Sean Philips is a jack-of-all-trades. The Canadian wood-carver was born in Zimbabwe before moving to South Africa, England and Taiwan, and eventually landing in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He’s a writer (he’s won a poetry award), musician, photographer, videographer, and most recently, a wood sculptor. “I grew up in the bush in Zimbabwe,” he tells Business of Home. “It wasn’t even a town. We used to go out and pick up mud, and I used to make little animals out of the mud, like elephants and cows. But then we moved to South Africa into a city, so there was no bush around us, so I didn’t have that outlet.” That creative spark would be reignited years later on a trip with his children. “During Covid, we were camping, and my kids were into Harry Potter, and I had a knife with me. They asked me to make some Harry Potter wands, and I started carving them with the knife, and I was immediately smitten with that process.”
Philips researched how to do power carving to craft things like sculptures, bowls and other vessels—all items that are both functional and beautiful. “I couldn’t find any information online, so I just bought as much stuff as I could and figured it out as I went along, and then started posting videos,” he says. Some of the clips he posted to Instagram, Facebook and TikTok ended up garnering upwards of 8 million views. Now, he has amassed nearly 100,000 followers across the three platforms.
That social media following has been an important part of his journey. “There was nothing out there to learn from when I started,” he says. “It’s been amazing to build a community of people. I get hundreds of questions a day about the tools, the processes, and it’s really satisfying to be able to help other people.”
Balancing creative work and the incessant demands of the algorithm required innovation. To manage his growing following and keep up with all his other interests and activities, Philips used AI to code an entire backend system, where all the emails and messages from his different businesses land in one spot, and are marked according to urgency. He has also scheduled out social media posts up to 145 days in advance. (His process is a key source of content: Philips films the production of every piece.) “The social media stuff was a couple of hours a day at the beginning, whereas now it’s two hours once every couple of weeks,” he says. “I can’t be doing nothing. I’m the kind of person where if I’m sitting doing nothing, bad things happen. I have to be building stuff—whether it’s with computers or writing music or words or carving—I’m just drawn to all of it.”
Philips only carves pieces from salvaged trees—think burn piles, backyards and fallen trees on streets. “I have them in the studio, cut them to look at the grain, and at that point, usually sit down for a few minutes and let the wood speak to me and tell me what it wants to become, because they’re all unique. I’ve never made the same thing twice,” he says. “In terms of the actual process, there’s a specific kind of grinder wheel made in Australia by Arbortech that’s excellent for roughing out shapes. So I’ll start with that, and then just keep refining with other tools until I get what I’m looking for.”
Every one-of-a-kind piece is named for the tree’s species and where he found it. One of Philips’s favorite creations was made from applewood from Winnipeg’s St. Boniface neighborhood. “It smells amazing when you’re carving it, but the problem is nobody uses it because it cracks so terribly. As soon as it dries, it just rips itself apart. But because I’m not really interested in perfection, I’m interested in soul, that actually suits me just fine,” he says. “[There’s] a piece [made of] gnarled applewood split all the way down the middle, and laced up with deerskin leather. I’m really enjoying the combination of leather and wood at the moment. I go in different directions where certain aesthetics appeal to me, and then I’ll play with that until something else occurs.”
This year, he’s a juried exhibitor at the Winnipeg Art Gallery for the second year in a row. “I’m looking forward to that mostly because I get to have great conversations with knowledgeable people about the craft and about art in general. I found my people there as well,” he says. “I don’t have a destination in mind. It’s just [about] the process and the journey.”
