Courtney Petley
BAYA HOUSE Vol. 2
Courtney Petley’s hand-carved native timber animals, each made from a single piece of wood, are shown together for the first time at BAYA House.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Felix Jackson
You taught yourself to carve. What did those early pieces teach you about form?
The first piece I carved was a spatula, at the time I thought I had given it a lot of form, but looking at it now I can see how subtle it was. Form and shape were already things I thought a lot about, but before I could push them further I had to learn the material: with only floorboard offcuts, an Opinel knife, an axe and a handsaw, I taught myself to read the grain and use my tools, and as I became more confident about removing material, and using my tools, that knowledge changed and strengthened the way I thought about form, a process that continues with every piece.
Why native timbers? How does a particular wood’s grain, colour or density shape the animal it becomes?
Growing up as a builder’s daughter, I learnt early to recognise native timber in houses, to appreciate the joy of pulling up carpet and finding native gold underneath, and, most importantly, to understand it as a beautiful resource worth preserving.
With the animals, I choose the forms first and select pieces of reclaimed timber that work together in terms of scale, the grain is often the surprise at the end, revealing something I couldn’t have anticipated that feels completely fitting for that particular animal, and that is part of the beauty of native timber, as the grain moves across a form, it somehow always seems to complement and enhance it.
How do you decide what to carve next? Is it intuition, or seeing how beautiful a form could be in wood?
The next piece usually begins in one of three ways: as an evolution of the previous piece, as a new challenge entirely, or with a particular piece of wood that has inspired a shape through its unique form or grain. Whatever the starting point, I want each piece to ask something new of me, so I always go into new work wanting to improve, learn and strengthen my knowledge.
How much detail do you put in, and how much do you leave out? Where’s the line between a realistic animal and a simplified one?
Proportion, balance and scale are the three fundamentals for me, if they feel right, the animal doesn’t need a lot of detail to be recognisable. I focus on the defining feature that gives each animal its character and keep everything else relatively simple, relying on my gut to find the fine line between enough and too much.
This is the first time your animals have been shown together as a collection. How did you think about scale and grouping when placing them on the BAYA rug?
The animals share a similar scale, so I wanted them to feel like a collection while still giving each one enough space to hold its own, and Kayla Jurlina’s styling expertise helped bring balance to the final grouping. What I hadn’t anticipated was just how complementary the materials would be, with the warmth and variation of the swamp kauri and rimu sitting beautifully against the clay-toned 100% wool rug and creating a soothing quality that reinforced the original idea of making the space feel like a home.