‘It felt instinctual’: How Rachel found her mojo in a block of wood

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The first time Rachel Shaw started carving wood, she felt like she had come home.

The former interior designer had been searching for purpose since relocating from Sydney to the south coast in 2017 when her partner Melissa Mylchreest suggested she sign up for a woodcarving class at a festival at Bulli.

“She said ‘now we’re country folk we should go do something country folk do’,” Shaw says.

Despite thinking the whole idea was “ridiculous”, Shaw signed up.

Rachel Shaw says working with reclaimed wood to create beautiful, small objects has given meaning to her life again.

“I sat down and started carving and I just thought ‘I’ve done this before’,” says Shaw. “I feel like it was instinctual and I just loved it. Honestly, after that three-hour class, I thought ‘I’ve got to do more of that.’”

Shaw says she ‘pestered’ woodcarving teacher, Carol Russell who directed her on what tools to buy to get started. And that was that. Eight years on and Shaw says carving is a form of meditation for her.

“I love shutting off and just going for it,” she says. “There is something deeply meditative about it.”

Now, her purpose is to share that feeling with others. Her sell-out workshops are among 240 events on offer for Sydney Craft Week Festival, a 10-day program which kicks off across 37 suburbs tomorrow.In its ninth year, the festival is a practical celebration of contemporary craft – and an antidote to the infiltration of AI into our lives says director Lisa Cahill. This year’s theme is “material intelligence”.

“In many ways material intelligence is a counterpoint to our lives increasingly lived online, with
artificial intelligence rapidly taking on what we once considered human skills,” Cahill says. “Craft practitioners have a deep respect for their materials, continually honing the practices needed to work with them. They often reuse and reinvent materials with an emphasis on sustainability.”

Workshops range from pottery and embroidery to jewellery and printmaking, but there are also exhibitions and talks on the agenda, as well as The Australian Design Centre’s MAKE Award for craft and design. This year there are 36 finalists across ceramics, lighting, jewellery, furniture, textiles, glass and object.

For Shaw, though, the focus will be on sharing her skills with those who may not have had the opportunity before.

Rachel Shaw in her workshop at Shoalhaven Heads

“A lot of the older women are still carrying that grudge that they weren’t allowed to learn woodwork at school and [make statements like] ‘my dad left me all these tools but he wouldn’t show me how to use them’,” says Shaw.

She also runs workshops at her home in Shoalhaven Heads and through Japanese Tools in Kogarah where she teaches students how to carve small objects like bowls, vases, birds and spoons. Her workshop space is deliberately home-like to attract the widest possible audience. She says there is a definite shift in mood once everyone begins to work with the tools.

“I notice everyone comes in and they’re a bit nervous but as soon as you start carving you go into this state of flow and I haven’t really found that with anything else I’ve done before,” she says.

To keep the practice as accessible as possible, Shaw says she only works with small tools – no axes or lathes – that can be used at the kitchen table. They are, however, extremely sharp and need to be handled with care.

“I do have to watch what I do,” she says. “It is permission to play with knives I guess, which we’re always told not to.”

Rather than buying new timber, Shaw works almost exclusively with reclaimed timber, the more unwanted, the better. Old doors are cut up and turned into bowls, rectangular beams become spoons. Nothing goes to waste.

“I like the mystery. I don’t generally go to the shop to buy a piece of wood, I try to find something a bit random. Other people might be looking for a clean slate but I am more interested to see what I can find and I’ll have a go at it. If it’s been in the skip bin for a while it probably has all sorts of paint on it so I will see what I can come up with.

“Everything is used. It’s nose to tail in carving.”

The space she occupies now is a far cry from her former life as an interior designer for wealthy clients.

“If anyone had said to me you will be teaching wood carving 10 years ago I would have thought that was absolutely ridiculous. I [used to be] up to all hours of the night thinking about what tiles I was going to put in someone’s bathroom.

“I turned 50 three years ago and I was thinking ‘there’s got to be more to life than this’.”

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