Soft launching for UK & US customers.
“Narratives driven by current existential issues inspire me, especially if they enable me to poke a finger in the eye of authority.”
Every piece here is made to commission. Greg works to a brief and enjoys one: a large vessel for a hall, a hotel lobby or a reception desk is the natural fit. Prices are on application, quoted on the size, the wood and what you want the piece to say. Allow three to four months.
One of Greg Kent's vases is carving itself a six-pack. It is beech, turned to the proportions of an ancient jar, and it has taken a chisel to its own midriff. He made it about looksmaxxing, and he thinks it is the best thing he has done.
Greg gave up art at thirteen. He came back to it as a geography teacher in Lancashire, building a boat, needing some tapered lengths of wood and going to YouTube to learn how to cut them. He calls himself a graduate of the University of YouTube. The boat mattered less than the shapes coming off the lathe, and he taught until 2023 with a workshop running alongside the classroom.
A beech log arrives at the door, three metres of it. Greg works the wood wet, straight off the tree, which is what turners mean by turning green: a log that size would take years to season, and it would split as he cut it. Wet, it comes down to a wall a centimetre or two thick, dries for two or three months, then goes back on the lathe for a fortnight of finishing. Two days of rough turning, a day working the inside, four months all in. He never sketches. He holds the piece in his head and lets the rot, the burrs and the colour argue with it: the vessel about the climate crisis is built around a rotten streak he read as an oil slick.
The other half of the bench is what he calls lace oak. Oak turned to about two millimetres, left to dry, then sandblasted until the soft spring growth has gone and only the hard rings are standing. Hold one up and there is daylight through the wall of the pot. Only oak takes it, because the medullary rays that run across an oak's grain are what hold the shell together once everything softer has been blown away.
Greg works to commission, talks to school groups about making a living from craft, and shows at Flow Gallery in London and Dansel in Dorset. He is a QEST Turners' Company Scholar, a Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Turners, and has shown at the Crafts Council's Collect Open and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
Greg taught geography for three decades and took up turning to unwind after school. He was self-taught from videos until a QEST Turners' Company Scholarship in 2024 paid for a year of it: deep hollowing with Keith Clark, steam bending at the London School of Furniture, fine abrasion with a fossil preparator, and a fortnight in France with Alain Mailland.
Everything comes from wood that was going to be burnt. Greg collects it from tree surgeons around Lancashire and from a wood recycling enterprise in Preston, and works it wet. Beech for the large vessels, turned to a centimetre or two so it dries without splitting. Oak for the lace, because only oak has medullary rays strong enough to survive the blasting.
Behind the work
