Chopped and Nailed: Sausage Ramps turns Blackriver ramps into sculpture you can ride

Blackriver has made professional fingerboard ramps in Germany since 1999. Its founder, Martin Ehrenberger, combined a carpentry training with years of building skateboard ramps, and the company's own history says it all started with one ramp, the Big Mama. Our history of Blackriver tells the rest.

A quarter of a century later, the catalogue is the closest thing the scene has to a shared vocabulary. The Pocket Quarter, the Pocket Mini, the Box 5, the Cowart ramp and the 10-Stair are the same pieces on tables in a great many countries, and a rider can usually name one from a single photo.

That shared vocabulary is exactly what a remix needs. A remix only reads as one when you can still hear the original in it, and Blackriver pieces are recognisable down to their edges: pale wood, round metal coping, the printed black strip that reads "blackriver-ramps", the skull roundel on the side. Tanner keeps those marks. In photo after photo the print runs up to a cut and stops, or carries on at a new angle on the far side of a joint. The source is never hidden, because the source is the point. Of one park he wrote that "all design decisions" were "kept within the brr language".

Tanner introduced himself on the account in January 2024. "My name is Tanner. I hand-make fingerboard products here in Pennsylvania. Been fingerboarding for almost 20 years," he wrote. "Sausage ramps started nearly 1 year ago as a creative outlet / art project that's turned into a decent business." By his own count, then, Sausage Ramps began in early 2023. A third-party brand directory says 2022; he has not published a founding date himself.

The first products were his own: benches, stairs and small obstacles, sold from his website and, by September 2023, through FlatFace, whose founder Mike Schneider posted a video of the Sausage Ramps barbecue bench that month. By 2024 he was throwing an event of his own, Sausage Fest.

The remixes came later. The earliest we have found is from May 2025, and its caption is five words long: "Brr cowart ramp mitosis remix (nfs)". A Cowart ramp, split in two the way a cell divides, and not for sale. A month later came "Remix 006 - Friday at noon", a red stair set with a skull on it, sold as a timed drop. That caption has since been edited, and a search index still lists the same post as Remix 007, so the early numbering moved around. We could not reach remixes 001 to 005 at all, and we are not going to guess which piece came first.

The captions are the best account of the method, because Tanner writes them as build notes. Every piece is described by what it samples and what was done to it. REMIX 025, a compact spine, "sampled one pocket quarter by splitting it down the middle, slicing off the top platform just behind the coping, and nailing a red domino tie to mend the original side supports together." REMIX #035 is an "extremely complicated reworking of a Box 5". Its banks were shortened and lifted, the offcuts split into three modular kickers, the coping moved to line the ledges and stairs sampled from the 10-Stair. The platform is made from "the stamped underside of a very old funbox".

The notes are just as specific about what the originals will not let him do. Pocket quarters "are made of very bendable wood," he wrote of 025, and taking off the top platform "will destroy a crucial support structure behind the coping that keeps the curved wood from caving in", so a spine built that way needs its own support made for the inner peak. On #035 the handrail "looks like decoration but all handrail blocks are absolutely necessary to keep it in place", and the hard part of a big remix is making one that "still rides flat and doesn't wobble."

What comes out is judged on what matters on a fingerboard obstacle: whether the coping is clean for a board-slide, whether a transition carries a board out, whether the piece stays put on a table. REMIX #036, two pocket minis rebuilt as a small vert ramp, has its top platforms "thinned out for comfortable board-slides", a rollover "made from vertically stacked exposed end grain", and bumpers that keep a board from dropping off the sides. REMIX 023's geometry "keeps it from tipping over when using the quarter pipe- so no need for annoying sticky tack". Most of the pieces are sized for a desk; #036 has a "roughly 2x1ft footprint".

"Sampling" is his word, and it is the right door into all of this. Hip-hop began with DJs cutting up records everybody could buy. DJ Kool Herc, whose party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on 11 August 1973 is often called hip-hop's birthday, stretched a record's break, the part people danced to, by playing two copies of it on two turntables and cutting between them. Two copies of one mass-pressed object, cut against each other to make something neither copy was: that is also a fair description of REMIX #036, which is two pocket minis made into one ramp.

The Austin event's name points somewhere more specific. "Chopped and screwed" is the sound Robert Earl Davis Jr., DJ Screw, built in Houston in the 1990s. He slowed records to half their speed or less and "chopped" between two copies to repeat and stutter phrases until a familiar song became something new. He died in 2000, at 29. Chopped and Nailed, in Texas, with one of Tanner's own captions signing off "Chopped and nailed back together with intensity", is not subtle about the lineage. It is also accurate. Screw worked by hand on records he owned, and Tanner works on ramps that he or their owners paid for. In both cases the original is still audible in the new thing, and meant to be.

In art the move is older than hip-hop. In 1913, in Paris, Marcel Duchamp fixed a bicycle wheel upside down to a kitchen stool. The original is lost. The Museum of Modern Art's is the third version, rebuilt in 1951 from a wheel sent over from Europe and a kitchen stool bought in Brooklyn. Four years after the wheel, Duchamp turned a urinal on its back, signed it "R. Mutt 1917" and submitted it to an exhibition in New York as Fountain. The point of the readymade was that a factory object, reframed, could carry an idea.

Duchamp cut nothing, though. The closer ancestor is Pablo Picasso's Bull's Head of 1942: a real bicycle saddle and a real set of handlebars joined into the head of a bull, now in the Musée national Picasso-Paris. Picasso liked to imagine the process running backwards. The museum quotes his remark, recorded by André Malraux, that if he threw the bull out of the window a boy would pick it up, need a saddle and handlebars, and "complete his bike", so "the bull would have become a bike again".

That is the part the remixes make literal. Picasso's bull could only go back to being a bicycle in a story. A Sausage Ramps remix never stops being the thing it came from. It is a new object, and it is still a ramp.

The most exact rhyme may be Kurt Schwitters. Working in Hannover after the First World War, he built collages from bus tickets, wrappers, labels and printed scraps, and he named his whole practice after a sample of a brand. "Merz" was a fragment he cut from an advertisement for the Kommerz- und Privatbank and pasted into a picture around 1919. The word lost its bank and became his.

Put his Teerose of 1924 next to REMIX #035 and the family resemblance is plain. In each, printed matter made by somebody else is cut, shifted and fitted against other pieces, and the printing survives the cut. On #035 a large black skull graphic is sliced through and rejoined slightly out of line; the caption says the platform uses "the stamped underside of a very old funbox". The scrap in the Schwitters still says "Teerose". Neither artist pretends the material was his to begin with, and both make the joins part of the picture.

In 1974 Gordon Matta-Clark took a suburban house at 322 Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey, due for demolition, and cut it in two. He bevelled the foundation so that one half tilted back a few degrees, opening the cut from roof to foundation. A year later, in Paris, he cut a cone through two seventeenth-century buildings due for demolition beside the site of the Centre Pompidou. Both works show the idea that matters here: a cut through something built is also a way of seeing how it was built.

Tanner's captions keep finding that out. The pocket quarter caves without the support hidden behind its coping; the Box 5 needs its handrail blocks. The difference is that Matta-Clark's buildings lost their use, and the remixes keep theirs. His Plaza Abstraction caption sets out the design problem: "Routes through the park bisect at every obstacle which means each cut into the pre existing ramp needs to end up with overlapping uses."

Architecture had a name for the look by 1988, when the Museum of Modern Art held its exhibition "Deconstructivist Architecture". Its catalogue said of Frank Gehry's own house in Santa Monica, a small 1920s home that Gehry wrapped in corrugated metal and chain-link, that it was "as if the house had always harbored these twisted shapes within it". That is close to how the Oblique A-frame looks: as if the plain Blackriver A-frame had been hiding a stranger one inside it.

One detail recurs across the whole series: a small red rectangle nailed across a seam. Tanner calls them domino ties. On REMIX 025 one mends "the original side supports together"; on the Pocket Pool Opus, REMIX 028, they are everywhere, as bumpers and as signs, "a repeating motif across the entire sculpture to show the breadth of use cases for them", in his words.

Japanese ceramics have an old name for a mend you are meant to see. Kintsugi repairs a broken vessel with lacquer dusted with gold, so the cracks become lines on its surface rather than faults to hide. The Metropolitan Museum's seventeenth-century Shigaraki tea jar wears its repairs that way. A related practice, yobitsugi, goes a step further and fills a gap with a shard from a different vessel. That is the nearer rhyme for a remix, where one ramp's platform ends up on another ramp's frame. In both cases the joins are not concealed. They are part of the object.

Sausage Ramps' Instagram bio is three lines long, and the middle one is "functional sculpture". He called REMIX 028, the Pocket Pool Opus, "my greatest functional sculpture invention yet". It has a small bowl with pool coping, a fold-out diving board and a storage cubby under the roll-in, and he photographed it the way galleries show sculpture: on a wooden stand, alone, outdoors. "The underside structures are strictly functional, nothing is only for decoration," he wrote. "Bottom most layers frame this piece like an artwork."

The stand is doing real work. In "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1979), the critic Rosalind Krauss described how modern sculpture absorbed its own pedestal, until in Brancusi's Endless Column "the sculpture is all base". A fingerboard obstacle is all base already; its whole purpose is to be ridden on. Putting one on a plinth doubles the base, and it asks the question every gallery asks: look at this. Donald Judd, who made furniture as well as sculpture, drew the line the other way: "If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous." REMIX 028 passes his test. It can still be ridden.

Skateboarders have been riding sculpture for decades without asking permission. The French artist Raphaël Zarka collected magazine photographs of skaters on public artworks in a book called Riding Modern Art. By his account their criteria are "above all mechanical", and a sculpture's interest for them lies in "the variety of movements it suggests". His publisher notes that some spaces in the book are left empty, because sculptors refused permission to reproduce their work. Fingerboarding has no such problem. Here the sculptor built the piece to be ridden, and the people riding seem to agree. "Truly a piece of art," swbacksmith wrote under Plaza Abstraction. Under REMIX #031, tricky.mane put it another way: "Biblically accurate Blackriver ramp."

Tanner has named his own influences. In Pass The Stoke, a short documentary by Carter Chan in three parts, which thanks Sausage Ramps in its description, he says that most of his creative influences come from artists, and names Keith Haring and Tom Sachs for what he calls their DIY aesthetic. He also says he sees a lot of that in fingerboarding.

Both fit. Haring, who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, made hundreds of chalk drawings between 1980 and 1985 on the blank black paper panels that covered unsold advertising space in the New York subway. That was art made directly on the city's commercial fittings, in a line simple enough to read at any size. Sachs is closer still. His New York studio remakes icons of consumer culture and industry by hand, and his gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, calls the results "conspicuously handmade": humble foam core and plywood "replace the gleaming aluminium and polycarbonate of mass-produced items". Put a Blackriver ramp in place of the mass-produced item and it could be a caption for a remix.

A factory obstacle is built to be predictable. That is its job, and Blackriver has done it well enough for long enough that a whole scene's sense of a line rests on it. The remixes are built to break that on purpose. Of the Oblique A-frame Tanner wrote: "Approaching from each corner has a different perspective which keeps the obstacle feeling fresh and interesting over time. It'll throw you off enough to make you rethink your typical routes with more creativity and intentionality." Of the plow bank, REMIX 018: "This ramp is so different that you're forced to fb on it in a new way that will feel refreshing for even the most experienced fbers who have gotten bored of everything."

That is the case for the whole project in two sentences, and it is the case the artists above were making too. Take the thing everyone owns, cut it and make people look at it again. The difference is that here the second look happens with two fingers on a board.

Blackriver has not, as far as we can find, said anything in public about the series. Under REMIX 017 in February, tvfingerboards noticed the same thing: "Blackriver hasn't said a word since these have been dropping."

Sausage Ramps posts each remix on Instagram, usually with a long caption on what was sampled and why, and the captions are worth reading in full. The remixes are one-offs and are not sold from a web shop. The February pieces could be had only at the Austin event, the April ones in person at Rendezvous, and several since have been built for named riders. REMIX #036 is marked sold. Tanner's own products, such as trucks, stairs, benches and decks, are sold at sausageramps.com. His part of Pass The Stoke is on YouTube.