Patagonia

I do all my work here at Joymill, but because it's on a private property and I need somewhere to meet people, I have an office and just down the road from my office is a Bunnings. I go and get all the pallets they're throwing away. I rip them apart and make fins out of them. I'm also making legrope plugs out of them too. I want to try and utilise as much rubbish on these, tastefully, but I also want to make them good and robust. One thing’s leading to another and it’s guiding me. It's fun rubbish.

I've even made custom orders out of them. I've had to tell the people who are buying them, “You're actually riding rubbish.” I can't be like; this is all top-quality A-grade stuff. It's a bit of a risk selling this foam that's an unknown quantity. Sometimes it's a bit too much of a mountain to climb for some people to hear that it's rubbish. But other people are just thrilled by it.

I'm hoping to make a mid-six-foot board. Usually, I can't go long because the foam is totally stringerless and I don’t trust the structural integrity of it. The longer you go, the more chance you have of breaking it. But now I'm using pallets to make stringers and using all kinds of stuff to make stringers. I'm constantly looking at building sites and seeing what's in the dumpsters and embarrassing my son, but I think I'm only just beginning to scratch the surface.

We were driving to Melbourne a week or so ago and I saw a huge pile of foam that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. They look like really big bits, so I can't wait to hit the road back towards Melbourne to try to find it. Hopefully it's still there. Once I'd seen the first bit of foam on the side of the road, I can't not see everything now when I drive by. It does my head in a bit, but it's really thrilling to all of a sudden be enlightened to all this free material that's sitting around. There are also the offcuts of fibreglass from making the boards here, which I'd like to try to use.

I'm absolutely thinking of other materials and other ways to make boards and the different possibilities. It's a really exciting, rule-free environment, rubbish. No one can tell me what to do because it’s meant to be in the bin, so I can do whatever the fuck I please with it.

If you were to come to my house, you're not going to see a single surfing image up. All my surfboards are tucked away in the shed. You wouldn't even know I surfed if you came to my house. I'm surrounded by art at home. And books. I shape for a living. I talk surfing all day, every day, and escape from it is almost the most important part of my creative process. If you watch too much incredible surfing, you end up making surfboards for incredible surfers and you don't investigate other things.

As soon as I finish work, I'm a dad and I'm looking at art and I'm doing different things. I can see a leaf on the ground, and I love the shape of that leaf, and then I go shape that leaf. One time I saw how the rings of Saturn at a certain angle made this beautiful elliptical shape and I thought, I'm going to make a totally elliptical surfboard. You just see things, and it inspires you and motivates you, but if you keep looking at the same things, you'll end up making the same things and being too influenced by it.

I also think what helps me is watching ordinary surfers surf; not just watching all the best in the world surf all the time. I get a lot of inspiration from watching everyday surfers and our everyday problems in our surfing helps me problem-solve making surfboards.

Surfboards are my medicine — shaping and surfing is my medicine. Whenever you're feeling shit, I can go shape a board and feel great afterwards. We got to this point years ago with shaping where it just kind of stopped and then we kind of hit the reverse button and everybody started looking back at what we used to surf. I love that. It kind of splintered everybody off into riding logs and longboards and twin-fins again and fish and shortboards and it splintered everything apart, which was fantastic.

We were looking back a lot, and that includes with the manufacturing side of the boards. I shaped my first board at 13 and I'm still essentially making the same things now. The blanks have got lighter and stronger, and the glass has got clearer and brighter and all that, but it's essentially the same foam, glassed the same way. It drives me nuts because back then, there were no self-driving cars and there were no mobile phones or any of these types of technology. Even the Formula One cars back then to now, they're totally different, but we're trapped in this place with surfboards. It drives me nuts, but I don't have the money to do anything about that. All I can impact on is the shapes, and I'm loving that.

I'm trying to shape ergonomic surfboards at the minute. We never seem to think of our comfort on surfboards. It's a weird thought, but I wear Birkenstocks all the time and I thought, yeah, why not have a fitted deck of a board? Maybe if you get the deck that comfy and that fitted to your foot that we don't need deck grip anymore. They're an environmental problem on their own. I just chase rabbits down rabbit holes. But shaping is my medicine; being off the beaten path with doing it feeds my motivation to keep shaping. If I’m in a bay shaping the same thing all day, every day, it can be pretty mind-numbing stuff. And doing mind numbing stuff with an active mind isn't the best thing.

So yeah, I'm experimenting a lot with shapes and possibilities and scrapping rule books, and that's a big reason why I'm doing what I'm doing with this foam. All my biggest breakthroughs have come from fuckups or accidents that start leading me down another path. Me surfing twin-fins came with me fucking up a thruster and it ended up being a twin-fin. Experimenting with all types of forms, even though it's not retail friendly, it's certainly friendly for my mind.

This story features in Roaring Journals, Edition Two:order your copy here.