1minated jarrah bedhead, 1983, •ivate collection USA

Outer Space 11, 1990, lacquered fibreboard, she-oak and ebony, 600 x 95 mm

There is a picturesque part of South Western Australia which attracts both natives and tourists. Wild coasts, tall timber, lush vineyards, fine wines, epicurean food, together with historic homes, artists and craftspeople in residence, all draw their devotees.

An increasing number of fine woodworkers are making this region their home. They are serviced by a burgeoning number of galleries. Central to the area is Margaret River where well-known woodcraftsman Greg Collins has opened a gallery adjacent to his workshop. Greg has an eye for shape and form and a serious love of tactile wood . Unpretentious, a little eccentric, eloquent and inventive, Collins is the sort of person who continues to learn as he creates. In fact, he delights in continually moving off in new directions with his work. With each series he extends his somewhat unorthodox methods, continuing to

stretch himself and his materials to produce work which is simple, elegant and strong. Collins' production varies from bowls

C 5 . l and platters to large pieces of furniture.

0 me a m,p e Collins' woodworking career began in 1977 when he . · was commissioned to make a conference table for the

the ~::~rihe~~~~e;oF)~~~~!~. i ~:;ep1:c~l~;~~~~l~tt:~t~o~t

and orders quickly followed, enabling him to set up a workshop,

h W< d take a stall at Fremantle Markets, and turn out a range of saleable turned

t bowls to generate a cashflow. With each major commission he was able to e O O purchase further equipment. Within the year he had his first solo exhibition in the Old Fire Station Gallery in Leederville, a Perth suburb.

In 1979, contact with American woodsculptor, Michael Cooper, who was artist in residence at the Pinewood Studios, opened his eyes to the possibilities of lighter

1rned grasstree for >83, 500 x 300 mm, Uection of the R & I Bank

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furniture using laminated, steamed and bent wood. One result was a striking wooden bedhead, first seen in an exhibition Workers in Wood at the Fremantle Arts Centre in 1983. One hundred and thirty-one sawn strips were individually jigged and glued to produce this filagree in wood. It is now in a private collection in the USA.

His 1985 solo exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre concentrated on Variations on a Wooden Bowl. There were considerable variations of shape, wood and finish. Collins specializes in hollow-turned work on the lathe, a difficult technique where the shapes are hollowed out by working through a small hole. He has refined this technique to a

remarkable degree, being able to tell the wall thickness by sound and touch. His sensuous bowls and even the satin finish on the tables entice

one to stroke them. The bowls are distinctive and have won him a number of awards, including the City of Perth Craft Award in 1984 and 1990 and the National Woodworking Exhibition Award for woodturning in 1988. His Space Cadet 1 which won the latter award was turned from a distinctively marked jarrah burl and featured a rim from the fire-blackened bark of the tree .

As the eighties boomed, Collins exhibited further afield: in Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Darwin. By the late eighties Hong Kong, Tokyo and Milan were added to the list. By now his work was being used as presentation gifts and was finding its way into collections of important people in Europe and the Far East.

Blackboy or grasstree form, 1984, 360 x 290 mm,

win ner City of Perth Craft Award 1984, collection of

Bunbury City Council

Native pear wood form, 1987,

280x390 mm (this piece is absent ­

w ithout-leave, hav ing disappeared in the post!)

In 1990, a Churchill Fellowship took him on a study tour to North America. Quite a success story for a man who had been a dyslexic boy, unable to learn to read properly and, because of this, struggled with his education and became severely emotionally disturbed. He had been so clever concealing his disability that not even his mother knew the real problem until recently. He had covered with sheer bravado and when backed into a corner, with antisocial behaviour. At one school, when asked to read aloud, he refused and was expelled . Tertiary education was abandoned when he withdrew from the courses rather than admit he could not undertake some assignments because of his inability to read. Luckily his new and supportive wife Sandi, a teacher, encouraged him to continue without formal training.

Collins is usually described as self taught, but this is not quite true. He was taught to use a lathe when he was about ten years old. This was no ordinary lathe and the teacher no ordinary man. The instructor was his maternal grandfather who had learnt from his father, Forster Johnston, son of two of Western Australia's foremost pioneer families. Turning was one of the favoured pastimes of the gentry who pioneered rural Western Australia . The treadle lathe had arrived in the colony on board the Island Queen, the first ship to the Australind settlement in 1840. It had been brought out by Harley Robert Johnston, a young surveyor who married Mary, the daughter of Marshall Waller Clifton, Chief Commissioner of the Western Australian Company which opened up the Leschenault-Australind area near Bunbury in Western Australia. The Clifton relatives had a reputation as fine woodworkers and many examples of their art are preserved around the state. One great-great uncle spent most of his leisure hours building organs. Some six or so still grace churches in Western Australia .

The lathe was used by Johnston at the Clifton property Alverstoke which he managed and then by his son Forster at Leschenault-one of the centres of social life in Bunbury in the 19th century. The gentlemanly art and love of turning wood were passed on down the generations in the historic homestead built by architect Pearce Clifton . Collins ' grandfather Harold Johnston, son of Forster, had fitted it with a motor to enable him to turn more easily. Scented timbers such as Raspberry Jam and Sandalwood were given to the boy to experiment with and it is no wonder he was entranced. This same grandfather qlso bought him his first lathe when he was still at school.

Carved hollow-turned form c. 1984, iarrah, collection of the Archbishop of Canterbury

Still in Space, 1990, hollow-turned form, iarrah burl, 580 x 200 mm, collection of the Bank of Zurich, London

Desk, 1993, iarrah

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Detail, Ballet Dancer

l>etail, Ballet Dancer

3allet Dancer, 1992, side table, fiddleback tuart, ebonised iarrah, tbonised she-oak, African ivory and silverplated brass

Proud of his ancestry and passionately attached to the old homestead, Collins was pleased to be able to live and work there between 1980 and 1984 until, on the death of an aunt, it became the property of the Bunbury Port Authority. Sadly, that old barn at the Leschenault homestead in which so many generations had worked, was recently demolished by the Port Authority-despite being on the register of the National Trust and protected by Heritage orders.

Collins works mainly with native timbers culled from the South West farms and forests. Ecology minded, he has a forest-product-craft licence which enables him to salvage fallen timber for a small fee. Trees from forest floors or felled for agriculture or roadways are seasoned and milled. Banksia, silky oak, she-oak, peppermint, blackboy, native pear, jarrah and marri are included in his repertoire. Occasional exotics, such as mulberry and olive felled by storms are carefully stored and used. Shape, texture, grain pattern, colour and finish are all elements he considers in designing a piece. He favours timbers which are richly grained and likes to use a range of subtle colours in his bowls and furniture. His work is found in collections in Eire, Japan, Hong Kong, England, Switzerland, the USA, Belgium and Australia. A quiet achiever, he has had ten solo exhibitions since 1977 and has participated in over eighty group exhibitions.

This success has not been without its problems. His early forays into overseas marketing were unmitigated disasters which he and Sandi stoically describe as learning experiences. These have included an agent who organized an exhibition in a Tokyo hotel and sold well but disappeared with the remaining stock arid the profit. This was followed by taking part in a WA Government trade exhibition in Hong Kong where he sold out and had advance orders worth $24,000. To handle this, he selected a local interior designer to act as his agent, purchased a lathe capable of turning a half ton block of wood into a platter one metre in diameter, engaged staff to help complete the order and set off for the Milan Furniture Fair. When the first half was delivered, the principals of the export division of the US firm absconded with the bowls and he had to begin a legal battle over the ownership. Wiser but considerably out of pocket, he did not give up, just worked harder to clear the debt.

The visit to Milan made Collins aware that the local furniture crafted from solid timber looked heavy and gauche compared to the European veneered furniture. He has become an advocate of lighter design and the use of veneer for furniture. This can be seen in the Ballet Dancer table exhibited in Design Visions at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1992. The slender pointed legs of ebonised she­oak finished in silver, support a delicately constructed top veneered with fiddleback-tuart inlaid with African ebony.

Collins used his Churchill Fellowship for research into wood to visit the United States and Canada in 1990 to assess markets and upgrade his design approaches, toolmaking and turning skills. He spent time with David Elsworth of Philadelphia who also works using the difficult technique of hollowing­woodturning. Toolmaking skills picked up here have proved extremely useful in improving efficiency in the workshop. Collins makes most of his own cutters-tools that he uses on his giant lathe-adapting them as necessary for a project. To the purists, using metal lathe techniques for wood is anathema, but they work for Collins and he says the finish is there to prove it.

Dale Nish extended Collins' turning techniques and time with Mike Hosaluk in Canada was useful for the challenging approaches to the use of varied materials. Hosaluk has since returned the visit and they spent time in 1991 in Margaret River experimenting together on techniques-stimulation Collins obviously enjoys. He says the exchange of techniques and ideas is invaluable.

During his time away, Collins was presented with some rare woods such as pink ivorywood and African ebony. Because of their scarcity and the greater design freedom they give him, he prefers to maximise their use by veneering fine slices onto medium density fibreboard. These are seen to advantage in his spaceship bowls where the body is made of fibreboard and the edge veneered with the rare timbers which he contrasts with black lacquered sections. Outer Space in the collection of the Art Gallery of WA is an example of this. Made of veneered fibreboard, African ebony and olive wood, it was purchased from the 1990 City of Perth Craft Awards where it took off one of the major prizes. The olive wood used once stood in the garden of the Forrest family farm at Picton. (Pioneer explorer and parliamentarian Sir John Forrest, Baron of Bun bury' s parents had arrived as indentured servants in Collins' ancestors' party.) The top of the compressed sphere is hollowed out to take 6 small bowl of the same wood as the rim. Interesting ribbed effects achieved by turning provide counterpoint to the flying saucer shape, while the black lacquer contrasts with the warm gold of the olive wood;

This same wood was used to create the three delicately turned bowls which won the City of Perth Craft Award in 1984 and are now in the collection of Bunbury City Council. The stemmed bowls are turned and sanded until the walls are only a few millimetres thick. Collins also used veneered sections of this historic wood for the tables he made for the Committee Room of the new Parliament House in Canberra. Tradition has it that the trees were planted by Sir John Forrest who led WA into federation and Collins considers this a most appropriate use.

More recently, bowls have been enriched with gold leaf. Those exhibited in Design Visions at the Art Gallery of WA in 1992, drew visitors to contemplate Froot Bowls, not a bowl for fruit but the negative forms of the fruit which appear to be carved from the body of the wood glowing richly with gold leaf.

Collins has been included in Tom Darby's Making Fine Furniture: Designer-makers and their projects, a Guild of Master Craftsmen publication featuring twelve Australian furniture makers. In this he gives instructions for making an elegant, inlaid side table in a style for which he is becoming well known.

Furniture is a considerable proportion of his output. With each piece he likes to include some innovation or variation. A desk completed recently is an interesting version of the trestle table. It with other work can now be displayed in premises where he works, a considerable advantage for purchasers considering commissioning a piece. Collins completed the gallery space adjacent to his workshop in April 1993. This is open several days a week so that the increasing numbers of tourists to the area can take advantage of seeing a woodworker at work and purchasing the product direct. So if you should be visiting the Margaret River area of Western Australia, do not forget to sample the wood as well as the wine.

Dorothy Erickson

Leschenault homestead with the Forster Johnston family ready for the Bunbury Hunt c. 1902

Greg Collins with one of his tables in a karri forest near Margaret River

Greg Collins working on the lathe in the 1 844 barn at Leschenault, 1984

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