When Anneliese Gormley discovered her passion, she was sleeping on her sister’s couch and trying out new hobbies in the garage. “I had one of those brutal breakups that makes you question your own existence, and it kind of felt like an exciting time to reinvent myself,” she laughs, looking back. I would go into that garage and manically try on a lot of hats. I learned to play the banjo and I tried to get really deep into bourbon culture… I started trying to really learn anything I didn’t know about.”
During a surprise visit from her grandmother, she was given an old carved wooden spoon, a family heirloom. “She could trace it back to the Macon Valley Bird Clan, a Cherokee tribe that existed in Kentucky. I kept thinking about that spoon, and I thought, how cool that something so simple and functional can be so beautiful, trace so many stories, and live long enough to become an heirloom piece.”
“I started teaching myself to carve and I bought a hook knife,” she says. “Of all the many hats that I’d tried on, it turns out that I was really good at woodworking. I was not very good at many of the other things that I’d tried, but it was one thing that made a lot of sense to me and I was genuinely excited about it.”
Her work earned her a position as a finalist at the Garden & Gun Made in the South Awards in 2021, and a bevy of fresh custom orders in the process. These days her workload is filled with flowers, casting wedding bouquets to make heirlooms for other families. “I feel like I’ve been able to take something that started as a deep desire to tell my story and now it can tell other people’s stories.” She says, musing, “If I could dream up the perfect career for myself, it would be telling people’s stories in a way that turns them into heirlooms that can be passed down.” Which seems to be precisely what she wound up doing.
Photography provided by Anneliese Gormley
