Craftsman to show in San Diego

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 9, Issue 420, 21 January 1992, Page 9

Craftsman to show in San Diego

"Wooden Vessels" will be on display at San Diego during the America's Cup event in April, at the invitation of the New Zealand challenge patron Sir Michael Fay.

"Wooden Vessels" is a collection of New Zealand wood work created by Ohakune artisan Paul Beckett during the past seven months. The collection will be on display in Ohakune for three days, from 27 January, in the vacant shop next to the Ohakune Photo Pharmacy in Goldfinch Street. Paul told the Bulletin he wanted to give local people a chance to see his work before it is shipped to San Diego for the exhibition.

The America's Cup exhibition is to be opened by Sir Michael Fay on 16 April in the prestigious Avenue Gallery in Coronado, just a half-block away from the hub of the America's Cup event. He was invited to show his creations because he is one of the few craftsmen in the world who has perfected the art of end-grain wood turning deep vessels from single pieces of timber - a technique that has bccome Paul's trademark.

The exhibition features 80 pieces in all shapes and sizes, made from rimu, totara, maire, rata, kahikatea, kauri, kamahi, tawa, matai, pohutukawa and puriri. Some of the pieces can take up to a week to make, starting with a block of salvage timber that can sometimes be too heavy for two people to lift. There is an element of conservation in his style, said Paul, in that he only uses salvage timber, which is cut from logs that were left behind after the tree was felled, anywhere from 20 to 80 years ago, when a log for milling was cut off at the first branches. This often left logs over two metres thick behind to rot.

"I'm utilising what is going to waste, on the heels of a long lost logging industry," said Paul. Paul writes a brief description of the individual pieces to go with them, in which he notes the events in history that were happening when the particular tree would have started life. Some of them were seedlings in the 14 th century "when the world was flat!", as Paul puts it. He gathered timber for this exhibition from many places including Puhoi, north of Auckland, near Te Kaha in the eastern Bay of Plenty, and from a number of local sources. He tells of lessons learned in gathering

some of the timbers. One time he was gathering rata from a West Coast stream, finding it sinks quite readily. He said he tied pieces of beech tree to the timber so it could be floated downstream. Each piece is turned from a block of timber which is off-centre from the heart of the log. This is to minimise the distortion when the timber shrinks, and means the log a piece comes from is usually more than double the diameter of the vessel. The pieces are turned while the timber is wet, which means there is less friction and the timber cuts more easily and holds together better. What surprises many people about Paul's

pieces is how light they are considering thcir size. This is because the walls of the vessels are usually between five and 10 millimetres thick. In fact in some of the lighter timbers, light shines through the wood. The piece is then immersed in a bath made up of a solution of hydroscopic waxes (water absorbing) heated to 40°C. The wax is drawn into the timber, replacing the water in the wood fibres. Because this helps stop the collapse of the wood cell walls, it means the timber shrinks and warps less when it dries. Once dried the pieces are finished with a two coat epoxy resin, applied by a Wanganui French polisher.

While Paul is hopeful the America's Cup exhibition will bring him and his work to the attention of a wider audience, he is already highly regarded for his work. One of his best customers is the New Zealand Foreign Affairs department, which has often bought pieces for gifts for foreign dignitaries. Among the people who own Paul's works are: Bob Hawke, Imelda Marcos, past Japanese prime minister Tanaka, and Sir Paul Reeves. His work features in a number of permanent collections, New Zealand embassies and corporate offices. The exhibition in Ohakune has been arranged with help from King Country Energy.