Wendy is a talented metal and glass worker with a passion for upcycling. Photo: Supplied.
Wendy Lees of Vetro e Metallo (V&M) at Braidwood takes salvaged metals and crafts them into wearable pieces of art that are so unique they could only have been crafted with the singular vision and refined skill set that Wendy has honed over a lifetime.
Her ethos of handmade and upcycled has been the tenet of her work for 18 years, and Wendy is always on the lookout for ways to tell stories through the raw materials that form the basis of her work.
“We want to keep handmaking alive and repurpose things that would be thrown away,” Wendy tells Region.
“Everyone uses silver, so we started using copper as a point of difference. Copper is from the earth, so it’s nice to turn it into something you can wear instead of putting it back into the earth.”
Retired fitter and turner Gary became a part of the V&M story when he donated his tools. Photo: Supplied.
Sometimes in her quest to share stories through her work, stories end up finding her, and a recent visit to her Wallace Street store from retired fitter and turner Gary and his wife Janice delivered Wendy a whole new story to tell, plus a set of metalworking tools both vintage and practical that Wendy has already put to use.
Prior to retirement, Gary was contracting to the NSW Department of Education, servicing and repairing equipment in schools’ metalworking shops. Over time, he built up a collection of tools that Wendy says are now quite rare and collectible sheet metal shaping stakes.
Inspired by Wendy’s work at V&M, Gary decided that this was the perfect home for his collection, which also included a 68 kg 1920s Australian iron-forged anvil.
“The provenance of this new (old) BK anvil is rather special. It was forged in Sydney around 1922 by former BHP steel workers Les Bradford and Jim Kendall, who started their Alexandria, Sydney, foundry using proceeds from their joint lottery win,“ says Wendy of her new, old anvil.
“It’s handmade in Australia and the very tenet of V&M’s ethos.”
Wendy Lees has been working with metal and glass for 18 years. Photo: Supplied.
Pleased to find a new home where the tools will be used and loved, Gary also lamented the slow decline of metal trades that he witnessed in his time working within schools around the state.
“Students nowadays play with Meccano sets and paddle pop sticks, and beautiful equipment like this is scrapped because it is ‘unsafe’ or ‘non-compliant’,” Gary explained to Wendy upon their meeting.
Wendy felt that the school’s loss was their gain and expressed her enthusiasm for the acquisition with a quote from a Seamus Heaney poem called ‘The Forge’: “The anvil is the altar at which the blacksmith shapes the world.”
Wendy’s drive for local, handmade and upcycled products is certainly helping shape the town of Braidwood and all those who come into contact with V&M. That drive has also seen Wendy become the new owner of other Australian-made pieces of equipment, although a recent acquisition of two hydraulic presses was a bittersweet moment for Wendy.
Wendy sells her local, handmade products in her Braidwood store. Photo: Supplied.
The acquisition, Wendy explains, was due to the demise of a four-generation Australian metal craft family institution, the Nickl family.
“The closure and clearance of the Nickl family’s factory at Lawson in the Blue Mountains was the latest nail in the coffin of Australian manufacturing,” says Wendy, distressed by the wave of closures of businesses that share her Australian-made ethos.
Wendy explains that the local raw material costs alone are far greater than the price of imported comparable finished products, but the compromise is the significantly lower quality of those products.
Wendy credits the Nickl family as being the bedrock of the post-war Australian fashion accessory business and is proud to be incorporating machines with such creative and historic provenance into her business.
“So where there is other old machinery that has been made in Australia, we like to use that, as that fits with our ethos of what we do here, and the quality is generally better too.”
You can step into the world Wendy is shaping in Braidwood by visiting the Vetro e Metallo showroom located at 68B Wallace Street, Braidwood. It’s open seven days a week.
