In a sparse basement room sit two workbenches and a small table holding a saw. Covering each workbench are small sheets of metal, rivets, and pieces of linen and paper Micarta. Words like "jigging" and "tang" are flying around the room, walled with a dozen or so printouts of knife diagrams.

This is Matt Browning’s studio at Seattle University. His art residency at the university ends today; students and faculty have gathered to see his work and bid him farewell.

For a few months, Browning held open hours here on Mondays (in the basement of Hunthausen Hall). He invited students to visit and talk to him about his project, with the option that each student could leave with a handmade knife.

The project was not so much about the knives but about the interaction between the working artist and the students in the space of the knife shop itself. University students spend their academic careers gaining abstract tools to be put to use in the future as they see fit, he explained, and his knives function in a similar fashion: After he gives them away, his part in their existence and use is over. It’s the person who holds the tool who now decides how it is used.

Browning became interested in knives when he was working on his show at Lawrimore Project last year. Called Tradition as Adaptive Strategy, it was comprised of almost three-dozen wooden funnel-like structures he whittled by hand and filled with boiled pine sap. As he was carving them, he tweaked the commercial knives he was using to better fit his project—and eventually, he semi-joined the knife-making community online to figure out how to make his own. “There are many talented artists [among knife-makers],” Browning said, “but they’re all making the same knives.”

Knives are not Browning’s specialty, but these works are characteristic of his style. Much of his work involves a significant amount of research into not only the way objects are traditionally built, but the subculture that surrounds these primarily masculine crafts. To find out more about him, visit here. And Seattle U is now seeking another artist-in-residence—details are here. Should you buy the designer clothes?