Being an Australian contemporary fine furniture and chair maker brings with it unique cultural baggage. How does our work relate to country? How do the timbers, the landscape and the Australian light influence our work?
In August 2024, I bit-the-bullet and started the Dunstone Design Patreon page. I had several motivations for this, but my primary goal is to support articles about the craft, help makers and clients to understand our processes and motivations, and fund interviews with key master craftspeople. Suddenly, I find that the process is reflecting back as much as it is projecting out.
My first major interview was with the Master Carver Hape Kiddle in his hometown of Griffith, NSW. My mate Martin and I flew out to spend a day with Hape and you can watch the whole video here.
Hape talked a lot about his sense of place and his connection with nature. It made me reflect on our own work, and our relationship with country. We flew out of Canberra, right past Parliament House, out over Namadgi National Park and the Brindabella Mountains. Within half an hour, we were on the edge of the central plains. Below us was a patchwork of grazing and farming land. A little over an hour after takeoff, we were approaching Griffith and an oasis of irrigated intense agriculture.
Griffith sits on the Murrumbidgee river, but it’s not the river I know. I flyfish the skinny, fast, headwaters of the Murrumbidgee, high up in the Snowy Mountains. That river runs more than 600 km from where I fish it to where Hape sits on its banks to carve. By the time it gets to Griffith, the Murrumbidgee is the colour of weak milky coffee and it’s flowing at a sedate pace.
I spent my early adult years out-bush, flying commercially and living on stations. Now I spend far too much time in a workshop in an urban setting. My aesthetic and my connection to country was formed in that wild, arid land. I’m only starting to realise how profoundly it has affected me, and how much I miss it.
While talking about this with the team, Aditi suggested that they and William take a selection of our work and photograph it in the local Australian landscape. Perhaps there is even more of a connection than we realise. The images that Aditi and William took are extraordinary. Our furniture, and especially Mutawintji, clearly relates to the landscape.
It is wonderful to lead such a creative team. It humbles me. After twenty-five years of designing and making I feel less, not more, certain about the work. I see every missed opportunity. I am too aware of the chronology of the designs. I sometimes feel trapped by a design, like a singer who gets lambasted if his concert set doesn’t include the first song he wrote a quarter of a century ago.
Art and design is such a delicate dance. Fine furniture responds to the materials, the lifestyle, the landscape, the human form, our housing and our climate. At Dunstone Design, we spend all our time thinking about the craft and the design of furniture. Most people only think hard about furniture during the relatively infrequent times they buy it.
I often think that we resist trends and fashion. Now I’m starting to understand that we embrace place and culture. Our work speaks of Australia. We make uniquely Australian responses to lived experience.
I love wild places, but I have never seen a clear distinction between wilderness and land that has been walked and used by people. Our use of land has a hierarchy of purpose centered around the nature of that land. We need to build on it, farm it, mine it and preserve it all in a delicate dance.
Trees can be revered and thoughtfully harvested without contradiction. Taking to an old forest with a mining mentality is clearly foolish. Locking up every tree is similarly foolish. A forest can be managed, harvested and still have its core elements preserved. Furniture comes from the forest, and the answer is to respect the resource by building-to-last and respecting the built object.
We have extraordinary timbers with a wide range of colours, textures and properties. As designer/makers, we take the whole chain of the process into consideration. It is not a marketing ploy or green washing, it is born of our desire to have many generations able to enjoy the craft, or own work made by the craft. Timber is a truly renewable resource, but only if we manage and respect the forests.