Deadhead Wood is the work of one maker, operating out of a two-bench shop on the east side of Bend, Oregon. We work in resin, in wood, in ink, and in fire — and we make a small number of mounts a year, each one built to a specific trophy.
The studio began the way these things often do — a hunter, a skull, a wall, and no mount on the market that felt like anything other than a compromise. The first piece was a black resin pour, mountain-silhouette inlay, set under a mule deer skull taken in the Ochoco range in the fall of 2021. Friends saw it. They asked. The bench kept going.
The work lives in four small series now. The Obsidian Series is what most people know us for: black resin poured and cured in thin layers, a ridgeline drawn freehand into the face of it, a skull hand-inked to its own bone. The Amber Series holds book-matched wood in a clear cast — a tree, twice, suspended mid-light. The Heritage line is quiet: a live-edge burl, three coats of tung oil, nothing else. And the Liberty pieces are flag commissions — shou sugi ban charred pine, hand-painted, built to order.
The mount is a landscape the skull belongs in.
The trophy, to us, is the record of a specific morning. A specific ridgeline, a specific weather, a specific decision made in the half-light before legal shooting time. The mount is the container for that record. It shouldn't compete with it, and it shouldn't outshine it — but it should, in its own right, be an object worth keeping.
If you've found your way to the studio, thank you. We'd be glad to hear what you're working on.