W K ARTISAN Ltd is a unique small rural business, set in the heart of Wales. We specialize in individual designed and hand-made furniture, leather craft and other wooden bygones. We are artisans using traditional methods and innovative ideas to make beautiful, functional and individual products that will give pleasure for years to come. Our designs are inspired by nature and creation. W K ARTISAN Ltd evolved from the collaboration of two people who were joined through love and craft:
Tim Wade – Master Carpenter
Master Carpenter Tim Wade combines his skills as a furniture maker, joiner, woodland skills instructor and forester. For over 4 decades he has been designing and making traditional and modern furniture, Architectural joinery, wood carving and doing historic restoration. In the early eighties Tim built up his woodworking practise in mid Wales and also set up the Green Woodworking Project at the Award Winning Woodland skills Centre. The greenwood working project has taught woodland skills since 1987 in Wales, Central Europe, France and the Cook Islands.
In the 1995 he was awarded The Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship, which allowed him to study craft and forestry in Central Europe. In 1996. he was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship and worked and learnt from a master wood carver in Slovakia. During his time in Central Europe he met his now Wife and Fellow Artisan Zsuzsanna.
In 1999 Tim was invited to work as an instructor on the remote island of Pukapuka in the Cook Islands for 1 year. His travels have been a great inspiration to his work, but his late father, Robin Wade, (a wood carver/ designer) was Tim’s greatest influence.
He sources the raw material ~ from his own mixed woodlands, which he manages in a sustainable way, with a good balance for nature and end use. Tim’s work has been sold Worldwide and he has been awarded some very prestigious commissions including making the 1994 Bardic Chair for the Neath National Eisteddfod, 200 oak church chairs for the millennium restoration of St. Peters Church, Petersfield, seats in woods commission for the Woodland Trust, Public seating in the Physic garden and many more. He continues to work in his workshop in Wales and Hungary.
“He who works with sensitive and deft hands at any woodcraft, will absorb the rain, sunlight, moonlight and the dew, that entered in the making of the grain. He should grow tall, straight, clean and good, who daily breathes the essence of the wood.”
Email: tim@wkartisan.com
Zsuzsanna Wade-Kardos – Teacher & Leather Artisan
I was born in Nadudvar, Hungary, 1966.
After completing Teacher Training College in 1989, I was teaching in a Primary School in my native town.
I always had an interest in Arts & Crafts, so in 1994 I attended a Specialist Instructor Course, at the Leather Faculty in Budapest. Then I continued my study as a journey woman, working under the experience of leather craftsmen.
I spent a lot of time looking at examples of traditional leather work in museums and with country craftsmen. During this time, a Crafts School was set up in my native town, and I was asked to teach as a Leather Work Tutor where I continued teaching art and craft at for 12 years. During this time I built up my leather craft workshop practise and established myself as a leather artisan.
My work has been submitted many times to the Leather Crafts Guild in Budapest, where a panel of experts have noted my craftsmanship as being of the highest quality. I have had exhibitions of my work in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and Great Britain. I am a member of the Society of the Hungarian Crafts People in the City of Debrecen and the International Leathercrafters’ Guild.
I moved to Wales in 2006, through marrying my Master Carpenter husband Tim Wade. I continued to work as an Arts & Crafts teacher in a Rudolf Steiner school, and also established a successful craft studio. I have sold my work Worldwide and have many returned customers.
In my work I try to master the way of looking at things and perform the technical skills of older periods, which have been handed down to me. I create objects to be used in the world today, but in the spirit of the old craftsman and his traditional skills. I work mostly with vegetable tanned leather because I can create my items with a big variety of processes; including embossing, carving and hand dyeing. All my work is hand stitched, no machines are used. I still use the traditional technique of punching and double stitching (saddle-stitching). These objects bring back the forms of the older times, with a modern approach, therefore creating unique pieces of leather work.
My ethos is to create objects for this world but imbued with the spirit of the old craftsmen and made using traditional skills. I am also inspired by my Husband, the Nature and the Celtic History.- I believe that the culture and skills that we inherited need to be passed on to future generations with new depth, brightness and soul.
“She who works with her hands, is a labourer.
She who works with hands and her head is a craftswoman
She who works with hands and her head and her heart is an artist”.
/St. Francis of Assisi/
Email: zsuzsa@wkartisan.com