Classes: Woodworking

I’m a furniture maker, designer, artist and educator, and I’ve been making and teaching for more than 25 years. My practice has always been grounded in a fascination with wood — not simply as a material, but as something that grows, responds to its place and carries its life story into the things we make.

I’ve taught furniture making and woodworking in many different settings, including Sturt School for Wood, Queensland College of Art, the JamFactory, WoodDust, the Maleny Wood Expo, Lomandra Place Studios, The Cooroora Institute and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine. These days I teach from Moonlite Studios, the workshop I share with my partner Karla in Mount Egerton, regional Victoria.

What I enjoy most about teaching is helping people understand with their hands and their heads, and discover how they can grow their skills with what they have. Woodworking can sometimes be taught as a collection of rules and techniques, or as a prepared experience with no real learning involved. I’m much more interested in giving people enough understanding of tools, materials and processes to grow from where they are and make good decisions about how to work with this fabulous material.

That might mean learning to sharpen and use a hand plane, to safely use a machine, to design and make a “simple box” or even a chair, or exploring how we can persuade wood to bend. But it might also mean understanding how trees grow and what that means for how we make things, what the provenance of our material might teach us, or how to tell meaningful stories with what we make.

My own practice moves between furniture, sculpture, photography, sound and experimental work with wood and other biological materials. That breadth feeds back into the workshop: Moonlite Studios is a place where serious craft skills and curiosity can comfortably coexist.

Classes are deliberately small, inclusive, safe and supportive. You don’t need to arrive already knowing what you’re doing — just willing to pay attention, have fun, ask questions and learn to make things

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