I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight.
Callum Robinson would understand why this matters. A master woodcarver and cabinetmaker, plying his trade from a workshop in Scotland (location vague – ‘in a forest beside a loch nestled in the Scottish hills’), he is such a perfectionist that if one of his team used the wrong screw on the back of a bedside table, where nobody would ever see it, he would whip it straight out.
But he welcomes imperfection in wood. A great knobbly lump bulging from the side of a tree might look to most of us like an ugly mutation, but very often, beneath the surface, ‘a myriad of swirling, almost impossibly beautiful clusters is hiding’. Elm shot through with ‘the tracery of spectral green streaks… like the northern lights’, or the ‘shadows of a woodworm’s pinhole excavations’ are, for Robinson, bursting with creative possibility. If you want to see his genius at going with the grain, look at his website – callumrobinson.org – and the top of an astonishing dining-room table from which two swimming otters nose their way through the ripples of the wood.
His feeling for wood is rooted in a childhood surrounded by trees.
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