“To live a quiet life and work with my hands”

As with so many of the decisive moments in my life, I came to woodcarving by accident in 2015, at the age of 36. I had grown up in a rural part of Worcestershire and my family home backed on to a sprawling deciduous woodland that ran in a thick strip across the lower slopes of the Malvern Hills. The woods were a place of comfort and escape for me and the deep connection I developed with the woodlands and with each individual tree within it very much defined my childhood and shaped my vision of the world around me. My childhood dreams of becoming a woodsman or wildlife ranger seemed constantly out of my reach and so, in 2002, I left my home town to pursue my second love, photography, and to study for a degree. Despite earning a good degree in photography and trying every avenue I could to make a living from it, by 2015 I found myself working as a graphic designer for a software company. The job, that had long ago been stripped of even the pretence of creativity, required me to commute for two hours everyday and exist, desk-bound in an air conditioned, artificially lit office. I had never felt so detached from the natural world and was becoming increasingly detached from myself so it came as little surprise when I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety.

It was at this time that I began escaping each weekend to a small plot of woodland in Snowdonia, North Wales that my family had bought and replanted some years earlier. Named Coed Tegid after the lake over which it looks, the wood became my refuge from day to day life and looking after it rekindled my childhood dreams. Around this same time I spent a night doing a charcoal burn in the woods with some Countryside Ranger friends. It was on this night that I was first introduced to spoon carving. I watched with admiration and attempted to follow suit as they split logs and roughly hewed out simple spoon shapes by axe before finishing them by knife. Though my first attempt turned out to be a door-stopper shaped spatula rather than a spoon, I was immediately hooked. From then on any spare moment, whether in the woods or not, was spent furiously whittling away at any stick or branch I could find on the woodland floor or in a roadside ditch. Using a large bushcraft knife (relatively large for woodcarving at least) and without the benefit of further guidance, I began improvising carving techniques and knife holds as I carved out spoon after spoon. Waking at 4am to squeeze in a couple of hours carving before work; whittling in my car during lunch breaks at the office and carving until late at night; spoon carving became my connection with the woods throughout the week until I could escape to the mountains at the weekend.

As the months went by the form of the spoons I carved became more considered and the handles evolved from being simple, functional features to increasingly complex and elaborate designs, drawing on the flora and fauna of the woods, mountains and lakes that I yearned to be surrounded by. I had started to document and share my personal re-wilding journey and my carvings on social media, really just for family and friends but it seemed that my story hit a chord with many more people than I had ever imagined. Following the suggestion of a friend I tentatively listed my spoon carvings on an online crafts marketplace and, with very little expectation or hope I told my social media followers about it. The sale of my first spoon was accompanied by an almost guilt-ridden sense of being an imposter… “who was I to think that my carvings were good enough to ask real money for them?”, even though the price I had asked equated to less than a pound per hour. With subsequent sales my confidence grew but again, with each imaginary price boundary that my carvings crossed, £10, £20, £30, my imposter syndrome would strike again.

By the end of the year I was selling work quite regularly, with many pieces headed to overseas buyers but, despite the positive changes I had made to my life and the creative outlet of woodcarving, my depression and anxiety continued to worsen. With an overwhelming feeling that I wouldn’t last much longer unless I made even greater changes to my life, my family and I agreed that I would leave my design job and pursue woodcarving full-time.

The sense of freedom and elation that came with my first day as a full time spoon carver is impossible to convey in words. Instead of clock watching and bouncing from deadline to deadline, my schedule was now governed by the movement of the sun, starting work as soon as it was light enough to see and downing tools when the sun set or when my hands could take no more. My days, once spent couped up in an airless, artificially lit office staring at a computer screen, were now spent outdoors indulging in my love of nature, wilderness and wood carving.

All of these years on since first picking up a knife and trying to carve, my journey into the woods and into woodcarving continues and my work continues to evolve.