Matt Dwight
Handcrafted woodwork from salvaged and renewable timber in Sydney.
Working from a small home-based workshop backing onto bushland in Thornleigh, Sydney, Matt Dwight creates beautiful, functional homewares, furniture and sculptural pieces from salvaged, recycled and renewable materials.
His practice brings together traditional and contemporary furniture-making and woodturning techniques, but the material itself is always given a fairly important say in what comes next.
Matt works with both local and introduced timber species, much of it salvaged from trees across Sydney's northern suburbs and Northern Beaches. Rather than seeing fallen or removed timber as something at the end of its useful life, he gives it another one.
And that feels very at home at Wyldwood.
Letting the Timber Lead
Every piece begins with the wood.
Matt pays close attention to grain, figure and colour when selecting timber, allowing the individual character of the material to influence what it becomes.
But beautiful timber isn't enough on its own.
An object still has to do its job. It should feel balanced in the hand, function beautifully and have a form strong enough to stand on its own — even without the grain and colour that first drew your eye to it.
It's a wonderfully practical approach to making beautiful things.
Useful first. Beautiful as well.
We rather like that.
Shaped by the Landscape
While much of Matt's work allows the natural timber to speak for itself, sometimes he gives it a little encouragement.
Milk paint, burning, scorching, wire brushing and bleaching are used to introduce colour and texture — not simply to decorate the surface, but to reveal or exaggerate something already happening within the wood.
His inspiration comes from the landscape surrounding the material itself: old trees and fallen timber weathered by wind, rain, drought and fire.
The resulting surfaces echo those same processes — worn, textured, imperfect and very much alive.
It's not about making wood look like something it isn't.
It's about noticing what's already there.
A Second Life for Sydney Timber
There's something particularly lovely about knowing that the timber in an object might once have been part of a tree growing not terribly far from where it now sits.
By working with salvaged and recycled timber alongside responsibly renewable materials, Matt creates pieces that hold onto a little of where they came from.
Trees become timber.
Timber becomes an object.
The object becomes something used, marked, handled and lived with.
And the story keeps going.
Matt's work sits very comfortably amongst the flowers, plants, ceramics, art and other slightly eclectic things at Wyldwood — objects made thoughtfully, from materials worth paying attention to, by people who care about how they're made.