Nick Hopkins was stubbornly determined not to call himself an artist. Instead he said he liked to "free sculpt with power tools" and that he was "just someone who likes to muck around with wood".
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But buyers of his work tend to disagree.
Nick, from Lilli Pilli, is currently exhibiting at Sculpture for Clyde, with four of his creations on display.
One fervent exhibition goer spotted his piece 'Balancing Act' through the window of the indoor gallery, before the exhibition had even begun, and insisted on purchasing the piece.
Nick, who works only in wood, largely timbers he has scavenged or repurposed, creates sublime pieces that sing out the natural beauty of the wood he chooses.
His love and deep respect for the material was evident, and he had most recently been working with plantation hoop pine plywood from Queensland.
"That's making a bit of a statement," he said.
"I will use salvaged timber - hardwood that comes out of wherever I can find it, but I never would drop a tree to use that timber."
Trained as a landscape architect Nick admitted he had a strong design background, but when it came to wood turning and sculpting he was entirely self-taught.
He confessed that many of his ideas, such as 'Balancing Act' were born out of insomnia.
"So I lie awake at night and these ideas will run through my head and then I have to turn the light on and scribble things down on my notepad," he said.
"A lot of these ideas are born from sort of a frenetic, sleepless mind. And then I bring them to creation in daylight."
Other creations were a reflection of his long standing and dedicated love of the natural world and his activism in protecting it - like his 'Greater Glider' piece, that depicted the endangered greater glider outstretched and in full flight across the wall.
"They're kind of a tribute to all the endangered yellow-bellied gliders and greater gliders which aren't being protected properly in our public native forests - they're under threat from logging operations.
"To talk about threatened species... If you're serious about reversing the gliders' slide towards extinction, you really need to do your pre-logging surveys of the forest.
"You need to look for what they call den trees, where the gliders spend their daylight hours.
"But you have to survey around only dawn and dusk because that's when you'll spot them either returning or emerging from their tree hollows."
The issue around logging state forests with greater glider habitat is a contentious issue, and Nick, along with the conservation groups South East Forest Rescue and Friends of the Forest Mogo, staged a walk-in at Flat Rock State Forest Friday, May 24. All but one of the group left following police orders to do so, but not before the logging operation stopped.
Nick said he had been environmentally conscious from a young age.
"I was a teenager and I don't know why but I put this poster up on the wall...it's a picture of planet Earth taken from space by one of the moon expeditions," he said.
"And it's this beautiful kind of marble-like quality of this sphere hanging in space with a black background.
"It just rams home the fact that we're all just living on this one planet together. We have all got to sink or swim together.
"So we've got to prioritise the environment."
