A chance encounter in Portugal inspired photographer Bobby Mills to change his life and teach himself to work with wood – with very pleasing resultsAmong the rolling hills of the Algarve lies the market town of Monchique. Clad in forests of native pine, oak and eucalyptus, the surrounding towns have a sedate pace of life and a wild, unruly beauty.  In 2018, Bobby Mills was working as a photographer, travelling in a camper van through Portugal via France, Spain and Morocco. While passing through the rural towns, a small, picturesque cottage stopped Mills in his tracks.  It was its own little paradise, complete with a garden and a shed. Mills stopped to take a picture and it wasn’t long before he and the owner of the cottage, a wood turner, got talking. Though it lasted just a couple of hours,the chance encounter was to be a turning point for Mills, who was struck by this man’s simple, content and happy life.

‘What an existence,’ Mills recalls, the day we meet to talk about his own woodwork practice. That meeting had stirred a nostalgic niggle to work with his hands again, bringing back memories of his childhood with his father.

‘I spent the summer holidays working with my old man,’ says Mills. ‘He was a Sussex-based builder. He was always looking after the old stuff , and was constantly teaching me a sympathetic way of working with old buildings.’ With this mindful approach towards caring for and mending old things, Mills was handed an invaluable set of skills in working with stone, wood and metal.

The wood and tools for Mills’ first endeavour came to him in a similarly serendipitous way. Basing himself just outside Horsham in West Sussex, Mills made an informal agreement with a farmer to exchange his help on the farm for a place to stay.

 ‘He had no interest in rent, and was always well up for bartering’, Mills laughs.
‘The farm works in a way where trading legs of lamb for fixing up a roof is the norm.’ Mills was tasked with making three beehive stands for the farm. He was shown to a wind-felled oak tree, that had been left, somewhat forgotten, propped up in a barn since the storm that struck it in 1995. Tall, grand and resilient, the English oak had stood for 350 years, and now served the perfect purpose for the hive stands.

‘With a few basic hand tools, I started to figure out how I could work with the wood, and how to join it without using metal fixings. I would walk around the farm and look at the existing joins in the barns. 

I started to research the way old, proper furniture was made.’

With time, and piece by piece, beehive stands led to chair legs, and chair legs led to an entire stool. Mills observed his craft, intuitively engaging with the grains in the wood. With the help of an old, traditional lathe donated by a friend, Mills practised and perfected turning, working with the natural quirks in the wood, obsessing over joins and details.
‘With a few basic hand
tools, I started to figure
out how I could work
with the wood and how
to join it without using
metal fixings’Curvaceous and warmly toned, and crafted from the very same Sussex oak, his one stool ended up for sale in Wild Sussex, a conservation project and shop selling log wood and traditional crafts by local coppice workers. It took only two people to see the stool to commission an entire set, resulting in a bespoke family of stools, now housed in the prestigious Blue Mountain School.

His most recent series, ‘Blue Vessels’, allowed the wood to dictate the form in its entirety. While rummaging through the firewood of a tree surgeon, Mills came across some odd-looking chunks, not quite big enough for furniture, and blackened with rain and moisture. The unwanted pieces also contained fragments of iron from nails and fencing, tarnishing the wood and posing a threat to further sawing.
‘The wood told me what I was going to make,’ Mills tells me confidently, knowing from just looking at the misshapen pieces that they would undoubtedly become vessels. ‘Instead of squaring off the nails, I worked around them, forgivingly turning each chunk, one by one, into a vessel.’ Slowly left to dry, the vessels naturally warped and distorted into their own unique shape. And, as if dusted in pigments, each was naturally stained from years of deeply engrained iron with a midnight blue patina. An outcome unforeseen and beautifully distinct.

Settled today in North Devon’s Biosphere Nature Reserve, Mills continues to work strictly with wind-blown trees or wood that has been sustainably sourced from conservation projects around the UK. He looks back at his chance encounters and connections like the life cycle of a seed. Over the years, the seeds he planted were watered and cared for, and, with labour and good weather, they have come to fruition.
bobby-handcrafted.comWORDS DAISY GRAY PHOTOGRAPHS CHRIS OWER-DAVIS