Page 59 - Australian Wood Review №103 2019

PROFILE

Sculptural forms by
Hape Kiddle, clockwise
from opposite page:

Koru (spiral) forms in
mahogany and Huon pine

Water Vessels, Tasmanian
blackwood and Huon pine,
finished with shou sugi
ban technique
Rain Dance, Huon pine

After The Storm,
Huon pine, silver

When I teach I get students to black
texta the entire surface so they can

see where they’re touching. With a
new gouge chisel first thing to do is
to cut a straight line in a bit of
pine to the maximum depth
of the chisel so you build up

the cut to the full depth. Then
you put on a bit of compound
and you’ve made a jig for honing that
chisel. You just drag it back in the

saddle of that jig and that will polish
the edge exactly every time.

It’s important to not let your tools get
blunt, it takes 30 seconds (sometimes

only 10) to hone a chisel; in Huon
pine every couple of hundred cuts,
in harder wood it can come down to
every 100 cuts.

Is this a hard way to make a living?

Sometimes I think I’m particularly
dull in terms of my intelligence

because it’s an incredibly hard way
to make a living; it’s famine or feast
– it really is. It’s taken me a long
time from when you don’t wake up

those nights at three in the morning
worrying. You’re choosing a path that
has no market, particularly when you
step outside the norm. We sit outside
traditional sculptors already.

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