At first it was about picking up rubbish and doing the right thing. It started off as an environmental thing but then it turned into something more layered. Blanks are so expensive, and I can't just play on them. I have to get the board right every time. All of a sudden, it dawned on me that none of the rules apply to what I'm doing with this leftover foam. This is free rein to make whatever the hell I want. I don't have to please anybody but me, because it's rubbish.
They take a few forms. Some of them I've shaped have been dictated by the size of the block of foam I found. But I've started joining blocks of foam together, because some of it’s really low density and easy to ding, and then others are high density. I'm gluing a bunch of them together to form surfboard blanks where all the hard foam is where you stand on the board and the soft stuff where you don’t. I'm also making stuff that you're not going to stand on at all, like little hand planes and little bellyboards. The only consistent thing about it is how inconsistent I'm going to be with it.
I do all my work here at Joymill, but because it's on a private property and I need somewhere to meet people, I have an office and just down the road from my office is a Bunnings. I go and get all the pallets they're throwing away. I rip them apart and make fins out of that. I'm also making legrope plugs out of it. I want to try and utilise as much rubbish on these tastefully, but I also want to make them good and robust. One thing’s leading to another and it’s guiding me. It's fun rubbish.
I've even made custom orders out of them. I've had to tell the people that are buying them, “you're actually riding rubbish”. I can't be like; this is all top-quality A-grade stuff. It's a bit of a risk selling this foam that's an unknown quantity. Sometimes it's a bit too much of a mountain to climb for some people to hear that it's rubbish. But other people are just thrilled by it.
I'm hoping to make a mid-six-foot board. Usually, I can't go long because the foam is totally stringerless and I don’t trust the structural integrity of it. The longer you go, the more chance you have of breaking it. But now I'm using pallets to make stringers and using all kinds of stuff to make stringers. I'm constantly looking at building sites and seeing what's in the dumpsters and embarrassing my son, but I think I'm only just beginning to scratch the surface.
We were driving to Melbourne a week or so ago and I saw a huge pile of foam that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. They look like really big bits, so I can't wait to hit the road back towards Melbourne to try to find it. Hopefully it's still there. Once I'd seen the first bit of foam on the side of the road, I can't not see everything now when I drive by. It does my head in a bit, but it's really thrilling to all of a sudden be enlightened to all this free material that's sitting around. There are also the offcuts of fibreglass from making the boards here, which I'd like to try to use.
I'm absolutely thinking of other materials and other ways to make boards and the different possibilities of them. It's a really exciting rule-free environment, rubbish. No one can tell me what to do because it’s meant to be in the bin, so I can do whatever the fuck I please with it.
This one is a bellyboard, I think. It's too small to surf, but too big to be a kickboard. That was literally the size of the foam, and you can even see there's still big gouges out of it from being damaged on the side of the road. I utilised as much of it as I could to make it still float. It was a fun little shape to do. I just freehanded the outline and I did no measurements — just did it all by hand and feel, and it was great to make something I didn't measure once. I can't tell you how long, thick, wide or how many litres is in it. I can't tell you a damn thing about it. It just is what it is.
