‘I feel like I’m having my 20s in my 50s’: the furniture maker remaking her life after divorce

It’s that rarest of things, a hot late-summer afternoon in Hobart, and Laura McCusker opens the gate to her workshop wearing sweaty black shortalls and scuffed work boots. She’s a little sunburnt, a little messy, and doesn’t seem to care.

McCusker’s settled family life imploded three years ago, and at the age of 51, the celebrated furniture maker and designer is crafting her world afresh. “I’ve always tried to design my life,” she tells me over coffee at a corrugated iron smoko shack with two kayaks suspended from the roof – the only insulation – beside her century-old red-brick workshop. “I’m now redesigning it.”

The new rules are reflected in the furniture taking shape at this former apple-packing shed in suburban Moonah, beside a poplar-lined rivulet branching from the River Derwent. McCusker’s signature has long been pale, almost Scandi-hued timber pieces: tables, benches, cabinets and screens in Tasmanian oak with a mid-century accent. But nearing completion here are a darkly varnished dining-room table and a coffee table, the latter in fluid organic lines. Strikingly -expressive works, these hint at a bolder and more experimental spirit.

Then there is Forest Stand, commissioned last year by Launceston-based Design Tasmania for its permanent wood collection. A quirky clothes stand made from offcuts of Tasmanian oak, Huon pine, golden sassafras, myrtle and Tasmanian blackwood, left over from bespoke commissioned tables, the piece is sculptural and playful and light on its feet. It functions as a clothes stand – just. But it’s also an essay about the many lives of wood: its arboreal origins, its subtle beauty, its utility, with something to say about its maker, too.

Most of all, the new rules are inscribed in the credo McCusker is determined to live by. The mother of two worked her Blundstones off to forge a happy home. Her daughter, Ella, has just finished a teaching -degree and Jim, her son, is at university. Now that her marriage has ended, she’s just as determined to be joyously single, unfettered and answerable to herself alone. “If I’m in the zone it’s work, work, work; if I feel like taking time off, I go camping,” she says. “This is going to sound soooo Tasmanian, but I have a swag and I toss it in the ute, clip on the cover. Leave.”

Born in Adelaide to an Irish father and Brazilian mother, both medical specialists and recent immigrants, she moved to Sydney as a teenager. Much like her parents, she had a talent for maths and science, but there were early signs of her mania for making. “I had no interest in dolls, dress-ups or games of make-believe,” she recalls. “But give me plasticine, cellophane, crayons, paper, wire and glue and I’d be happy for days.”

As a 21-year-old, she enrolled in the UTS architecture school because she wanted to make a table – an indispensable, universal, humble domestic object – and to make it beautiful. But after three days of -abstruse theory, she dropped out, “running and screaming from the classroom”. She made that damn table anyway through a cabinetry course at TAFE, which led to a course in the finer aspects of woodwork – from wood types, veneers and joinery to coopering, laminating, designing and making custom furniture. Fine woodworking was, for McCusker, “the perfect combination of art and engineering, maths and making”. She’d discovered her true vocation. And it would become her life.

She leads me to her workshop, an Aladdin’s cave of timber and tools and furniture pieces at all stages of gestation. The walls are an orderly farrago of marking gauges, chisels, files, block planes, engineer’s squares, sliding bevels, calipers, cabinet scrapers, handsaws, woodworking rasps, screwdrivers; everything in its place and a place for everything. Ella, who is down from Sydney and “on the tools” today, is applying a treacly coat of tannic varnish to one of McCusker’s most recent “dark” pieces. And there, in a shadowy corner, is an astonishing thing: a stack of five raw Huon pine slabs, each one about five centimetres thick, 70 centimetres wide and seven metres long, still in their crusty skin of aged bark.

It’s always a shock to see a stash of rare Huon pine, in any state, and McCusker admits she “almost cried” when these “sister slabs” (from the same source) were brought in. It was so evocative of the magnificent tree that once was, and had been for centuries. This rich, butter-hued timber is as precious and alluring as the lustre of gold or the scintillation of diamonds. The boards belong to MONA’s founder David Walsh and she will say only that they’ll be used for something “amazing”.

A rarely discussed dimension of the “MONA effect” is its role in sustaining the state’s high-end craft economy. McCusker – who made a 60-metre table for the wedding of Walsh and Kirsha Kaechele, furniture for the MONA Pavilions, outdoor tables and benches for the Moorilla wine bar, a tasting table for the Moorilla cellar door, and dining tables for The Source restaurant – has long been a beneficiary of MONA’s twin divinities and their almost Pharaonic passion for building.

I first interviewed Laura McCusker in the winter of 2020 for a piece in this magazine on Tasmanian women designers. Sitting with her today in the smoko shack, beneath the suspended kayaks, and beside a well-worn upright piano, I ask the most elemental of questions: “So what’s changed for you these past six years?” Her eyes widen and she shoots back, “What hasn’t changed?” Then she turns, heads to the sink, returns with coffee, and breaks the seal on the most delicate of subjects.

When marital problems hit in mid-2022, McCusker began to study her marriage as if it were a carefully crafted object, modelled by hands and guided by hearts. “The Japanese would say that the greatest respect you can give to a loved yet broken object is to repair it,” she tells me. “The cracks are part of its beauty. You don’t throw it away. Relationships age and take on character, just like the furniture pieces I’ve dedicated my life to.” She was looking for ways to put it back together, this thing of human beauty.

It was a fine idea and noble sentiment, in keeping with McCusker’s instinct for braiding together her life and work, but it ultimately proved futile. Despite her best efforts, the fissure was irreparable. The break, inevitable.

When I spoke with McCusker back in 2020, it was striking how strongly her story was impressed with the trope of woman-in-a-man’s-world. The other Tasmanian women in the story – jewellers Anita Dineen and Emma Bugg, and graphic designer Megan Perkins – weren’t lugging and planing planks for a living. McCusker told how her first job in Hobart, after moving from Sydney in 2003, was making furniture for a luxury yacht, in a shipyard with 350 men. On day one, there was a mad scramble to remove the girlie pics from the tea room.

Talking to her now, she adds a not-insignificant gloss. “I was a young mother at the time, breastfeeding Jimbo. I used to say goodbye to him around 6am and wouldn’t see him again till six in the evening. It was a really tough time. But we had a mortgage and no money and I needed to get a job to provide for the family.”

She remembers starting her own practice in inner western Sydney three decades ago, in 1996, with her apprenticeship and trade certificates in woodworking under her belt, and a “big pregnant belly” – she was carrying Ella – beneath her overalls. “I was working right up to 38 weeks.”

The decision to have children early was all part of the plan, she says, the “grand design” of her life. The idea was to free herself up in her 50s. Things have panned out, pretty much, as expected. “I feel like I’m having my 20s in my 50s,” she says with a quick smile of delight at the paradox. “It’s so much more fun to be 20 when you’re 50, if that makes sense. I’m fitter than I’ve ever been. I know who I am. I’ve got housing security, job security, more financial security than I’ve ever had. In your 20s, you’re still trying to work out who you are.”

Of course she’s ended up with a tad more freedom than she hoped for. “My new plan is to work out how to do this in a way that’s still fun and joyful. I know I’m incurably optimistic, always looking for the silver linings. I think it
irritates the shit out of my children sometimes. But, what are the options? This stage of life can be a bit rough, but if you learn how to, you know, read the surf – and how to sort of ride the waves – then you’re much better than just being thrown around by it.”

In the early years of her career, and her relocation to Hobart, she was acutely conscious of her femininity in a male-dominated world of tools and machines, that required strength, skill and precision, and an element of danger. She wanted more than anything to fit in. So the girl with her Brazilian mother’s soft, brown eyes and heavy hair “learnt to speak bloke, my accent changed, I became harder. I wanted to just get on with my work and be judged by my work.” As part of that strategy of effacement, she set out to “dial down her femininity”, lest it become a distraction. “It was survival strategy via camouflage. I’m sure I’m not the first woman to use this technique.”

‘I’m older, wiser and I’m not worried about making other people feel comfortable.’

Laura McCusker

Now, three decades after McCusker started fashioning a life in wood, “I’m older, wiser and I’m not worried about making other people feel comfortable. I know I am good at what I do and I make no excuses for who I am.” And with time has come a deeper appreciation of “traditional feminine skills” in the worlds of business, craft and art. “I would say, ‘Don’t throw that stuff out thinking you have to blend in.’ ”

McCusker has learnt lessons from life that she’s taken into the workshop, and lessons from the workshop that have aided her in life. There’s a quiet meditative conversation going on during the slow, reflective process of woodwork, despite the background hammering and the shrill ringing of saws. “You learn to read the timber,” she says. “Read its grain, its growth, what part of the tree the board has been cut from. You can go against the grain – and sometimes you must. But your knives need to be sharp, the cut not too deep, and take it slow.”

Her children, she admits, often roll their eyes when she talks this way, when she comes over all Jedi Wood Master, but she can’t resist the temptation to view working with wood as a metaphor for working through life. A piece of timber’s most beautiful feature, for McCusker, is as often as not the result of stress. “Of fracture. Of tension. Of the tree responding to wind, to lean, to damage, to uneven light. What we admire as beauty is often the visible record of difficulty. Those glorious growth rings – so striking when they arc across a board – are also where the tension lives in the tree. Where torsion builds. Where movement is stored. They are beautiful – and they can be unstable. They demand respect. Allowance. Understanding.”

I leave McCusker at her studio and drive two hours north along the Midland Highway to view Forest Stand. The work is an evolution from a more functional piece designed a decade earlier for a client to encourage his partner to dismantle the “clothes monster” in the corner of the room, and actually put his clothes away. Responding to a commission last year from Design Tasmania, she returned to the idea. This time she used specialty Tasmanian timbers left over from commissioned tables – cast-offs, as she puts it, “too good to throw away but not good for very much else”. The fine bones of this functional sculpture mesh into a fretwork of contained and open spaces, some seeking earth and stability, others breaking free.

Arts consultant Pippa Dickson, who met McCusker more than 20 years ago when she arrived in Hobart as a young mother and designer, sees Forest Stand as a riff on an earlier cluster of verticals and play of shadows. This piece dates from 2003, an undulating slatted screen of blackbutt titled Barcode Screen, a bespoke version of which is in Walsh and Kaechele’s -private collection.

Consistently through both McCusker’s work and her personality, Dickson sees “strength and elegance, grit and refinement”, a combination that “feels entirely her own”. For sure there’s an evolution, but there’s also a straight and consistent grain.

The next day, McCusker sends a note to say that our discussion about design and life, design in life, and designing life – at least having a good crack at it – has prompted thoughts about purpose. As is her way, she frames her meditation in tangible terms that relate to her craft.

“If perfection isn’t attainable,” she writes, “the question then becomes: which side of perfect do you choose? Functional perfectionism? Or dysfunctional perfectionism?

“Functional sharpens the blade, tests the joint and makes it again if it needs remaking – and then moves forward. While ‘dysfunctional’, on the other hand, never quite finishes. Never quite releases. Never quite believes it’s enough.

“The true perfectionist knows the difference -immediately. You bring two pieces together – and you don’t need a ruler. It either fits. Or it doesn’t. There’s sound when it’s right. A feeling in the hand. In the body. Not flawless. Not sterile. But resolved.

“And in a world of mass production, of computerised fabrication, of algorithmic precision and factory-made sameness, the human hand – with its slight variation, its softness, its ‘less-than-perfect’ edge – becomes something else entirely.

“It becomes evidence. Evidence that a person was here. That care was taken. That time was spent. The irregularity itself becomes authenticity. The variation becomes truth. Perfection, in that context, is no longer the goal. Presence is. Not perfect – but resolved.”

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