Business Cards
Lasercut Birch Ply
My new wooden business cards. Happy!
Alight
In kind light this cabinet’s contorted grain shapeshifts. Tea tree stained water flowing over river stones – sunlight penetrating, reflecting, then penetrating again; sandstone escarpments set ablaze by dying days, a campfire, a nebula, solar flares, desire.
Some things can be set alight without using flame.
Images Cathy Taylor Photography
Click on images to view at full size.
Baby dovetails
American Rock Maple and Red Cedar
A little post about tiny dovetails.
Thylacine
American Black Walnut heartwood and sapwood
Precious things, unrecognised, are easily lost.
A flash of light sapwood, in the piece of American Black Walnut that became the top of this small side table, came dangerously close to being discarded. An ‘inferior’ material having no place in the work of an inexperienced furniture maker anxious to create sleek, uniform ‘perfection’. Ha!
But the sapwood tells a story that would otherwise be lost. Its presence reveals that the darker heartwood in this table top lived close to the surface of the trunk, feeling more acutely the sun’s warmth and winter’s bite. It is also the youngest of this tree’s heartwood, being sapwood itself not long ago.
Thankfully, once resawn and laid out like toppled dominoes, the rhythm created by the stripes of contrasting sapwood charmed me. They illustrate that each of the seven pieces of timber that make up the top belong to each other — from the same place within the same tree, lying next to each other here as they have always done. Somehow this seems right.
The thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus, was a carnivorous marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger due to the stripes on its back. Almost extinct on the mainland of Australia at the beginning of European settlement, the thylacine survived in reasonable numbers in the wilderness of the island of Tasmania — but not for long.
Maligned by a people terrified of their strange new surroundings, this unique and beautiful animal became the victim of a deep misunderstanding and a need to create order out of the wild unknown.
Tragically, the last known free thylacine was shot in 1930. Six years later the sole remaining captive thylacine died of neglect in Hobart Zoo.
National Threatened Species Day is held on 7 September each year in Australia,
to commemorate the death of the last officially recorded thylacine.
This side table is one of a series of set projects completed with the guidance of
Roy Schack of the Brisbane School of Fine Woodwork.
Images Cathy Taylor Photography
Click on images to view at full size.
Wenge
This simple mitred box is made from Wenge,
the dark chocolate of timbers…….delicious!
Union.
I make things because I get lost in the doing.
I make for those rare moments when there are no thoughts of success or failure,
no projecting forward to some future happiness. No me.
A place where the maker, the making and the things made are one.
It is very hard to stay in that place, the split second I become aware of being there,
I am no longer there. But that is its elusive magic.
Most of the time I live between and for those moments.
Cutting dovetailed joints transports me to that place sometimes. Having shown
you the making of handcut dovetails in a previous post I thought I had better
show you the corresponding pins and the resulting coming together of the two.
Enjoy.
MADE 2011
The MADE Group, a collective of Australian furniture designers and craftsmen, presents its third exhibition ‘MADE for you’.
This exciting group of established and emerging designers and craftsmen share a passion for innovative design and quality craftsmanship. Their third exhibition showcases their diverse range of skills with a focus on design.
MADE Group cofounder Nicholas Bailey said:
In these days of mass production too many people see furniture as a throw away item. We encourage people to focus on individuality and quality as opposed to quantity.
We want visitors to the gallery to be inspired by the possibilities of our skills. We put our heart and soul into the pieces we make and we want our customers to get involved.
There’s something very rewarding about making a one-off beautifully designed piece of furniture that will last many lifetimes. It’s rewarding for both the artist and the person who commissions it. They are not just buying a piece of furniture. They are creating a very personal heirloom.
The exhibition is an avenue to meet designers and craftsmen, learn about the commissioning process and understand the joy of having something designed and made for you.
MADE member Roy Schack explained:
It’s not often that you can have such creative input when commissioning artwork.
Our job is to work with our customers to bring a piece to life – designing to suit their needs, their personalities and their lifestyles. We see our customers get exactly what they want. No compromises.
Come along and meet the makers and find out what could be MADE for you.
The MADE Group is Nick Bailey, Broc Cattley, John Madden, Will Marx, Raf Nathan, Andrew Ness, Roy Schack and Peter Young. Hiroaki Eba is also displaying his unique floral designs and artwork at the exhibition.
About The MADE Group
The MADE (Makers and Designers) group is a collaboration of established and emerging Queensland designers and studio furniture makers.
The group formed in 2008 to raise the profile of Australian studio furniture makers and designers and to bring their art to a wider audience.
The group shares a diverse range of backgrounds including builders, scientists, florists, woodworkers and craftsmen.
MADE’s previous exhibitions include, the inaugural Meet Your Maker and MADE with Love exhibitions.
The MADE Group is supported by Lazarides Timber, Carba-Tec, Marxcraft
and Brisbane School of Fine Woodwork.
MADE for you
Graydon Gallery
Open daily 10am – 5pm until Sunday 2 October 2011
29 Merthyr Road, New Farm, Brisbane
MADE (Makers and Designers)
www.makersanddesigners.com.au
Made For You. Post 02.
If you go back, way back to the first post I made here on the Handmade blog, you will find an article about an upcoming exhibition I am involved in – Made For You.
Back then all I had was a very old, dusty block of Red Cedar and the mystery of what lay within.
Opening that block up has revealed much more than intensely figured grain and the vivid colour that made Red Cedar such a prized timber in the early days of Australian colonisation. Inside I found clues to how the tree had grown and a guide as to how this small and rare remnant might best be utilised.
Once, when this timber was more plentiful, the crotch of the tree – the point where trunk diverges into two or more major limbs – would have been considered waste.
No straight, easily managed, commercially viable lengths of timber to be found here.
Instead, I find myself working in and around a point of tension and change. A moment when this living being was visited upon by the unforeseen. It is a moment of drama, of adaptation, determination, of twists and turns and ultimately of the joyous richness that grows out of such interplays.
For the Made For You exhibition, I am making a small wall cabinet that sits on a shelf with a single drawer suspended below it. The shape and quantity of the rough cut timber have informed the size and proportions of the piece. The cabinet and carcass for the single drawer are constructed using hand cut dovetails with mitered corners.
Above are a few images illustrating part of that process.
Made For You
Graydon Gallery
29 Merthyr Road, New Farm, Brisbane
Opening Night
Thursday 22 September 6.30pm
Open Daily
20 September – 2 October 2010, 10am – 5pm
Pimp my plinth
In our living room we have a long, low Iron Bark timber plinth that hovers just above the ground. It is a resting place for beautiful and precious objects we have made, gleaned or been given.
When we first moved in I raised the plinth up with scraps of timber full of splinters
lying in wait. I told myself it would not be long before a more elegant solution
was found.
How time gets away.
But six years ago I did not have a shed full of beautiful timber offcuts, the tools or the experience to transform them into anything useful. Sometimes we have to wait for circumstances to catch up to our aspirations. The luxury of waiting for the right moment to present itself is one I try hard to indulge in. More resolved solutions seem to result. That is my excuse anyway.
Shown above is one of the two ‘feet’ I made for under our plinth. Once in position they are not visible as they taper away from view and the dark chocolate of the Torrified White Oak melts into the shadow line beneath the plinth. I thought they deserved an airing here as they won’t be seen again until we move on, which, with any luck, will not be for a very long time.
As mentioned in a previous post, torrified timber has been ‘cooked’ in an oxygen free oven so that it browns through but does not burn. It means you can take a relatively inexpensive timber like White Oak and turn it into a rich dark timber, similar to American Walnut. Yum.
Elements
My workshop is open to the elements. They move around and through my workspace.
Wind sweeps wood shavings into corners and wood dust is carried out and back to the soil. Rain encroaches and humidity creeps across and into the timber, while rust blooms on anything not coated with Camellia oil.
The tin roof moans with disappointment as the sun moves behind clouds and it amplifies the footfalls of Magpies and Pee Wees strutting overhead. I have learnt to recognise the sounds of Green Snake belly scales moving over rafters or leaves sliding into gutters.
There are those seeking shelter in the workshop. Butcher Birds singing sweetly as they murderously hunt down spiders, the languid fifteen foot Carpet Python and the silent possum in its belly, legions of termites moving forever toward the softwoods in the woodpile, and there is me.
A Native Pink-tongued Skink (Cyclodomorphus gerrardii) at home on an old block of Red Cedar (Toona ciliata).
