I first visited this farm when I was 19 in 1979. Shortly thereafter my friend who owned the farm was killed in a car accident. The parents offered me the chance to buy the property and I jumped at the chance. The farm was back blocks of the conventional farming area, and it was considered scrub country. It wasn’t valued for any purpose, because it was too steep for cattle and totally vegetated. I jumped […read the rest]
This piece was a curbside find from the South Coast. My sister has developed a habit of txting me when she sees things. It was beautiful but it was very old and had obviously been damp. It’s probably the first piece that I stripped right back to the frame and then built up. A lot of time I try to manipulate what’s already there and bolster it. There’s a handwritten mark in there from […read the rest]
At the centre of my design interventions is the idea of working in the margins, on the edge, in the spaces between. “Embodiment” refers to the tension and struggle between a world in which what is valued is increasingly digital, distant, and idealized and a world of everyday relationships, sensations, and mystery. I have lived in the interstices, gleaning, struggling for meaning between street protests and my job in an ad agency, building furniture while […read the rest]
Interview by Tara Robertson in World Sweet World Issue #07 Original here: World Sweet World: Issue #07 67 STORY TIME: WENDY NEALE: MAKER She is a paradox; a designer who thinks there’s too much stuff in the world, and a professional furniture maker who has decided that she will no longer sell her pieces. She has a wicked sense of humour, punctuating our conversation with her trademark “I knoooow”. She is a curious explorer who […read the rest]
