Meet the women turning bicycle tyres and timber offcuts into furniture

Jess Humpston uses her background in fashion and interior design to inform her woodworking. (Supplied) Link copiedShareShare articleThe next generation of women woodworkers are giving waste products like bike tyres and timber offcuts a new life. The rise of the small design studio is where they are thriving as they explore circular-economy ideals and sustainable practices while driving a new narrative in design that's emotive, thoughtful and cutting-edge. Their work is being showcased at this year's Melbourne Design Week, which brings together Australian makers who create furniture, lighting and homewares. ABC Arts looks at four artists carving out a name for themselves in a traditionally male space. Isabel Avendaño-Hazbún has designed a new upholstery material made from discarded rubber bicycle tyres — sourced from local bike shops — which would have ended up in landfill. The multidisciplinary artist, who creates furniture in her Melbourne studio, has used the materials to build on her chair design The Chair (2022). These buoyant timber chairs are threaded and handwoven with tyre rope in an artistic move that is inspired by nautical knots and breathes new life into her practice. Avendaño-Hazbún considers the entire ecological impact of her work to feed into a sustainable model of production and consumption. (Supplied: Matthew McQuiggan) She says it is a way to think about a circular economy that prevents waste, and rewire how we consider upholstery. "I like to use timbers that are readily available, as opposed to rare timbers," says Avendaño-Hazbún, who primarily works with Tasmanian oak and Victorian ash. "There's a demand for the handmade, and through the pieces I create, people understand why the craft is so precious. "The skills and the labour of love is inherently me; I make things that are complex and take a long time, but making furniture is beyond the obvious, it's about problem solving too. Her work is on show at Craft Victoria as part of Future Ambition. Furniture designer Jess Humpston has a new work titled Felled: Reimagining Timber Supply in Contemporary Practice. She works with timber offcuts to make new furniture pieces, utilising waste materials for new-found expression. She brings an architectural verve to her final creations, where recycled gets a new lease of life. The interlocking joints of the Ballast coffee table create a grid system that allows an interplay of light and shadow. (Supplied) "The industry is definitely changing; there's more women making furniture, and diversity in terms of queer representation too," Humpston says. "It's more inclusive, more comfortable to work in this space, and you don't have to shrink and make yourself too small to be here — you can just be." Humpston has pivoted from fashion design to interior and now furniture, creating side tables that are sculptural and purposeful too. Last year she used celery top pine to create tables that are were grounded by a travertine base; her Ballast coffee table, grid-like with interlocking joints, makes a mighty statement. "I really like to work under a bit of tension — for furniture to be lightweight but also super strong," she says. "I choose to work with a lot of structural systems from gridded to dry joint construction; no glue is needed to hold it together. "There is always a level of practicality when I design. For example, the chairs I made a few years ago are practical, but I want to push it a little bit further into the sculptural art world." Furniture maker Georgie Szymanski says she loves the feel of timber in an increasingly digital age. "I love the tactile part of furniture making — it's so important for people to be able to do this especially now at this point in history where our lives revolve around computers," Szymanski says. "We're addicted to our phones, and having that tactile body, hand, hand and eye coordination is where I find my body and mind truly connect in the studio." Her creation Light Chair is on show as part of the 100 Chairs exhibition during Melbourne Design Week. She takes inspiration from Gio Ponti's Leggera chair from 1951 to find an expression of practical-meets-architectural cues. Georgie Szymanski's Light Chair is designed to follow the contours of the body. (Supplied: Issy Connelley) From her Preston studio, she says the demand for handmade keeps her busy. She also likes to focus on works made using Australian timbers. "I'm working on something with Tasmanian Blackwood, using offcuts, rather than new timber, and currently making a second sort of iteration of Light Chairs," she says. "I’d like to think I toe the line between this being art, but also functional." Musician-turned-furniture designer Raven Mahon left her native USA for a life in Australia after she fell in love with Mikey Young, of garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Together they have their own band, Green Child, but away from her love of touring on the road, she crafts he

Meet the women turning bicycle tyres and timber offcuts into furniture

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