Commission a Work
N° 04 · Workshop

From the workshop.

These were not commissioned. Nobody asked for a stone goblet carved from local stone, or a two-storey dollshouse built with mortise-and-tenon joints at miniature scale. Yet both exist — at the same standard as everything else. To understand what someone will do when the stakes are real, look at what they do when nobody is asking.

01 · The Stone Goblet Stone carving begins
Begun without a vision

He started cutting and kept going until it told him.

NZ stone from a local quarry, intended for landscaping. No plan, no prior experience, a grinder and whatever tools were in the shed. The material decided the form. A few weeks later, a goblet existed.

02 · Gifted The finished goblet — gifted
Made to be given away

A goblet for the cellar it would live in.

Gifted to the clients on completion of the cellar — unprompted, unrequested. It now lives there permanently, the only object in the room not built into a wall or a rack. "What is possible expands the moment you stop expecting to fail."

03 · The Dollshouse The dollshouse — finished
For his daughter

Built the way a house should be built.

"I was going through a difficult time — the dollshouse was my way of practising traditional techniques on a small scale, so I could take them into a bigger scale." Cedar. Two storeys. Mortise and tenon at miniature scale. The scale changed; the standard did not.

04 · Detail Joinery — detail
What care looks like at small scale

Joinery — at any size.

The detail nobody would have noticed if it had been wrong. The kind of work made when nobody is asking, which is the only honest measure of what someone will do when everyone is.