forms of art (like hand carving). It’s a really efficient tool. There aren’t too many other art tools like that.

Ramsey starts from the beginning on a new project.

Would you say that the fastness of the tool makes you faster as an artist?

I’m not a very fast carver yet, but it’s not all about speed. There are different styles of approaching the art, and different ways to make money with it, too. Some of it is more performance-based. The speed carving is something a lot of people commit to and practice for day and night. But other carvers do one-off projects that aren’t so much about speed. They discover what they’re making along the way. So while it’s not the main focus, I can appreciate the benefit of getting faster. Often for competitions, even if you have days to prepare, you’re still working in a short timespan for the contest itself.

So what’s your favorite category at competitions? Speed? Design?

I’ve done a few now, but the ones I’m really interested in doing are the large-scale design contests. Sometimes I take a break from that and opt for a speed-carve. That’s more fun for people to watch because they get to see it happen from start to finish, whereas large pieces take about three days.

Crow Dress, Handmade, hand sculpted, and hand dyed dress created for Austin Fashion Week ’13. Crow made with Eastern Red Cedar.

So there’s a time element to the art itself?

Just at competitions. When you’re at home, you can take as long as you want with your work.

What’s the longest you’ve worked on a project?

Well, the reason the chainsaw is a great tool for me is that I get really impatient. I lose focus quickly and I need to bounce around on projects. So if something doesn’t get done in three days, it can take a year because I don’t get back to it. But that’s just because of procrastination. The longest one piece took for me, at a time, was four and a half days. That’s pretty long for a competition.

Do you ever skip the detailing and just use just the chainsaw for the whole piece?

Yes—a lot of people actually prefer that sort of rustic, straight-chainsaw look. They tend to sell well. But for other projects I use grinders, sanders, and dremels for details.

And you paint them too?

I do. It’s a combination of burning, staining, and painting, depending on what the piece calls for and the nuances. I’ve been trying to incorporate more paint recently. There’s a chainsaw artist I really admire, Angie Polglaze. She puts such great paints on her stuff even when people advise against it. One time at a competition they said she’d be disqualified, but she still used paint, because that’s her art form. I think that’s great. There’s so much brown and wood color out there, that sometimes a little bit of color is nice.

Where do you get the subjects of your sculptures?

For Marvel’s Groot, and Majora’s Mask (from Zelda), I got a lot of requests online for those. As much as I loved Guardians of the Galaxy, I wasn’t so intensely a fan that I’d have done it on my own. But for Neverending Story—I’m a child of the 80s, that one is very personal.

So much of it comes from my YouTube community. It’s fun when people interact and get really interested in my projects. That’s what’s fascinating about fan art. It adds an extra challenge, to recreate something people love—they’re really sticklers about it. It has to look just like the character. But I like doing original things and want to do more in the future. It’s easier to create something straight from your head, where no one knows what it’s supposed to look like.