Johnny McCaffrey is a woodworker and sculptural artist from Olympia, Washington now living in Kansas City, Missouri. Johnny’s work focuses on themes of reclamation, reinvention, and playful curiosity, both conceptually and materially. Craft and art-making have been throughlines in all areas of his life—haling from a familial lineage of makers to working as an art installer and handler and home builder and remodeler. Johnny has forged a non-traditional path in his career and will continue to engage with making through channels of education that honor alternative ways of learning.

His work is constantly engaging with the line(s) between sculptural and functional. Johnny loves the tension created between the viewer and useless functional objects. He also love the satisfaction of sensually engaging functional and non-functional objects that make it nearly impossible to not touch, use, or physically engage with. Tension and the ways we apprehend it, navigate it, contend with it are not only part of his practice but of his lived experiences in the world as a queer, trans person. 

Reclamation of material, history, place, and stories play a vital role in their making. Reclaimed materials often inform the form of the work in concert with narratives and curiosities they wrestle with.