thumpin' big seats

About two years ago I had a few days working alongside arts workers who were producing public art as part of our new local library and community centre, a big budget council project for the City of Wollongong. My friend Kim, had generously give my name to Anna Pollak who was making three large carved "seats" for outside the centre. This was to be carving on completely different scale than I had encountered and with wood as tough as nails, swamp mahogany from Lake Conjola. A big old tree cut into three huge lumps and then trucked to the site, manouevred into place onto their steel feet, ready for Anna to begin her work on them.

The theme for the benches was around the area's coal mining heritage, indigenous culture and messages about the impact of the use of coal on our global climate. Celeste Coucke, another of the artists, was working on a pathway that would wind it's way around the centre, over a concreted-over water course.

Telling the story of coal

Anna Pollak and her palm tools 

Coal-black inlay  fired by Celeste was used to fill the carved marks on two of the bench seats. A wollemi pine cone ceramic was fixed into the centre of the largest seat, with the local dharawal word "ngaraba-aan" inscribed around the rim for hands to trace.                      

love spoon

Spent a week at the Sturt Summer School in January and decided to have a go at carving a smallish, more traditional love spoon in english lime. I have carved some more rustic spoons for family as gifts, but this was more of a challenge as it had finer detail and had to be hand held for most of the time. It was good to come to grips with using a knife under the supervision of our tutor from Canberra Keith Houston. He does the most amazing small carvings, chopsticks into chain link and very wee spoons, uses things more like needles than gouges to carve. Way beyond my skill and dexterity !!