Next-gen women woodworkers give waste products new life

The next generation of women woodworkers are giving waste products like bike tyres and timber offcuts a new life.

The rise of the small design studio is where they are thriving as they explore circular-economy ideals and sustainable practices while driving a new narrative in design that's emotive, thoughtful and cutting-edge.

Their work is being showcased at this year's Melbourne Design Week, which brings together Australian makers who create furniture, lighting and homewares.

ABC Arts looks at four artists carving out a name for themselves in a traditionally male space.

From bikes to chairs

Isabel Avendaño-Hazbún has designed a new upholstery material made from discarded rubber bicycle tyres — sourced from local bike shops — which would have ended up in landfill.

The multidisciplinary artist, who creates furniture in her Melbourne studio, has used the materials to build on her chair design The Chair (2022).

These buoyant timber chairs are threaded and handwoven with tyre rope in an artistic move that is inspired by nautical knots and breathes new life into her practice.

She says it is a way to think about a circular economy that prevents waste, and rewire how we consider upholstery.

"I like to use timbers that are readily available, as opposed to rare timbers," says Avendaño-Hazbún, who primarily works with Tasmanian oak and Victorian ash.

"There's a demand for the handmade, and through the pieces I create, people understand why the craft is so precious.

"The skills and the labour of love is inherently me; I make things that are complex and take a long time, but making furniture is beyond the obvious, it's about problem solving too.

Her work is on show at Craft Victoria as part of Future Ambition.

Furniture as sculpture

Furniture designer Jess Humpston has a new work titled Felled: Reimagining Timber Supply in Contemporary Practice.

She works with timber offcuts to make new furniture pieces, utilising waste materials for new-found expression. She brings an architectural verve to her final creations, where recycled gets a new lease of life.

"The industry is definitely changing; there's more women making furniture, and diversity in terms of queer representation too," Humpston says.

"It's more inclusive, more comfortable to work in this space, and you don't have to shrink and make yourself too small to be here — you can just be."

Humpston has pivoted from fashion design to interior and now furniture, creating side tables that are sculptural and purposeful too.

Last year she used celery top pine to create tables that are were grounded by a travertine base; her Ballast coffee table, grid-like with interlocking joints, makes a mighty statement.

"I really like to work under a bit of tension — for furniture to be lightweight but also super strong," she says.

"I choose to work with a lot of structural systems from gridded to dry joint construction; no glue is needed to hold it together.

"There is always a level of practicality when I design. For example, the chairs I made a few years ago are practical, but I want to push it a little bit further into the sculptural art world."

Form and function

Furniture maker Georgie Szymanski says she loves the feel of timber in an increasingly digital age.

"I love the tactile part of furniture making — it's so important for people to be able to do this especially now at this point in history where our lives revolve around computers," Szymanski says.

"We're addicted to our phones, and having that tactile body, hand, hand and eye coordination is where I find my body and mind truly connect in the studio."

Her creation Light Chair is on show as part of the 100 Chairs exhibition during Melbourne Design Week. She takes inspiration from Gio Ponti's Leggera chair from 1951 to find an expression of practical-meets-architectural cues.

From her Preston studio, she says the demand for handmade keeps her busy. She also likes to focus on works made using Australian timbers.

"I'm working on something with Tasmanian Blackwood, using offcuts, rather than new timber, and currently making a second sort of iteration of Light Chairs."

"I’d like to think I toe the line between this being art, but also functional."

Music from machines

Musician-turned-furniture designer Raven Mahon left her native USA for a life in Australia after she fell in love with Mikey Young, of garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring.

Together they have their own band, Green Child, but away from her love of touring on the road, she crafts her own furniture.

She's been making furniture since 2006 — think custom-made turntables, side tables and chairs for a mid-century spin of a modernist kind — and at Melbourne Design Week she works with Avendaño-Hazbún to create a soundscape to accompany her timber works.

"Isabel and I met at the Victorian Woodworkers Association — a non-profit organisation based in the Meat Market in North Melbourne," Mahon says.

"We struck up a friendship and generated a conversation about her works and approach to furniture making.

"She comes to woodwork with a really conceptually driven perspective which differs from what I do.

"My focus is on commission-based residential furniture, but as a musician and a woman working in furniture design there's always this larger conflict between industrialisation and use of materials, and the longevity of the objects we create, and the impact of those mediums.

For Avendaño-Hazbún's work, Mahon recorded the machines the artist used to make her furniture.

"That became the bedrock of the found sound I used for the soundscape,” Mahon says.

"The object itself is peaceful and precise — it doesn't make sound, but the processes you go through to create it can be really noisy. The idea of punk seems to be driving Isabel's motivation for this body; and there's some melodic elements with guitars and synths that I added to it."