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When you think of Elmer's glue, you remember sticking things together in kindergarten. It was a basic adhesive used for fun.

Jonathan Benson uses Elmer's woodworking glue--lots of it--but his projects are anything but elementary.

Benson builds fanciful, solid furniture using laminated wood--very thin sheets of birch, lauan or elm glued together to form panels.

Many of his tables, cabinets, pedestals and sculptures employ wavy shapes he creates on a homemade veneer press featuring 30 large press screws.

"It's a lot of work making the jigs for bending and clamping the wood," Benson said in an interview at his studio near Lone Butte. "That's why I do more than one. There are about 10 designs I repeat.

"When I build a new jig I use a pattern for the curve I want the wood piece to have, then I cut seven ribs for each of the two forms, male and female. I glue up the wood and, while it's still wet, put the piece between two forms and screw it down tightly to dry in that shape."

Benson trims off the glue-seep edges with a power saw and uses hand and power tools to cut the shapes and joints for his furniture. The finish work includes detailed shaping with a spoke-shave, rasps and chisels; applying edge caps with a veneer hammer; and sanding and staining.

One current design, a glass-topped coffee table, has undulating legs that appear to be supported in the middle by a diamond-shaped panel of a different wood. It's actually all cut from a single laminated panel; the maker creates the illusion of joints by means of fine chiseling and selective staining.

Two tables in his studio had a similar basic design but varied considerably upon closer inspection. For the one made of curly maple and mahogany, Benson turned a central spindle form on his lathe. For the other, he used African satinwood and purpleheart and elaborated the spindle with hand carving.

Faultline, a wall sculpture, exhibits Benson's third most commonly used material after laminates and turned wood: the American burl.

"I began Faultline with a red-elm burl", he said. "I was trying to follow the curve in the burl and as I got further into it I came up with this bird form."

The piece has two parallel "wings" extending from the sides of the round, central shape Benson created from the richly patterned burl. He formed each wing using a laminate of common wood and, on the outside layer, a rarer variety: curly maple on one and African makore on the other.

The woodworker enjoys listening to National Public Radio and jazz music while he works.

"All I miss is having a view but I will soon," he said.

Benson has spent most of his career working in garages and dim wood shops. He is now at work building two houses--one for his mother, jewelry maker Martha Benson, and one for himself and his wife, Sherry Wise, and their two small children. His new workshop will have a couple of big windows.

Benson grew up in Iowa. After high school, he moved to Northern New Mexico and in 1976 and 1977, lived in a tepee and worked in the now-defunct Hills Furniture in Santa Fe.

He returned to his home state and earned a bachelor's degree  in craft design at Iowa State University in Ames. He studied with master craftsman Tage Frid at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence for his master's degree.

Benson renovated two houses on the East Coast and taught design for three years at Iowa State. He moved to his property near Lone Butte in April 1999.

He has shown work in galleries since 1986 and is currently represented in Aspen, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Kansas City, Mo.; Park City, Utah; Carboro, N.C.; New Orleans; and Seattle; as well as at Santa Fe's Blue Rose, which carries handcrafted furniture on its lower level.

His design influences in Rhode Island included Danish modern, the Arts and Crafts movement, art deco, art nouveau and Memphis. He then looked to painting for inspiration.

"I had always been intrigued by the geometric abstraction of cubist and futurist painting," he wrote in a statement about his work. "My own style began to emerge as I started to incorporate ideas from these paintings into my furniture designs."

Benson attempts to invent flowing designs in his work, invoking the spirit of water in motion.

The woods, especially burls, intrigue him. His best recent work, Benson said, contrasts "the rough surface and unusual grain of the burls against the refined elements of my designs."