Woodworker’s slabwood style picked up by major sports chain
Kaituna woodworker Brian Cooper is making a national name for himself in Hunting & Fishing franchise stores around New Zealand.
He’s off this week to outfit their biggest shop in the country, a 60-metre-long former furniture store at Botany Downs in Auckland. His three-month mission is to give it the “wood makeover”, lining the whole interior with macrocarpa and Japanese cedar, then making all the racks for clothes, rods and guns, as well as miscellaneous counters and benches.
It all started four years ago when Brian’s natural and chunky slabwood style made a huge impression on the owners of the Hunting & Fishing store in Nelson, after they commissioned him to make some furniture. That culminated in Brian outfitting the Nelson shop, and he went on to do others in the chain at Blenheim, Otaki, Tauranga and Christchurch.
“I guess my style suited the rugged outdoor image the store puts out there to sell its products. But it’s also naturally pleasing and highly effective in other situations as well, like the fitting out I’ve done at the Naked Possum and Tutti Frutti in Takaka too. Collingwood has eight of my sitting benches too now, scattered around the township. Slowly your work gets out there.”
Originally from Yorkshire, where he attended Bridlington Boys Grammar School, Brian emigrated to Australia with his family in 1968 before shifting to New Zealand 23 years ago and Golden Bay a short time later. He and partner Karen Cooper have established a name for themselves in the Bay as Weka Arts, operating their Kaituna gallery on the “two skinny roadside acres” they have totally transformed over the last 10 years into highly effective gardens of driftwood, rocks, buoys and other found materials. Brian in particular has collected all manner of quirky stuff over the years. Number plates and car badges adorn his car shed, at the back of which he has fitted out his own “Kaituna Hunting & Fishing” room. A keen fisherman, duck and goose shooter, he confesses to being a “gear freak”.
What the public sees mostly, though, is their gallery, full of their combined creations: not only Brian’s wooden picture frames, garden seats, shelves, king and queen chairs, a double bed, even a selection of breadboards, but Karen’s framed “photographic essays” which portray subjects as diverse as graffiti at the Christchurch Sale Yards and scenes from the Dunedin Farmers’ Market. All Karen’s works are one-off original pieces and she still uses roll film rather than digital images.
Brian’s 25-year-old son, Ben, a chip off the old block, turns out everything from breadboards to coffee tables, and assisted his father with the Hunting & Fishing job in Christchurch. Ben is a carpentry apprentice in the Bay.
You will still see the occasional mobile and woven “spider’s web” at Weka Arts, driftwood creations that Brian makes mostly in winter—“no TV in our house”, he explains. He has always made mobiles out of the choicest bits of driftwood. His knack for that art goes right back to his childhood, when he built toys from the flotsam and jetsam he scavenged along the Yorkshire coastline.
The concept of “mobile art” goes back to Alexander Calder, an American engineer who became bored with routine work and started to play around with balancing bits of scrap metal on pieces of wire. Calder wanted to present “a sculpture that moves gently in an unpredictable pattern through the effort of moving air agitated by the movements of the observers”. He died in 1976, but his sheet metal works are still seen in the Museum of Modern art in New York.
Brian says he draws creativity from lots of places, “but in the end I think a lot of my inspiration has definitely come from others in the Bay. This place is sure full of creative people and it’s helped define exactly what we do here now at Weka Arts.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
