Kevin Dwyer
Goulburn, Vic

Hall table

‘It seemed to me that our beautiful native timbers are becoming scarcer and scarcer, and although I’ve cut, burnt and built with Australian hardwood all my life I don’t believe we can waste this beautiful resource any longer. With all this in mind I started using condemned hardwood pallets. While I was pulling the pallet apart I put the nails in a bucket with the intention of dumping them, but as the design started to come together in my mind I decided I would use them as decoration. They were straightened, the heads cut off then put into acid to clean, then washed and into a bath of copper sulphate before drying them in the sun and painting them matt black. When cutting the timber I decided to leave the nail holes out; when I couldn’t I cut them out and filled them with diamond shapes of the same wood.’