Grant Vaughan

Eighty-five acres of bushland in the Border Ranges foothills, fifteen kilometres from Lismore, hold a workshop built in 1980 and still turning out furniture and carved sculptural forms from native and salvaged timbers. Grant Vaughan established the workshop that year, and over more than four decades has developed a carving vocabulary that treats wood as something to be coaxed into organic, almost geological shapes rather than forced into straight lines. His pieces sit in the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum, Parliament House and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in 2020 the Australian Wood Review named him its Maker of the Year. He has taught at the Australian National University, at Sturt's winter school in Mittagong and at woodturning gatherings across the country, passing on a style built on patient hand-work rather than production shortcuts. The workshop remains open to visitors by appointment, and Vaughan still runs small carving and furniture-design classes from the same shed where he has worked for more than four decades, a rare case of a maker's reputation and his everyday workspace being exactly the same place.