Jono Everett: With and Within

Above: Jono Everett in The Soap Factory space in Newcastle. Photo: Edwina Richards 

Words: Linda Nathan, Wood Review Editor

Some of us do our best work away from others. The shed, studio, workshop, whatever you call it, can be a place of retreat, a bastion of endeavour and an antidote to worrying about all that stuff going on out there.

But for others, it’s the community of others that fires creativity and sweetens the daily grind. Jonathan (Jono) Everett is one such. For the last 10 years he has worked out of The Soap Factory in Newcastle, a collective he set up with his partner Sophia Emmett.

Currently there are eight other makers there, and incidentally they’re all women – it wasn’t planned that way. It’s a collective of independents but Jono and Sophia lead the way things work. There’s never been an official meeting and many of the residents have been there for 10 years, so clearly the model is working.

Jono Everett with partner Sophia Emmett, founders of The Soap Factory community. Photo: Edwina Richards 

If you asked Jono to sum himself up, you might get this for a short but packed resume: ‘I guess in a nutshell my story is one of a varied approach to design and fabrication. I have passion for collaborative projects with galleries and museums and community projects. I make one-off furniture pieces for exhibitions and sculptures, take commissions, and manage a collective arts studio. I am running upskilling workshops to people who may be at some disadvantage, and working with people to re-establish their lives in disaster zones.’

Jono calls himself an artist, a designer and a fabricator, and wood is his main but not only medium. One of his earlier business forays was also a cooperative. After completing studies in the then-led-by George Ingham Wood Workshop at the ANU School of Art, Jono started Trout Design with two others, and he and Scott Mitchell went on to successfully work singly and together on projects for some nine years.

Slip Vitrines, (display cases) for indigenous artefacts as part of the Spirit of Place exhibition at Singleton Arts and Cultural Centre. ‘Pushing minimalist aesthetic and technical challenges to the line, these showcases play on super fine sections against the wild rawness of southern mahogany.’ Photo: Jono Everett

Jono moved to another set of challenges working as a carpenter/ furniture maker, architectural and then heritage manager at Parliament House. There he oversaw maintenance, restoration and new building and infrastructure works. And yes, at times it got political.

Apartment Chair, Tasmanian myrtle. ‘Years of development led me to pare back the design – no back rail, super fine leg section, and importantly a 6mm seat and back from 1.5mm ply sheets, laminated directly to the chair frame, giving it form and structural integrity – much like the body of a stringed instrument.’ Photo: Jono Everett

He is passionate about his making and works with interior designers and architects to deliver considered interiors for commercial spaces, museums and galleries. Add to that commissions for bespoke residential commissions and you get the picture – it’s a busy creative life with a lot going on.

Jono is a well-spring of positivity. His social media is peppered with comments like, ‘I am so lucky to work in the creative world. Every day is a new project, I get to work with a myriad of amazing people and loving what I do.’ ‘I am the luckiest person alive.’

Maypete Side Table in jarrah and stainless steel. I’ve been making these for nearly 20 years.⁠ I named it after my mum and dad for all the support they have given me in my complex and challenging career as a designer maker. Photo: Jono Everett

He is a people person but when it comes to design it’s a different matter. Design starts with pen on paper, and being in the zone. ‘I need complete silence, and being in my space. Without being too ‘hippy’ about it, you need to express an emotion. That’s what art is. It’s an expression of what it is to be human’, says Jono, taking it to a deeper level.

‘You start with a feeling and try to capture it through a design sketch. It’s so important to get the sketch right. If my sketch doesn’t marry up to the feeling I’m trying to capture, I have to get rid of it and start again. It could just be a couple of lines, but they have to be the right lines, and then you can’t mess with them.

Brush Chair, patinated steel and celery top pine. Photo: Jono Everett 

‘When I then go to create a shop drawing, like a proper design, it has to be true to those lines because that’s where the truth is, in those lines, capturing that emotion. That’s why I need quiet, because it’s a sensitive and delicate process before it rounds out into being more active. Coming up with original ideas for every commission is pretty challenging’, he says. ‘There’s a lot of work in the design process.’

Going back even further on his timeline, after high school years, Jono made things from a home garage, and then embarked on his own journeyman travels. With an interest in Japanese design, and through a friend’s connection, he found work with a master craftsman just outside of Tokyo.

Flight Table, American oak with ebonised under-frame. ‘A super special table for a client in the East End – trying some bold angles.’ Photo: Jono Everett

What did he learn there? ‘Every morning (the master) would just sit in Japanese zazen (meditation) with his tools before him, in silence. And it could go for quite a while, but it was about having respect for the tools, and a quietening and centring.’ Not speaking Japanese wasn’t really a problem for Jono, ‘because (the master) didn’t really seem to want to talk much anyway’.

Despite the influence of travels to Japan and afterwards to Denmark, Jono has distilled his own style. If there’s ‘a sense of singularity’, it’s a search for a lightness in both a visual and physical sense. ‘It’s a cliché, but it’s incredibly difficult to make  things look really simple,’ says Jono, ‘because ‘lightness’ often means deploying more advanced techniques such as lamination and torsion box construction.’

Jono is all about support structures, social and physical. ‘If you’re not familiar with a torsion box – you’re missing out on all the good times,’ he said, referring to the way he makes his Slip Benches and Slip Vitrines. It’s a clever design. A substantial skeleton is overlaid with eucalypt veneer. The top underside and pedestal supports are curved towards 2mm fine knife edges, so visibly the volume ‘disappears’. Strong, light, understated.

Synergy, cherry, maple, glass funnel. ‘Made with Sophia Emmett. Tenuously close to one another, the pieces create a flow, but also a tension. The work is about relationships. The glass is inscribed with the words from a letter I wrote to Sophia when we first met.’ Photo: Jono Everett

‘A chair is a difficult creature to design’, says Jono. ‘Every challenge in design and making is in a chair. Because you’ve got that conviviality of strength, weight and visual appeal.’ Designed some 20 years ago, his Apartment Chair has been made many times in different iterations. ‘It’s fantastically strong and really, really light’, he said. ‘The trick with that chair is that it has no back rail. The strength comes through the lamination of the back and the seat as the structural component, rather than being “dropped into” the chair as you normally do.’ The back is a 6mm thick lamination, made up from 1mm veneers.

The ‘right lines’ that Jono speaks of as the basis of his designs are very apparent in strokes of his Brush Chair and Flight Table. They are both one-offs and he refers to them as artworks.

So where does inspiration come from? ‘It’s really great to expose yourself to design, read a lot of design books and look at what everyone is doing through social media but if I’ve got a commission or a project that I need to think through, I turn all that off. I think it’s really healthy to disengage when you’re designing and that’s why trying to replicate designs off the internet will inevitably fail because you don’t have those ‘lines’ – you’re trying reverse engineer somebody else’s concept. It’s exciting to tell your own stories.’

Wine Wall, salavaged French oak from ‘retired’ wine barrels, commissioned as a sculptural focal point for the Glandore Estate cellar-door in the Hunter Valley. Photo: Jono Everett

Time is your friend too. ‘I think you are your work’, said Jono. ‘If you can, work with simplicity and precision and clarity, and at the same time push boundaries. You can really nail some good stuff if you work within those parameters. I think you get better at those things too. In the last few years I’ve had better commissions, better opportunities to explore.’

It comes back to the continuum though. Now there’s a sense of wanting to pass learnings and skills on. ‘What with institutions dissolving, there are less and less places to learn fine and traditional making skills and it’s really important they don’t disappear, so I feel a degree of obligation to share them. I have taught at TAFE in Canberra and at the (no longer existing) School of Fine Furniture in Tasmania. There will be classes here but we’ll do it differently.’

The objective is to make classes affordable and explore community funding options so that a wider range of people can come and learn to make. ‘That can help people who are economically challenged – we don’t want to be selective about who can do these classes. That would be my gift to society, I guess. My real passion is community outreach. I’m much more interested in a community base and allowing unfettered access to all, and really empowering people.’

Working with and for others, and creating work that tells its own story is what Jono Everett is all about.

First published in Australian Wood Review, issue 123, June 2024.

Learn more about Jono Everett @everett_ creative at https://www.everettcreative.com.au/