Steven Garrison's sunfish sphere earns Woodturners forum honor

Steven Garrison’s Sphere With Sunfish earned Turning of the Week for the July 6, 2026 cycle on the American Association of Woodturners forum, and the honor put a hard-to-build showpiece back in front of turners who know how much planning such a sphere demands. The 8-inch piece is a spherical tessellation made from five domestic hardwoods, walnut that has been ebonized, maple, cherry, oak endgrain and sycamore.

The material choices are part of the engineering. Fine Woodworking describes the form as a 72-sided Goldberg polyhedron, which means the object depends on a geometry of pentagonal and hexagonal faces with icosahedral symmetry rather than on a simple hollowing or spindle sequence. The same project listing says Garrison studied the geometry and symmetry of M.C. Escher’s Sphere With Reptiles, then carried those ideas into Sphere With Sunfish with a color logic built around the four-color theorem so adjacent fish would not end up with matching fin colors touching.

That is where the craftsmanship lesson sits inside the eye-catching surface. A piece like this asks for layout that holds across the full sphere, indexing that keeps the pattern coherent, fitting that allows the segments to meet cleanly, and grain orientation that works with the final visual read. It is not standard bowl turning, and it is not simply decorative assembly after the fact; the lathe becomes one part of a larger system in which shape, symmetry and color all have to agree. The AAW’s own mission is to advance the art and craft of woodturning worldwide through education, information and organization, and work like Garrison’s shows why that mission matters to advanced segmented turning.

The forum thread announcing the recognition congratulated Garrison by name, and the media entry drew immediate reaction from Jim Reynolds and Michael Anderson. That kind of peer attention turns a private shop success into a public reference point, especially for turners who look closely at how ambitious segmented work actually gets built. Escher, born June 17, 1898, and dead on March 27, 1972, built a vocabulary of image and structure that still travels well into the turning shop, and Garrison’s sunfish sphere shows how far that vocabulary can go when a turner is willing to let geometry carry the design.