Inspired by Max Ernst’s collage novels, Wood began making photocollages in high school. He continues to do so today. He held his first one-man show in Cleveland in 1966 where he also showed in traveling exhibitions of the Cleveland Museum of Art. During the 1970s and 1980s he exhibited with some regularity, in the North Carolina Museum of Art, Wake County annuals, and local Raleigh galleries. In 1985, in conjunction with a show at the College of Design at NCSU, he explained his practice in a lecture, Ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage.

Beginning in college and continuing through graduate school, Wood was variously a laborer, oiler, and larry car operator on the Upper Docks of what in the 1960s and 1970s was Republic Steel's sprawling Cleveland plant. Wood was romanced by the work and seduced by the 1000-ton hulett that unloaded the Great Lakes ore boats. Wood began making oil collages, later watercolors, and, inspired this time by Max Ernst’s frottage work, rubbings. Mounted at the College of Design in 1983, Wood’s The Upper Dock was a three-channel synchronized narrated slide show of photographs, watercolors, and oil collages. In 2004 he produced The Upper Dock in which the text to which the 1983 slide show had been synchronized was accompanied by selected watercolors and rubbings. It was xerographically reproduced in an edition limited to 35 copies. He continues to paint watercolors of the dock and make rubbings.

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