I'm Sean. Everything here was made twice — once in my head, once on the bench.

Raised outdoors

I grew up in West Auckland, on the edge of the Waitākere Ranges. My parents ran an outdoor adventure company, so my childhood was rock faces, canyons and campsites — I was raised to be comfortable in wild places and careful in them.

Fourteen years of exact

From age six I trained as a gymnast, and kept training for fourteen years. Gymnastics is the practice of repeating a small movement a thousand times until it is exact, then holding it under pressure. When injury ended my competitive career, the sport left me with the thing I still work from every day: the belief that precision is not a talent, it's a practice.

I studied science for a while, then went into construction at twenty and spent a decade building — reading materials, solving joins, working to tolerances that had to hold.

The ride

In 2016 I lost my mum to a stroke.

Two years later I set off alone down the West Coast of the North Island on a bicycle — 1,200 kilometres. Somewhere on that ride I met a glass artist, and by the time I got home I knew what I wanted to make: a case to protect glass art, cut from macrocarpa. That first case became this workshop.

Woodworking, for me, is a way of connecting to and honouring the past while staying in the present. The material I choose makes that literal — every board I put on the bench is older than the road I rode down.