In his memoir The Village Carpenter, Walter Rose, writing in the 1930s, speaks of the era before the First World War and about his father’s carpentry shop in southern England. He writes knowing he must document his memories before he dies so that there will remain a testimony of that time. He speaks of the various jobs these carpenters did, from the making of windows and doors, the framing of houses, the building of roofs, staircases, and furniture; to the making of coffins, carts, cartwheels, and even the elm pipes for wells. He speaks of the relationship individual craftsmen within the shop had to particular aspects of the work, and how that connected them to the community.

The two men who went out to the farmers’ fields to repair the chestnut fences and gates, the men who had a particular eye for the precise task of drilling a straight hole twelve feet through the trunk of an elm tree to make a well pipe. Then there were the sawyers, often itinerant men who would cut through the great logs. The top sawyer guiding the blade, the bottom one, not known for his subtlety or acumen, who pulled the saw blade down with force, its teeth cutting through the wood, the wet sawdust showering his face and body.

George Sturt, writing The Wheelwright’s Shop some years later, further imbeds this picture of interconnected relationships. The early, dark starts, the wind howling out of the dawn into the cracks between windows and doors, the wood drying ready for use, the sense the craftsmen had of the purposing of each piece. The trees, sawn and stacked, became cradles for birth and coffins for death, and, between the two, cartwheels turned, taking all the industry of the carpenters’ shops from the tree to its end purpose within the community.

Slowly but surely, metal pipes replaced the elm ones, barbed wire the traditional fencing, and sawmills were established outside the carpenter’s shop. Coffins came to be made of manmade materials instead of elm, and gradually the quality and extent of the village carpenter’s craft diminished. Eventually, the village carpenter also disappeared, to be replaced by large centralized workshops and factories in towns and near major roads. Alongside his disappearance was that of the village smith, wheelwright, saddle maker, butcher, and baker as communities became fractured and a new order took hold. The car replaced the cart; the engine replaced the horse; and metal replaced wood. Objects and dwellings were no longer crafted by local people from local materials. The direct connection between place and material object was gradually fractured.

As a carpenter, I have come to think through making. I am inextricably bound to it, but also to all the contradictions implicit in that relationship. Now there is a growing thirst and interest in what it means to make, and I can’t help but reflect on the longing I had over thirty-five years ago and on what I see and hear around me now. Having made the decision to alter my path and ground myself in the journey to become a maker, I never imagined I would spend thirty-five years in one vocation.

It is tempting to ask why I have made a life of something so physical and demanding. Only recently, particularly through the traumatic but cleansing event of my workshop burning down, have I come to find an answer to that question. I have developed the ability to transform wood into any form I wish within nature’s laws. I have built our own home and filled the homes of countless others with furniture. All of us who make are to some degree magicians, alchemists, the transformers of base nature into something undeniably human. This is not something I have understood before. I have simply made to live, unaware of how essential making is to the idea of being human.

As a maker I feel my humanity, my human being, the potential and danger I represent. The home that my wife and I have built for our family is a particular result of this dual relationship. We live in a woods where we have built our house and cabins, our studio and workshops. The woods holds the water, acts as a conduit for it, and clings in deep brackish mulch to it over summer and winter. The water rises willfully, raw freedom from the earth, and all becomes soft, musty, musky, fetid with deep life. The sycamores, beeches, chestnuts, and oaks cast their seeds in the earth’s receptive womb, and the unstoppable, unnamable life force rises anew from it each season. We, on our small plot, sit in the middle of twenty or so acres of mainly beech woods, planted one hundred years ago on a ridge, to protect the crops from sea- and moor-birthed gales. A hundred years of their growth, and whatever preceded them, have cast the ground brackish; our property, The Brake, taking its name from the soil.

We moved into our house in 2000, the basics all done, much still to be finished. When we did, I could let all the dust settle and finally appreciate what we were doing. We had arrived on this land a year earlier with a hope and a prayer, torn from where we had been, building another house in the hills of Mexico three years before, and dropped into a London hospital. Our daughter, Misha, born with Down syndrome while we were in Mexico, needed major medical care and we had had to quickly pack our lives into a container and leave the dry heat of the Mexican plains for the chaos of an anxious city life. Nearly two years passed – two years lived on a fine line between life and death. We didn’t dare to dream. But at some point after the house was built, very slowly we did dare again, and as we looked out of the windows to the south from our living room, we saw the sea for the first time, and I realized that we had found our way after all. Everything since has been a slow deepening of what it means to be part of a piece of land, to live on it, nurture it, and be nurtured by it as best as one can.

Home has become more than a place, more than shelter. Home for me is the manifestation of my material connection to life. It is the point at which wild land and our ingenuity meet, where the soul finds rest and endeavor finds the opportunity for expression. We don’t need to build our own house; we just need to interact, to tend a garden or a window box, to cook our own food and make some of the things we require. Once we do these things, we begin to create stories of our connection here, of the meaning of this life, and we root all the more to the earth beneath us.

The land here now supports a hamlet of buildings: the two cabins we rent, our house, an art studio, two workshops, sheds, a bakehouse, and a polytunnel. It is home to our working lives as well as to our family. It is a home to other families through nine months of the year, families who come to rest, to take a break out of their busy city lives.

We have made a life here amongst the trees, shielded and shaded by them, yet at times conflicted over our relationship with them. We have lived here for twenty years, the trees circling us and protecting us, their great crowns reaching over the garden, their shade cloaking the summers, their skeletal beauty marking the winters. They rain their bud husks down on us in the spring, their nuts in the late summer and their leaves in the autumn. At times we must take one down for the sake of safety, and though new ones have been planted, we won’t live to see them reaching as far above us as their forebears did.

Adapted from Nick Kary, Material: Making and the Art of Transformation (Chelsea Green Publishing) and reprinted with permission from the publisher.