2011 WoodfestWales Event
Woodfest 2011 North Wales
Today I made it to the 2011 WoodfestWales at Kinmel Estate, St George, North Wales. A woodworking event I’ve looked forward to for months. I chose not to be a demonstrator this year and being on my own meant I could sit and talk with my fellow craftsmen and women more freely.
I am always amazed at the standards these woodworkers set themselves, not only in their work methods and craftsmanship, but also their designs. Sometimes I see a piece of work and think how lovely its form with all of the pieces fully reconciled to one another. Just look at Neil Taylor’s work here.
I watched the adze swing with precision by his wood-soled clog and shavings lift gracefully from the seat blank beneath his foot. Slowly the seat emerges before my eyes as I sit by in one of his chairs.
Therapy in the making and also the watching. This unwritten, unuttered poem of highly refined, articulate movement; economical, precise and utterly wasteless, reminds me that craft lives in the new-genre artisan. I’m humbled by each swinging cut as I contemplate this artisans struggle against the tide of new convention to hew the raw wood instead of buying not-so cheap trash from Ikea. I’m sad that the passers by don’t stop to buy his work. An Ikea chair costs £40, his cost £85. He works a full day to make it rightly, the factory machine in Asia or Hungary stamps out 200 in the time it takes him to make but one. One has soul, the other none.
Here is some small measure of his work. He has three children, a wife who teaches. It’s a lifestyle you see.
It’s all about choices. About how we gauge success I suppose. How often do careers counsellors guide students by evaluating success with how much money they can make in an hour or a week. A month and a year. Look at the clog and the adze. Who made them. Look at them working, see how they all work together. Look now, for soon you may see no more.
Here is success.
A woman I know nothing about but met today grows her willow stock from coppiced beds of willow she planted and now harvests from. She sits at her stool and in a day, maybe two or three, weaves successive layers of what she grew into a finished basket, which then stands with such grace and beauty in a field in North Wales. I respect her for what she’s accomplished. Her baskets I admire. Her way of life isn’t easy, but she would shrivel and die behind the desk of a dentist’s office or answering the helpline of Books R Us. Look at this basket and tell me it’s not just lovely. Mandy Coates the maker of these baskets would no more use rattan with all its toxic chemical colourings and insect repellents than fly to the moon.
And what of these
