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Weidman, born in 1982, lives in rural Pennsylvania a bit outside the city of Philadelphia. Initially studying philosophy in college, but a born artist, he to follow in the path of his father who was a bird carver. When he began turning in 2003 he has approached the lathe as a sculptor, primarily exploring and pushing the boundaries of multi-axis turning. His main effort was trying to create a visually descriptive and versatile language born out of the arcing and circular cuts of a and has spent well over a decade now building up a vocabulary of shapes and cuts. At the heart of many of his he treats the lathe almost as an unusual camera, with every subject passing through its lens adding to a novel circular zoo of animals. A simple question, what would each animal look like through the lens of a lathe? With the question in mind the shaping begins and even with the most rigorous naturalism, an honest abstraction takes place, and for each new that question gets answered. So from human heads to rhinos, mandrills to birds, each idea captured in a way it has not been expressed before.
As animal lover with deep connections to nature Weidman also volunteers as a wildlife rehabber, gaining an enormous amount of inspiration from working so closely with local fauna. There is a tension in Weidman's work and process where the organic meets the industrial, wood to metal, nature to machines, that speaks appropriately of our place as humans on the and trying to find a suitable way to coexist harmoniously with nature, while still progressing as a species.