Brian Robins is a sculptor who works in Huon Pine. He lives at Franklin on a small acreage and has lived the rural life for most of the 20 years he’s been in Tasmania.

Brian says that he doesn’t think when he sculpts. The wood he works with was felled somewhere prior to the 1970’s when the logging of Huon Pine ceased. The felled tree would need to have been large enough to warrant the axeman’s effort and since Huon Pine grows extremely slowly that tree would have certainly been hundreds of years old. The log woukd eventually have ended up in waterways or on river banks where it was finally salvaged. As a result, much of the wood that Brian works with is compromised by decay, splitting, fracturing or discolouration.

Brian’s process is to first remove all or most of that compromised material. As a direct consequence he cannot select a log and know what he will make from it, what it will become - say, for example  a human figure or a bird - he cannot know what he will find or what will remain. Rather than making a conscious decision of the intellect to decide on an object to render, Brian’s way is based on instinct and intuition. It is the material itself, and not the artist, that decides. The process is a subtractive one; he only takes away, he doesn’t add, apply or assemble to create. For Brian, it is the unknown, the uncertainty, that is the drug for him. Creating something that pays tribute to that piece of Huon Pine is the skill he’s developing, but it’s always predominantly about the wood.