Roger Bennett

When Roger Bennett took a year’s sabbatical from his career as a secondary school teacher in Dublin, he was always intending to go back. But one day he was mesmerised by a woodturning demonstration and the experience changed his life. That very day, he decided he had to try woodturning for himself. He joined an evening class, bought a lathe and set up a workshop in his garden, and soon was selling pieces in a local market. One year turned into four, before Roger finally told his school he wasn’t going back. He now specialises in making woodturned bowls, vessels and wall pieces, turned very thin, coloured with water-based dyes and inlaid with silver.

To create many of his silver inlay patterns, Roger Bennett uses the vector graphics software Corel Draw. For example, using the program he can draw a straight line and then undulate it, taking control of the amplitude of the undulations, the number of dots and the spacing between the dots. He prints the design, sticks this template on the wood, and pricks through the paper to mark the position of the silver dots. Roger then drills holes into the wood, but not through it, and carefully glues in short lengths of silver wire, holding each piece tightly in a pair of pliers. After snipping off the protruding bits, he sands the metal flush with the wood. He colours the wood with water-based dyes and finishes with Danish oil.

When Roger Bennett first started creating colourful bowls, he did so with no inlay. He had previously seen wood-turned pieces with silver inlays in the work of another Irish woodturner who dabbled a little bit in it. However, Roger’s most notable influence came during a Crafts Council course in Kilkenny. There was a jeweller on that course, and as Roger notes, “on the course obviously we would swap suggestions as to what each of us might try”. She, the jeweller, suggested that the shine of silver would work very well against the background of the darker shades of his turned-wood creations. She gave him some advice and Roger started to experiment.

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