Category: Making
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carving place
Around a scratched and gouged workbench a group of Syrian men (and one notable Iraqi) came together to share skills, songs, stories, and to make a woodcarving. For some, this was a chance to reconnect with old tools that they knew so well from home, to share their exquisite talent & joy in making. Others,…
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Revealing The Treasure
Pictures from last months relief carving class. Warm light, playing over subtle tactile traces, left as our students stripped away whatever wood wasn’t necessary for telling their own creation stories: Tales that sometimes shifted in the making/telling. Watching the tools move over the wood, skillfully revealing a little more of these beautiful designs each moment…
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A Better Place to Sit
Starting with a firm place to stand, a still point from which to safely swing an axe, the fulcrum from which to move the Earth. Carving it into new, more fitting shapes. Ending with dog-tired, aching bodies and with a better place to sit and rest, to sit and contemplate, to sit and tell stories.…
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Pretty Windows
Each year for the past ten nearly, our city has picked a cold dark night in February to get enlightened! We tried to do our little bit, along with some amazing artists and makers all across the town. The streets were full of puppets, glowing sculpture and interactive illumination. Our new studio windows proved a…
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Shedding Something
If things have been quiet here lately, it’s because we’ve been slowly, ever so slowly climbing out of an old skin, and settling into a new one. For the past 10 years we have been working and dreaming out of this half-fossilised concretion of a shed, like hermit crabs: Scuttling off to collect, make, visit,…
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Graduating with Full Honours
As part of Welbeck School’s Children’s University project we were asked to give some aspiring students the experience of woodwork. No one imagined that the wood in question would be enormous, raw trunks of willow, birch and oak tree, with bark, twigs & leaves still attached. Undaunted our charges took to splitting, chopping, drilling, shaving,…
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Perches of a Different Order
Beautiful work this past weekend, creating simple seats, from cleft wood, growing as dear trees that defined our horizon only weeks ago. A giant ash that has already defied many attempts to bring it to the ground judging by the twisted, scarred and buckling trunk & silver birch half a century old or more, battleground…
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A Fine Fleet of Vessels
Remembering friends gathered by a well fed fire. Kettle boiling constantly, whistling a wedding march. It was a beautiful way to spend a December day, a privilege for our family to join in the Nag Do (not a stag do) celebrations before Jeff and Jo’s wedding. Over the day rough cherry logs were split, carved…
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Making peace with the Norns
We interrupt this broadcast for some mild metaphysical musings… Wrangling with the tangling of the warp and weft of the universe. Beginning the day in a mood that felt something like this: What to do? Spring is here apparently so some cleaning is in order, inside and out. A few choice pieces of ash, crabapple…