Yorkshire maker Marcus Jacka
Marcus grew up in Australia, trained as a scientist and came to York in 1996 to take up a research position and later a lectureship in physics at the university here. He left in 2005 to become a full-time woodworker. A maker by nature, and curious to a fault, he strives to make beautiful, well designed work.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 I've always been a maker. As a child I was making my own toys and my father
00:06 taught me a certain amount of woodwork. I grew up in Australia, fantastic timbers,
00:14 really exciting wood to use, but now I prefer the European hardwoods.
00:22 They're just, the subtlety is really nice to work with. But from school I was a
00:29 good boy, I studied hard, I got good grades, I went to university, I got a job
00:33 in university, that's how I came to England, I had a job at the University of York in
00:38 the physics department. I used to get in trouble for spending more time in the
00:42 workshops making my equipment than actually doing the scientific research.
00:46 So it was a sensible thing to, in my mind, to leave that and become a woodworker
00:54 full-time. And now I've got this fantastic workshop in a beautiful part of the York Moors,
01:00 North York Moors. It's a really inspirational place to work. I make furniture which
01:07 we send out all over the world from this little bit of the Moors. And I
01:15 guess my feeling about my designs and my work is that I want to keep it
01:22 simple. I want to keep the simplicity of the materials combined with good
01:28 design. I'm not a virtuosic woodworker. I'm not interested in the
01:34 really fancy carving and ultra-precise joinery, which isn't to say that it's not
01:41 good quality. We make exceptional quality work, but it's the design and the
01:46 materials, that combination that really attracts me to what I do. And that's
01:53 what my customers are looking for, I think.