Anyone can dream a dream. What’s inspiring is seeing that dream coaxed into existence.

STORY BY BARRY KAUFMAN + PHOTOGRAPHY BY LISA STAFF

There’s an old saying that talk is cheap. It’s nothing more than wind, carrying thoughts and ideas that die as quickly as the words vanish in the breeze. 

What’s worth something, perhaps the only thing worth anything, is what you make from those words. You can talk about creating a beautiful work of art, but that art doesn’t exist until you create it. You can carry around an idea for a tune, but it’s nothing more than electric static in your brain until you birth it into song. You can know the way to make something, but that’s not the same as making the commitment to see it take shape.

This month we salute those makers who turned their dreams into reality, no matter what form that dream took. They had the vision, then they got busy making it happen. Meet three makers who prove that when you stop talking and start doing, the possibilities are endless.

Matthew Morris

This master craftsman is carving his legacy with a subtractive philosophy.

According to Matthew Morris, the biggest trick of woodworking isn’t making something. It’s unmaking something.

“Woodworking is a craft of removing things to make something. It’s not an additive art,” he said. “If you’re removing something and you make a mistake, that’s OK. You just set it aside and move on. You’re not failing; you’re learning to be better the next time.”

It’s a philosophy he’s gained over the last 15 or so years, as he’s watched his woodworking grow from a hobby to an obsession to a calling. Originally a side gig while he oversaw the software company he’d built, he realized soon after starting that he had an aptitude for the subtractive art of woodworking. It’s not only the knowledge of different woods and how they come together but how the art form has evolved, intertwining different influences.

“It started because I bought a condo and decided to remodel it myself, including building the furniture,” he said. “Doing that inside the condo isn’t the easiest thing in the world, so I got a commercial site.”

From there he started building pieces for people he knew, customized down to the last grain. Realizing there was a bigger market for his art, he began running ads in Robb Report, the famed luxury magazine aimed at the upper crust. From there his reputation grew, leading to working with California’s Gamble House and the homes of famous athletes around the world as he caught the eye of several professional players associations.

“When I started, I was doing other people’s stuff, and that really helped me get into a style and learn why people did certain things,” he said. “You learn someone else’s language, then develop your own. And that was the hardest part.”

His style leans heavily on the arts and crafts pieces of early 1900s America, with clean lines and exposed joinery. As he says, “It’s just letting the wood speak for itself.”

He spent several years sharing the secrets of his art, leading an online woodworking school whose student body stretched around the world. He enjoyed the ability it gave him to interact with other woodworkers, while passing along the knowledge he’d acquired, but ultimately shuttered it last year to focus more on building custom pieces. 

Today his creations keep the saws running at his MM Wood Studio, where he crafts custom pieces of every kind that are sold through Carolina Jasmine, the boutique opened by his wife, Elizabeth. With some pieces he’s creating furniture for a client across the world. For others, he’s taking in red oaks harvested from a lot near Dolphin Point to create furniture in the home for which the trees were cleared. 

“That was great. They cut down the red oaks, a guy on the island helped mill them, they were dried upstate, then we built furniture using the trees from their own property,” he said.

Have a seat

While he’s built countless pieces of furniture in his years behind the table saw, there are several pieces of which Matthew Morris is particularly proud. One is an intricate rocking chair created in partnership with the Gamble House, a California landmark and icon of the arts-and-crafts movement. 

“That is the most complicated and intricate piece I’ve ever built,” he said. Still, it was worth it just for the unprecedented access it gave him to the home’s secret spaces as he took detailed photographs to craft a replica of a historic rocking chair – albeit one scaled up to modern size. “If you sat in the original, your knees would come up to your chest.”

Another piece is the Nova dining chair seen here. “I’ve been wanting to build more of a modern chair for a while, so when we moved to Hilton Head, I designed the nova dining set for our house here,” he said. “It’s really comfy: the seat is ash, and the frame is walnut, so the light ash contrasts with the darker walnut.”

Courtney Cutchins

This vocal coach and performer is crafting a new sound, merging the soul of jazz with the edge of grunge.

When you think of a maker, you probably picture someone working with their hands. But not everything that is made is built from elements of the physical world. Take a song, for example. Even the simplest of melodies represents a corralling of notes that exist only in the moment they’re being played, grasped from the air during their fleeting lifespan and woven together to make music. And even then, this tune is only effective if it resonates with the listener, playing on some part of our universal experience.

And once all that’s done, that song must be performed. And even as intuitive an instrument as the human voice must be mastered before it can create music. 

Courtney Cutchins knows this too well as a 20-year vocal coach and performer. And if she looks entirely too young to have a 20-year career as anything, you should know she got her start very young.

“I first began teaching when I was in high school, working with the children of people who had heard me sing,” she said. “It’s been an incredible evolution, from those early days to now working mostly with adult clients, helping them tap into their own vocal and creative freedom in profound and deep ways — however best serves them. Because we all have a voice, and we use it every day of our lives.”

The Seattle native eventually made her way to New York City, where she earned her master of music degree in jazz vocal performance from the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. While she was studying, however, a little bit of that classic Big Apple magic nearly derailed her singing career.

“I started getting sick, and it turned out I had black mold in the walls of my apartment. While the apartment was very clean, I lived in it for three years not even knowing,” she said. “One doctor I went to just told me, ‘Welcome to New York. It’s a gross place. You get sick; what are you going to do?’”

Having to work against the constant strain of what she thought was laryngitis provided to be a pyrrhic blessing. 

“I was exploring exercises to reinspire and encourage myself in creating more music and not feeling exhausted and stuck. One of them was to revisit music from my childhood,” she said. And that’s when Cutchins discovered the way her distinctive voice, once removed from the illness of her apartment, gave fresh air to the grunge music she’d grown up with. “I’m heavily rooted in jazz music and love the traditional sounds of that, but it started to feel a little limiting in my head.”

That exercise launched her headlong into finding the intersection of jazz and grunge, two wildly disparate music styles that she brings together in her debut album, Grunge to Grace, which drops on Oct. 18. 

“I was rearranging grunge tunes, and as I started writing my original stuff, there were elements that you’d typically hear in grunge that started working their way in,” she said. “Some people are saying, ‘Yeah, this is jazz.’ Some are saying, ‘I don’t know what this is.’ It’s kind of fun to have something that people can’t put their finger on. The whole point is the journey to your unique and authentic self, musically and otherwise, so it’s fitting to think that this is being reflected on the album.” 

Sweet release

Featuring six original songs and three jazz-flavored reimaginings of ‘90s grunge-era classics, Courtney Cutchins’ new album, Grunge to Grace, represents the culmination of a musical journey that started when she was in college. It was then that the first bars of what would become the second track on the album, “Star on the Sea,” crossed her mind. 

That original will join Soundgarden classics like “Boot Camp” and “The Day I Tried to Live” as well as Nirvana’s iconic “All Apologies” on an album that blends genres into something entirely Cutchins’ own.

You can hear it for yourself at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 5 at SoundWaves on Hilton Head Island (tickets online at Eventbrite). There, during an epic release party, she’ll be joined on stage by musical royalty, Taylor Swift musical director, David Cook.

“I was referred to him through the grapevine of musicians I was reaching out to when I was putting this project together,” said Cutchins. “He really dug the music and said, ‘People need to hear this.’ It’s always amazing to work with people who are ridiculously talented and ridiculously kind.”

Michelle Lindberg

This Bluffton woman is raising the bar in soap making and creativity.

“I can’t do what everybody else does. I have to go the extra mile,” said Michelle Lindberg, standing amid the dizzying kaleidoscope of powders, tinctures and raw materials that is her workshop. “It’s all or nothing. If it’s a craft, I can do it.”

This relentless urge to create has been the biggest strand of Lindberg’s DNA since her youth, picking up cooking because she decided she’d like something fancier than what her mother was making. Over the years this urge has driven from one medium to the next – sewing, quilting, cake decorating, playing the trumpet. 

“I’ve always done those things,” she said. “I like to be unique. I’m a little bit extra.”

But one fateful trip to New Orleans in 2019 launched what might just be her biggest obsession yet. 

“We walked into a shop selling this old handmade soap. They wanted $15 a bar for this stuff! I just said to myself, ‘Well, I can make that,’” she said. “So as we were driving home, I started researching and ordered my first few tools off of Amazon.”

That first set of tools, and she still has them, are now just a small part of the absolute arsenal at her disposal. Oils, butters, powders, fragrances. Towering stacks of bins bearing inscrutable labels. A kaleidoscope of jars containing mica. Custom-built molds for setting soap in massive blocks to be cut down. Smaller molds for the detailed shapes she adds to some of her more artistic soaps. They line the shelves and cabinets in a workshop that she and her husband, Jim, built themselves, extending the barn where he works on motorcycles and hot rods.

And across one table – the heavenly scented fruits of that labor. Lined up in orderly rows that contrast with the chaos surrounding them, these blocks of soap dazzle with their colorful contours. Some mingle purples and browns, some tan and mocha. Some are embellished with hand-crafted apples, Christmas tree trucks or pumpkins that she meticulously molds one at a time. Some have their designs emblazoned within the bar itself, extruded using tools that Lindberg makes herself using a 3D printer. Some await packaging, some are all ready for shipping, proudly displayed in their Mosaic Garden Soap Works package. 

“I’m making everything. I’m marketing, I’m doing the website, I’m doing the packaging… OK, so I don’t lie, my mom does come out to help me clean up sometimes,” she said with a laugh.

Having built everything from the ground up – quite literally, including her workshop – Lindberg has created a business out of her relentless pursuit of learning, making and creating.

Silky creations in every batch

Along with the ingredients you’d expect to find in soap – fragrances, oils, shea butter, etc. – Michele Lindberg has developed a recipe over the years that includes a few unorthodox ingredients. For example, she adds a bit of mulberry silk to every batch. 

Ask her what that does, and she’ll give you the obvious answer – “it makes it silky.”

“You develop soap friends and watch what they do, but I have my recipe, you have yours. One friend of mine, she has goats, so all of her soaps have goat milk. I sometimes use goat milk, but I have it as a powder. You have to be careful how you add it, because the lye will burn it, affecting the color of the soap. It’s about creating something special that people can enjoy every day.”

And for Lindberg, that satisfaction goes far beyond the soaps themselves. It’s in the joy of creating, the connection with her customers and the quiet pride that comes from knowing she’s turned her creative obsession into a business that raises the bar – quite literally – on handmade soaps.