"Work begets work"

Sculptor Morgan Faulds Pike started as an apprentice pipe organ builder

Morgan Faulds Pike. The Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Memorial, 12 feet high, bronze and granite, on the boulevard waterfront, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Photo: Michael Lafferty

The Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Memorial, erected in 2001 in Gloucester’s Stage Fort Park, depicts a forlorn family gazing out to sea and tells the signal story of life in a fishing village. It was designed and sculpted by Morgan Faulds Pike. In her Rockport studio, she has scores of wood gouges (she likes the antique ones; the steel is stronger) and carves on heavy oak work tables her father built decades ago.

Morgan started out as an apprentice organ builder with CB Fisk, Inc. in Gloucester – and she still designs and carves wood facades for organs. The largest, at Indiana University, is 40 feet tall. Here’s a detail.

Morgan Faulds Pike, sculptor and designer, “Hawk,” walnut wood, center tower detail C.B. Fisk, Op. 91, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Photo courtesy Morgan Faulds Pike.

She has a delicately honed sense for representational carving, but when she’s at home in her studio, Morgan carves scrap wood into fluid abstractions. “I let the wood do the talking,” she said. In this week’s installment of the Working Artist series in the Globe, photographer Jessica Rinaldi and I visit Morgan in her studio.