Kevin Perkins AM

(1945–), Launceston, TAS
Kevin Perkins trained in carpentry, industrial arts and sculpture. He has been winning awards all over Australia since the mid-70’s and has pieces in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. Kevin continues to design and make furniture as well as lecturing part-time at the Centre for Furniture Design in Hobart. Kevin is a strong advocate and supporter of the wave of young new designers coming through the Centre and out of the bush elsewhere in Tasmania. For him the greatest success will be when Tasmania’s forest resources are permanently accorded their real value.

" My father was in the timber industry so I was always surrounded by stories of timber and things like that. I left school at 14 to do a trade in joinery. When I did my trade there was never any understanding about the real trees. We knew what the timber was dead, not alive. It became a real interest for me to pursue – to identify the leaves and what shade of green is that and what does that produce in timber terms."

Studio location Huon Valley, Tasmania

Education Joinery Apprenticeship, 1965; Sculpture and Industrial; Arts Teaching Diploma, School of Art Hobart, 1969

View Melaleuca 1, co-created with Belinda Winkler and exhibited for EXPORT