About

About the Artist

Robert Sheckler is a primarily self-taught broom maker living and working in Yarmouth, Maine, on the coast just north of Portland. His work focuses on interpreting a traditional heritage craft through a contemporary lens, exploring color, material, and technique to create modern brooms and brushes. Guided by a bias toward innovation and a strong interest in sustainability, Robert often experiments with non-traditional styles, tying techniques that allow weaker natural fiber cords to be used effectively, and the incorporation of found and thrifted objects in his work. As utilitarian domestic objects, brooms and brushes are rarely treated with joy or reverence. Robert’s synthesis of a colorful but clean sensibility with a traditional–and rarely seen–handcraft highlights the value of sweeping as a practice and the value of a handmade, natural fiber object over the more common synthetic alternatives.