Toes on the nose, an eye for the creative. Rachel, practicing the art. Photo: Brian Asher
Rachel Lord, known as R. Lord in the art world, is a shaper, artist, and surfer behind the label Lord Bords. Although she’s based in Ventura, California, when I called her for the interview, she was in her friend’s house on the way to Williamsburg in New York City where she would begin her residency at Pilgrim Surf Shop fulfilling custom board orders. After Pilgrim, Lord was headed to Space Rock, a glass shop in Rhode Island, for yet another residency. She was dealing with hiccups setting up a board raffle to fund relief in Gaza. She had a million things going on at once.
Throughout our conversation, Lord’s attention would swing to her dog, Tiny Guy, calling him off from eating a pair of panties and other miscellaneous items. Friends stopped by outside the house and invited Lord to dinner. “I’ll talk to you later,” Lord yelled out the window. “I’m doing an interview.” Her attention was intense and occasionally sporadic, but when she spoke of things she cared about, like board designs or conceptual art ideas, the conversation turned passionate and nothing – no friends, no Tiny Guy – could interrupt that.
Lord is an anomaly within the shaping scene. Despite the relatively short time she’s been on the scene, her work has been recognized by shaper Peter Schroff, writer Jamie Brisick, and appeared on the cover of EMOCEAN magazine. Perhaps due to her long list of art accolades: artist residencies, solo exhibitions, and thought-provoking performances — Lord applies her ability to transcend categorization to the surfing world, referencing both classic and contemporary figures in the space with both her board designs and her ability to present them in fresh ways.
From offering flash laminations of sexed-up anime girls to referencing Miki Dora by wearing a neon Dora the Explorer costume with her back to the camera, it is clear Rachel Lord has little interest in following a template and doing things the old-fashioned way. Much of this can likely be attributed to her artist’s mindset. As the 1960s and ‘70s conceptual artist Lee Lozano once wrote, “seek the extremes, that’s where all the action is.”
Rachel in the bay, and with one of her creations.
Innovation is crucial to any shaper’s success, but Lord almost appears to ignore functionality in the name of pushing the limits for rideable art. For example, her contribution to Mele Saili’s Katwalk Model release party at Dear Tomorrow in Oceanside involved a live performance: slathering herself in blue paint and recording herself printing her body onto a surfboard. This board was deemed the “Reverse Cowgirl,” which she described as an asymmetrical reversible twinzer pickelfork with fins and priced at $4,000. The recording was titled “Anthropmétrie (ANT 11’0)” and was priced at $6,000.
Lord boasts a traditional art background, having studied at Rhode Island School of Design. She started in sculpture, did one year, and then transferred into painting, graduating with a BFA. “Conceptually, what I wanted to do was in painting because I always considered myself a conceptual artist, first and foremost,” Lord explained. “As a painter, I’m a conceptual painter. If I use formal elements, I’m using them to tell a conceptual story, and with some of my sculptural surfboards as well.”
Art is also what led Lord to surfing in the first place. “From the time I entered art school until the time I quit Adderall at 28, I completely ignored my body, except for maybe some yoga,” Lord said. “The way I made art was to ignore all of my needs as a person and grind on this thing that I wanted to do, which works in your early 20s, but falls off quickly.”
In 2015, things changed. Lord received her first surfboard on her 29th birthday. She began taking herself out into whitewater. “I learned in the most embarrassing adult learner way, and just worked my way up from whitewater to breaking waves,” she said. “I cut my teeth in the South Bay.” She was hooked. When Lord moved north for an art residency in Marin County, she continued to learn to surf alongside making art. “I came back down south and fell all in.”
Since her first whitewater waves, Lord has competed in longboarding contests to find new ways to push herself as a surfer. Lord said contests have “been a vehicle for my growth since I started competing at my four-year surfing mark.”
Lord is not your typical competitor. Unlike Championship Tour-style surfers who focus on the point system and perfecting certain tricks, Lord sees competition as just another way to chase a new sensation. She is level-headed about the process and how competition can affect surf style. “Wins can get to your head,” she said. “Losses can get to your head. All these things can really affect your surfing, and you need to know when to step away. Sometimes you get into a contest surfing mentality, and it can really affect your creativity on a wave because you’re always looking for that nose ride.”
On the other end of the spectrum, in 2022, Lord found herself deep in conversation with a kneeboarder at C-Street. The man found out that she shaped and also rode kneeboards from time to time, and Lord basically got recruited in.
For Lord, kneeboarding provides both a connection to surf history and the kneeboarding community as well as a new way to experience wave riding. Lord grew up ski racing in Aspen, and then Michigan, and while she admits her skills as a shortboarder are not the same as a lifelong surfer, she’s able to apply her skiing skills to her kneeboarding. “The way that you turn is rail to rail, using your hips and your knees in the way that emulates turning on skis. It’s a pure experience of picking a line and getting to see it through, and not really connected to your ability as a shortboarder. It opens up days that would be too intimidating for me to go out otherwise.”
“You see the waves totally differently,” she continued. “You’re just at a different eye line. When I had knee surgery, I had a brief period where my surgeon got really pissed at me so I was just surfing prone, and it totally changed my approach. I got deeper after that. I saw different lines because I saw the wave from this other angle, and I was more willing to take off behind it or in sketchier situations because I knew I could just hold on to my board and ride it out. When I did start surfing again, my entire approach changed. It made everything feel so fresh.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Lord’s first foray into shaping came about shortly after her foray into surfing, providing yet another way to interact with riding waves. By 2019, Lord had been applying the same relentless, passionate effort to learning to surf that she had applied throughout her art career. She could try boards and feel things she wanted to change. “I think there was a strong desire from just having this object in my hands and knowing what I wanted it to be,” Lord said. But also, she wanted to meld together the two sides of herself – the artist and the surfer. “Shaping is a very natural way to do that.”
Even with the intuition that she would love shaping, it took a car accident and being unable to work for Lord to pick up a hand plane. “It was time,” she said. “I had to know if this was going to work for me.” With COVID-19 wreaking havoc across world, there was no time like the present. “For a lot of younger shapers, [the pandemic] was a way to get a foot in the door,” Lord said.
Traditionally, shapers fall into the profession by watching older members of their families work the business and having the ability to seek mentorship through people they know. For example, both Guy and Michael Takayama had their uncle, Donald Takayama, to thank for their interest. Timmy Patterson prides himself on being a second-generation surfboard builder.
But being born into the surfboard industry is a double-edged sword. Lord explains that “in a lot of ways, these lineages, these apprentice-style ways of coming up allow people to be signed off on. There is a lot of good information that comes to those lineages, but a lot of it is a seal of approval, and it can make people comfortable. Sometimes people aren’t always comfortable to give their opinions with no context.”
So, while Lord didn’t have anyone to teach her directly, that offered the benefit of figuring out her own way and not taking somebody else’s process for granted. After making a few miniature-scale replica boards and hammering out her vision, Lord went after it. “I decided to just go for it and intuit the process based off of the tools that were in the bay I had access to in Ventura at the Surf Rodeo headquarters bay,” she said. “Based off the tools that were in there, I figured it out, as well as putting together the pieces with some blog posts and watching what I could on YouTube. There is an amazing amount of stuff on the internet.” Lord admits that, “even more than a mentor, the barrier to entry is having the tools and the space.”
Now, Lord has her own label, Lord Bords, offering logs, eggs, and creative customs. The boards are colorful, often airbrushed in neon and pastel colors, with strange and trippy deck designs. After years of growing slowly and organically, Lord Bords has attracted a core following, and the boards sell out quickly.
No matter which side of the coin you land on, everyone can rest easy knowing quality always prevails. To Lord, “the beautiful thing about surfboards is that at the end of the day, especially for someone who knows, is that they are objective. You can have them in your hands. You can see them with your eyes, and you can tell if it’s going to be good or not if you know anything about boards. Pretty, shiny things on the internet look nice, but for the ones who know, you know when you’re looking at it.”
In the end, that’s what matters to Lord. “If my boards resonate with people through their craft and not just by association of name, that’s a great honor to me. That’s my dream as a shaper: to lead my own lineage.”
