Gallery Lulo is pleased to partner with Harmon Guest House, the Official 2026 Hotel Partner for Design Healdsburg, for an intimate artist talk with Sébastien Pochan, whose abstract wood sculptures are featured among the hotel’s collection of locally-sourced art and creative public spaces.
Pochan’s work begins not with a plan, but with a piece of wood — its grain, its history, its inherent form. A winemaker by profession and a self-taught sculptor, he approaches each piece the way he approaches a vintage: responding to what the material already holds, and shaping it into something new without erasing what came before. His pieces are left largely unfinished but for wax, allowing the natural grain and character of the wood to remain visible — though he occasionally turns to charring for more dramatic effect. It is a practice shaped in part by a childhood spent across West Africa, where his early exposure to form and material planted roots that would later surface in his abstract work.
The setting is a fitting one. Harmon Guest House was built on the same instinct that drives Pochan’s own work: an architecture that leaves its concrete, steel, and reclaimed redwood exposed rather than dressed up, furniture hand-built in-house rather than sourced, and a reception desk carved from a single fallen eucalyptus tree. Sculpture, architecture, and material meet here on the same terms — honoring what a material already is, and keeping the hand of the maker visible in the result.
Join us on Harmon’s outdoor deck for an evening of conversation, moderated Q&A, and a rare opportunity to hear directly from the artist about process, material, and the long throughline between two crafts — wine and wood — built on patience and transformation.
Program
- Welcome and brief artist introduction
- 20 minutes to walk through the exhibition (maps provided)
- 20 minute artist Q&A on the outdoor deck
- Informal reception, with an opportunity to revisit the exhibition after the event
Ticket sales benefit Design Bay Area to support the production of Design Healdsburg.