BUSH MAKERS: LIFE+LEISURE

In search of gifts worthy of heirlooms, Nina Karnikowski meets five makers creating artworks and wearables in regional Australia.

This Christmas you can splash out on stuff manufactured in unknown factories located goodness knows where, or you can support skilled artisans out bush who’ve poured their hearts and souls into distinctive pieces designed to be loved for a lifetime. We meet five makers creating treasures in regional Australia – the antidote to mass production. Be warned, however: at least one of them might decide you don’t pass muster as a client.


LAURA HALL | Hat maker
When Laura Hall left her corporate sales job in lean manufacturing in 2018, she knew it was time to turn her millinery side hustle into a full-time career. She launched her handmade-hat company Phylli the following year, bootstrapping her business from the sale of her first four hats at Sydney’s Bondi market and, when COVID-19 hit, moving to Scone, in the NSW Upper Hunter, where her family is based.

‘‘As soon as I moved, I hit my sweet spot,’’ says Hall from her store in Scone, which opened in May. ‘‘I connected with my sense of purpose, my creativity and with the brand, and incredible people have come into my life since then.’’ People including Delta Goodrem, Collette Dinnigan and Spanish model Elsa Pataky, whom she names as Phylli customers.

The move to the country is reflected in Hall’s designs, with many emulating the ruggedness of the Australian landscape.
‘‘I often think about how the elements we have here – bushfire and drought, strong wind and sun – influence us as Australians, and I try to convey that in my work,’’ she says. ‘‘I do that either through colour, using say the ginger-nut tone of a banksia, the greens of eucalyptus leaves or the reds and browns of the earth, or through a worn-in aesthetic that represents the tenacity of Australians.’’

To achieve this distressed look, Hall uses fire, paint and stitching techniques, and materials such as kangaroo leather and feathers in her signature hat bands.

She creates custom designs for clients in her boutique, and sells ready-to-wear hats in-store, on her website and via the Buy from the Bush online marketplace. When possible, she also hits the road in her station wagon and hosts hat-making parties in homes across Australia, which she has also held online for the likes of Google.

‘‘The hat-making parties are about connecting and engaging with customers in a way we otherwise couldn’t,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s also a way to empower customers. By making their own hat, it becomes so much more than passive consumption.’’

Visit phylli.com.au or buyfromthebush. com.au/


PENNY EVANS | Ceramicist and artist
‘‘My blood, sweat, tears and soul are in my work,’’ says Lismore-based ceramicist and mixed media artist Penny Evans. ‘‘I hope people feel that, and get a resonance of the landscape and of our cultures in Australia.’’

A descendent of the Gamilaraay people, whose country extends from north-west NSW to Queensland, her graphic works are informed by inquiries into her identity.

Growing up in Sydney in the 1970s, Evans knew little about her heritage. ‘‘We weren’t allowed to practise our culture, it was illegal to speak our language,’’ she says. ‘‘My family assimilated and tried to get on in the world that way – just left country and went to Sydney and didn’t talk about it much. We had lots of issues in my family, drug and alcohol and mental health problems, and my art practice facilitated a healing journey for me.’’

In 2000 Evans moved from Sydney to Lismore, about a three-hour drive from Gamilaraay country, where she often takes her ceramics and photographs them as part of the environment, suspended from trees or dug into the earth. She describes her work as part of a ‘‘lifelong decolonising process’’ and a way of reclaiming her Aboriginal identity.

‘‘The graphic nature of my work connects to my ancestral practices – carving into trees, as well as into the ground for ceremonial sites,’’ she says of the graffito technique her ceramics often feature, whereby parts of the coloured surface layer are scratched away to reveal the clay beneath.

This process is a metaphor for the way she is reconnecting to her cultural roots. ‘‘It’s tapping into my genetic memory, my DNA, my ancestry,’’ says Evans, who will exhibit a wall of 300 burnt banksia flowers in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in March as part of the fourth National Indigenous Art Triennial.

Beyond echoing the practices of her ancestors, Evans’ work allows her to be in conversation with them. ‘‘If I’m working in a really honest and open way, I’m bringing my ancestors in – their voice is in my head,’’ she says. ‘‘I can’t always achieve that but when I do, I can hear the story being told to me.’’ Visit pennyevansart.com

JAMES B. YOUNG | Shoemaker
It was a trek from Bathurst to Broken Hill via the Snowy Mountains that set James B. Young on the path to becoming a shoemaker. ‘‘In the late ’90s my partner [artist Elliat Rich] and I decided to walk around NSW with some pack camels and donkeys,’’ says Young from his studio in Alice Springs, his base since 2004. ‘‘We had to make our own gear, so making saddles from scratch was my first introduction to this work.’’

Following that trip, Young dropped out of design studies in Sydney to ‘‘make things that were more tangible and practical, andthat had immediate use’’. It wasn’t until he began to learn shoemaking that his great- aunt told him he was descended from a long line of shoemakers.

‘‘When I was training, I had a few moments where I was doing something for the first time and experienced a profound sense of familiarity. We don’t know that much about epigenetics, but there was something going on there.’’

Today, Young works in a traditional way, creating custom shoes and boots for mainly repeat and local clients. It’s a 12-month task that requires at least two in-person fittings.

‘‘It’s a slow burn and a very intimate process,’’ says Young. ‘‘Bespoke shoes are symbolic of this meeting between what the client wants and requires, and my materiality – where I live and my obsessions.’’

Shoes crafted by Young have an old-world quality, with a hint of rugged utility. ‘‘With craftsmanship you can really gild the lily and make everything look super polished. But everything’s flawed, and part of me pushes back on that notion of extreme refinement,’’ he says.

Young chooses to work with kangaroo leather to convey the essence of the desert to his customers. He also incorporates wood and other materials from the outback into bags, belts and wallets, collecting bits and pieces while on cameleering trips with Rich and their two children.

‘‘Kangaroo leather generally bears the scars from the life of the animal, and tells the story about the place it’s from,’’ he says. ‘‘It also has the highest tensile strength of any leather, and it’s something of an ethical choice in that it is vegetable tanned, and the animals are harvested from the wild.’’

What does Young imagine his customers feel when they finally slip on his boots? ‘‘Bespoke shoes fit in a fundamentally different way to something off the shelf. They hold the foot completely, so it’s probably a feeling of stepping back in time.’’

See jamesbyoung.com.au


NATALIE MILLER | Textile artist
Natalie Miller’s large-scale tapestry landscapes are a riot of vivid colour, incorporating undulating waves of fuchsia and neon orange, sunflower yellow and aquamarine.

‘‘The seasonal colours of Australian sunrises and sunsets, the pink skies and the rainbows, the flowers and the water, we have so much colour in our landscapes,’’ says Miller.

‘‘Many people don’t feel confident using colour, but I’ve always worn a lot of it, and it’s exhilarating for me to use so much of it. I hope my clients feel that, and a sense of happiness, when they look at my work.’’

An interior architect for the past 30 years, it wasn’t until Miller and her architect husband moved to the NSW Southern Highlands to build their environmental home in 2012 that she began weaving, studying tapestry for two years at the Sturt school of art and design. ‘‘I immediately fell in love with it and knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.’’

Miller’s muse is the Southern Highlands landscape, where she does a lot of hiking, bike riding and trail running. ‘‘I’m forever finding the tallest mountain or chasing waterfalls, and that’s where a lot of my inspiration comes from,’’ she says, adding that she uses scale in her works – which can be up to five metres long – to express the expansiveness she feels in that environment.

Unable to find the rich colours of nature in wool stores, she began to experiment with natural dyes. Today she dyes her wool herself, using everything from eucalyptus leaves, indigo and cochineal (small insects that feed on cactus), to turmeric, onion skins and mud.

‘‘I went to Sumba in Indonesia to learn about mud dyeing. Luckily, I live on ancient volcanic soil that’s such a rich, intense red it dyes your hands when you touch it,’’ she says.

Because her works take two full weeks per square metre, she interviews prospective clients and ideally visits their homes to see what size and colours will suit before she takes commissions. ‘‘I want to be assured they’re really going to appreciate the work and what goes into each piece,’’ she says. ‘‘I want it to have power in that person’s space.’’

See nataliemillerdesign.com

ANGUS McDIARMID | Wood-fired potter
‘‘The goal isn’t creating a beautiful pot, it’s creating a beautiful life,’’ says Angus McDiarmid, a 33-year-old potter who lives in bushland near Lake Weyba in Noosa Heads, Queensland.

What McDiarmid is alluding to, and what you feel when you hold one of his wood- fired P ̃an Pottery pots, bowls or mugs in your hands, is that his work symbolises a slower way of life.

McDiarmid, who learnt to make pottery in 2011 in the Indian Himalayas, works without electricity in his airy home studio and gallery. He built it after teaching himself to mill timber. He’s just that kind of guy. The kind who relishes process, making his pots from blended local clay he digs up then shapes on kick wheels before firing it in his hand-built kiln, using wood he has split by hand.

It’s a laborious process that allows the natural beauty of the local materials to shine. And it’s the antidote to our fast-paced society, as he sees it.

‘‘If you have an electric wheel and a gas kiln, you can make as many pots and fire them as often as you like,’’ he says. ‘‘But I love having boundaries that slow me down. And the variation of tasks involved in wood firing is something that makes my life even more beautiful because I don’t feel like a machine.’’

The wood-firing gives his pots their earthy, wabi-sabi aesthetic – flecks of red- hot ash that land on a pot’s surface create a natural glaze, for example. It involves a degree of mystery that McDiarmid appreciates.

‘‘When you fire with wood, you’re firing at such high temperatures [sometimes more than 1300 degrees] that the work and the kiln have their own relationship,’’ he says. ‘‘So I do the best I can with the knowledge I have, but I also let go and let the process speak.

‘‘I love that wood firing just takes over and gives you an opportunity to create something you never thought of.’’

McDiarmid’s work is also stocked at Koskela and CLO Studios. Visitpanpottery.com

This story first appeared in print below and online here