When you enter Pierre Tardif's workshop, you discover a surprising cave. Every centimeter is exploited by machines, old objects, boards, pieces of wood, furniture. It smells good.
He collects and hunts for old tools, forgotten mechanisms, rare woods, one-legged chairs, etc. Each object in his workshop not only has a story, but also a soul.
He has been a cabinetmaker and teacher at the École d'ébéniste d'Art de Montréal since 1995 and is as passionate about his craft as he is about its transmission. Pierre attaches particular importance to youth, he likes to let the apprentices speak: “I listen to them and I learn”.
Currently, one of her students is making a half-horse carved with a chainsaw and which will be fixed to the ceiling. It’s all these experiences that drive him. He accepts crazy orders and does not count his hours. He repairs irreparable furniture even if it means embarking on real projects, such as shrinking antique furniture from 6 feet wide to 3 feet.
He acquired this passion when he was young. Together with his friends, they were building loudspeakers and transport boxes for sound equipment. His pleasure was cutting, assembling and driving the screws into the wood. He then followed a training course and this job became the passion of his life.
For Maison Tricotée, he manufactures BOXES FOR STORING DOUBLE POINTED NEEDLES, and BOBBIN HOLDERS . It uses maple, birch, cherry and walnut. But his favorite wood is cherry because its colored tendencies are more subtle. He begins by tracing the correct dimensions on the raw wood, cuts it with the band saw and planes the pieces.
Then, he shapes them, cuts out the lid, hollows out the mortise, cuts a slot, installs a pivot, magnets, etc. Finally, he sands them, files them, oils them and signs them. He works about two days to make about twenty boxes.
It's religious, each base remains next to its lid until the final assembly.
In the arts, you have to know how to be an engineer and an artist, mathematical and sensitive. It is in these paradoxes that Pierre Tardif finds his balance, between the mechanisms of machines and the knots in the wood.
He likes to work with the whims of a material that moves, of a living material.
