When woodwork becomes artwork

Somewhere in the hills near Glacier National Park, heavy timbers dull the sounds of saws and sandpaper inside the Wild Sky Woodwork shop.

Joe Gallagher, the owner and sole employee of Wild Sky Woodwork, repurposes old barn materials into works of art. His gallery includes shelves, bars and picture frames; he’s even designed entire rooms encased in his barn wood.

“It’s just part of Montana’s transition away from the historical resource-based industry,” Gallagher said, talking about huge industries like mining and logging. “Resources are still involved, but there’s so much cool stuff here with people doing artisan work like growing their own food or brewing their own beer.”

Wild Sky is still a relatively young company, three years old, and Gallagher is first to admit that he is not a traditional businessman. But that hasn’t deterred him from diving into the craft like a saw into some soft, repurposed wood.

Gallagher’s shop is located just west of West Glacier. He’s rented the space for the last three years, and fully stocked the shop with the tools and equipment he needs to transform aged barn siding planks into distinctive interior decor.

Behind the shop, Gallagher has stacked old planks from six different barns, most coming from the Kalispell area, others coming from the plains of Eastern Montana. Some of the barns were 100 years old before Gallagher tore them down. Each pile features a different age, dimension and color of wood.

This is Gallagher’s third year in the woodworking industry. He moved to the Flathead Valley nine years ago, after 15 years with a commercial construction business in Spokane.

Gallagher’s entry to the Flathead Valley wasn’t unlike that of many other implants before him. He spent his first summer as a guide with Great Northern Raft Guides, a job he continues to execute with as much as passion as woodworking.

“This area is like my part of Washington on steroids,” Gallagher said. “But what really kept me here was the people; there was an immediate kinship with the other guides.

After that first summer here, it was just a matter of finding a way to live here full time,”

When he wasn’t in the heat of rafting season, Gallagher ended up doing some odd jobs, which included deconstructing a farmer’s old barn. He used the old planks to build a few shelves for a friend and now, three years later, he has turned the list of creative odd jobs into a full-scale business.

During the first year, Gallagher went to a few vintage craft shows to test the market waters. Business had been slow at first, so he was surprised when the show produced a handful of sales and some custom woodwork orders for people outside the valley.

“That show gave me the confidence to know that my stuff could sell,” he said.

Gallagher said his most notable work so far was constructing many of the woodworking pieces in Glacier Distillery’s tasting room in Coram. But he also took note of the interior design done by Danny McIntosh.

Gallagher wants to expand on the interior design facet of Wild Sky. He said he didn’t expect woodworking to become as encompassing as it has, but enjoying the creativity and fulfillment from developing the atmosphere of an entire room has been the biggest surprise yet.

Gallagher said it’s easy to draw inspiration from the local landscapes while living in the woods just outside Glacier National Park.

“It’s a huge inspiration for me,” he said. “I want to keep challenging myself and mix art into it where I can. I want to keep experimenting.”

Gallagher said he feels bad tearing some of the barns down, but most of the time the owners have offered him to take the wood, instead of burning the barn down themselves. He decided to preserve the history by chronicling the stories behind the structures, usually tracking down information about the original owner to uncover the barn’s initial purpose and when it was built.

Now, each piece Gallagher creates comes with a small tag describing the barn, owner and the land where the barn once stood. The fact that these barn materials are reusable is really the only reason Gallagher gets to carry the history forward.

“There’s so much story in each one and they’re really starting to go away,” Gallagher said. “Eventually there won’t be many left with good wood.”

For the last three years, Gallagher said he’s been transitioning from a life scheduled by seasonal-employment and into the full swing of owning and operating a business.

While his background in construction lent itself to woodworking, one area Gallagher is still picking up is marketing. He said breaking into the local market has been tough. He’s attending shows mostly outside the Flathead, but developing a better strategy for local sales is among his short-term goals for Wild Sky Woodwork.

“It’s a tricky balance for me, between planning and letting things happen. You still have to have a plan,” he said. “That’s what I’ve learned from the business. I had to learn how to discipline myself.”

Looking ahead, Gallagher said he plans to spend more time on the areas of Wild Sky he thinks need work. That means taking more time to take pictures of pieces, meeting people in the market and planning pieces before the construction phase.

The first vintage craft show of the year is coming up in a few months in Spokane. Gallagher is looking forward to getting back to the shows with a revived motivation and some new ideas for his craft.

He’ll continue to work at Great Northern Raft Guides as well, but this will be the first summer he takes a part-time guiding position. Wild Sky Woodwork is paramount now, he said, but it’s also important to him to stay connected with the community that embraced him upon his arrival in Montana.

A line from one of the barn tags Gallagher attaches to his woodwork might best represent his outlook on balancing work and play:

“Sometimes the price you pay for living in a country so beautiful and free is the number of hats you wear to make it work.”

For more information on Wild Sky Woodwork, visit www.WildSkyWoodwork.com.

Reporter Seaborn Larson may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at slarson@dailyinterlake.com.