Our ethos.
We seek to explore the quiet tension between what grows and what is imposed. Reclaimed wood—scarred by time, weather, and prior use—serves as the organic foundation. Its grain records years of stress, adaptation, and survival. Steel enters as the counterpoint: precise, manufactured, and unyielding. Where wood remembers, steel asserts.
The dialogue between these materials is deliberate. Wood yields, swells, splits, and carries irregularity; steel resists, punctures, and holds form. Their intersection is not harmonious by default—it is negotiated. Steel interrupts the wood’s natural continuity, while the wood absorbs and reframes the intrusion, refusing to be reduced to a passive substrate. Each piece becomes a record of that encounter.
By using reclaimed wood, the work foregrounds prior life rather than raw extraction. These materials are not neutral; they arrive with histories embedded in their fibers. Steel, often associated with infrastructure, industry, and control, is repositioned as a foreign body within a living archive. The resulting compositions are neither purely natural nor purely industrial, but suspended between states—organism and artifact, growth and constraint.
Ultimately, the work asks where meaning resides: in what is engineered for permanence, or in what survives through adaptation. The sculptures do not resolve this tension. Instead, they preserve it—holding organic complexity and inorganic certainty in sustained, physical conversation.
Renewal & Rebirth
We give new life to what was once forgotten — transforming the cast-aside into something enduring, alive, and renewed.
Storytelling
As DNA carries the code of life, reclaimed wood carries the memory of time. Each piece we craft honors both stories — biological and botanical, ancient and ongoing.
Sustainability
Reclaiming materials is an act of respect — for nature, for craft, and for the generations to come. It’s how we create responsibly, with beauty and purpose intertwined.
Science
We’re endlessly inspired by science — its patterns, efficiency, and pursuit of truth. It shapes how we see the world, and how we bring it to life in our work.
Our origins.
I suspect my efforts emerge from a childhood shaped by the wooded suburbs outside Pittsburgh, where steel and timber were never opposites, but neighbors. Growing up amid forested hills threaded with rail lines, bridges, and mills, I experienced nature and industry as an inseparable landscape—trees infiltrating infrastructure, organic growth coexisting with engineered order.
That early environment informs the material language of Helix & Hewn. Reclaimed wood carries memory, irregularity, and time—its grain recording weather, growth, and prior use. Steel enters as counterpoint: precise, deliberate, and imposed. Together, they echo the places that shaped me, where human systems were built directly into the land rather than apart from it.
My projects do not attempt to reconcile these forces. Instead, they seek to hold them in tension. Wood resists uniformity; steel insists on structure. Their coexistence reflects a formative belief born of place: that meaning often arises not from purity, but from friction—where nature and design, history and intention, are forced to occupy the same space.
Robert Bakin
Founder, Helix & Hewn