Way back in 2007, Wood Review met Michael Koren from the Atherton Tablelands who wrote about his journey to becoming a wood artist. In ‘Sleeping With Spoons’ (issue 55) Michael described how he came to live near Ravenshoe, now part of a World Heritage listed region in Queensland’s wet tropics.
He ended up living on a banana plantation in a workers cottage where he also had access to a shed. Instead of going back to jewellery making, Michael got to work with an angle grinder on the resource of ‘splintered trunks and tangled branches’ that literally lay in heaps right outside his door. Wood sculptors like Grant Vaughan and Marcus Tatton inspired him, as did his environmentally based philosophy of ‘waste not, want not’.
Michael made bowls and other shapes and in particular the spoons which have sold at markets and galleries including Bungendore Wood Works Gallery for many years. On making spoons Michael said it wasn’t their functionality that interested him, instead they were shapes that pleased him to make and were ‘ancient and democratic’ forms.
See work by Michael Koren’s and other Tablelands wood artists in Inside the Tree, Tableland Regional Gallery, Cultural Centre, 16 Robert St, Atherton, Qld from June 3 to July 6, 2014.