Meet a Maker: Edition 1

Meet Clunie Fretton

1. What is your craft and how did you get into it?
Ornamental woodcarving and gilding. I wanted to be a woodcarver when I was in primary school, but didn’t think it was still practised by anyone. I found the full time course at City & Guilds of London Art School in my early twenties, and haven’t looked back.

2. What is one interesting fact about you?
I recently discovered that relatives four or five generations back were woodcarvers and gilders!

3. How long have you been making?
I’ve been in practice for seven and a half years.

4. Who is/are your favourite maker(s) in your craft? Anyone you admire in your craft field? 
Grinling Gibbons or Tilman Riemenschneider were wonderful past carvers, but the most inspiring carvings are often by unknown makers. There’s a wonderful boxwood carving in the Victoria & Albert Museum from 1520 called “Scenes from the Story of St George” from an unknown carver that blows me away each time I see it.

5. What is the most challenging skill/technique you learned in your craft?
The most challenging thing is probably understanding the visual language of different ornamental styles. We don’t have a lot of ornament in our daily lives anymore, and if you’re training now you have to really work to internalise styles and motifs that an apprentice would have known like the back of their hand a hundred odd years ago. For most people these days, unless you’re especially interested in antiques or classical architecture, it takes a lot of time and close observation to learn the different styles.

6. What is your favourite part of your craft?
Probably the physicality of the work: working with my hands; how a chisel feels going into wood, or the feel of clay, or the smell of timber when you’re sawing it. The process of creating a carving can be frustrating sometimes, but the action of making it is always rewarding in some way even when you’re finding the work hard.

7. What project are you most proud of and why?
In 2021 I got the chance to partially recreate a lace cravat carved by Grinling Gibbons on behalf of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Grinling Gibbons is one of the most iconic woodcarvers, and his lace cravat is a wonderful piece. I’d have felt very daunted if I’d been told I would have to recreate it when I first began training, but I learned so much in working on it. There is something very compelling about looking at a piece of carving made 300+ years ago and being able to see the decisions that person made from the marks they left behind.

8. If someone who knows nothing about your craft could know one thing, what would it be and why?
Lots of people still do it! Most people seem to think that the traditional carving skills have been lost, but that’s not the case. We have a small but healthy number of practising carvers in the UK, and more people are undertaking full-time training every year.

Learn more about Clunie