Grain & Form

There’s an assured calmness to Elise McLauchlan’s work, echoing the material she works with. Her pieces, made from maple, turned and carved, are soft in the hand and subtle in form. “I love that it’s forgiving,” she says. “It moves with you. You can take a wrong turn and recover. You can shift direction mid-way.”

Elise works from a light-filled studio in Montreal’s Saint-Henri district, an old industrial neighbourhood that borders the Lachine Canal. Her workshop sits within a converted nineteenth-century textile mill - a space with tall windows, raw timber beams and a palpable sense of history. “It’s still full of creative energy,” she says. “There are a few of us in here - a furniture maker, someone who works in textiles. It’s peaceful, but there’s a shared momentum.”

Originally from Canada, Elise spent several years in London before returning to Montreal in 2020. Her background is in furniture design, which she studied at London Metropolitan University after an earlier career in visual merchandising at Mulberry. Her first forays into making began with metalwork - brass candlesticks, offcut jewellery - but it was the shift to wood in 2016 that opened up new creative territory. “Wood felt like a whole world,” she says. “A material I wanted to keep exploring.”

Elise began teaching herself to turn on a small lathe at home, watching videos and learning by trial. Over time, her skill deepened, her visual language refined. She made salt and pepper mills, lidded vessels and hand-turned bowls with a sculptural sensibility - each one practical, but with a kind of looseness in the form. An asymmetry in the foot. A shoulder that leans slightly off-centre. “I’m always looking for balance,” she says, “but not symmetry. I like pieces that have character, that carry some sense of play.”

Her aesthetic is influenced in part by the soft geometries of ceramicists like Lucie Rie and Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, whose forms offered a framework for thinking about weight and composition. But it’s also rooted in the everyday: the shape of a rolling pin, the base of a wine bottle, the curve of a stone picked up on a walk. “I’ll sometimes draw something out,” she says, “but more often I’ll just go straight to the lathe. It’s a very intuitive process.”

Turning, for Elise, is as much about feel as form. Standing at the lathe - apron on, gouge in hand - she works closely with the wood, responding to its grain, its shifts in density, its occasional unpredictability. “It’s a dance,” she says. “You’re in dialogue with the material. You have to pay attention.”

The process is physical, meditative. Shavings gather at her feet in warm, curled ribbons; the smell of maple or walnut lingers in the air. Some days, she works on wholesale orders for shops and stockists. Other days, she gives space to experimentation - carving by hand, combining turned and found elements, testing out new finishes. “I need both sides,” she says. “The rhythm of production, and the freedom to just try something.”

For TOAST New Makers 2025, Elise has made a collection of three pieces: a pepper mill; a wide-footed cake stand; and a bowl, all turned from figured maple burl, its grain swirling in tight, organic knots. Each object holds the imprint of her hand - the weight, the polish, the fine ridges left from shaping. “I wanted them to feel generous,” she says. “Comfortable to use, but also a little unexpected.”

Her work is shaped in part by her surroundings. Montreal is a city of contrasts - stone and steel, nature and infrastructure, long winters and humid, leafy summers. “There’s a seasonality to everything,” Elise says. “You work differently in January than you do in July.” The rhythms of the city - its markets, its pace, its shifts in light - find their way subtly into her practice. A bowl might be turned looser in the warmer months, a form slightly tighter in winter. Even her palette responds: pale ash, deep walnut, creamy maple that mirrors the light on the canal.

Though rooted in a deep respect for function, her objects have a sculptural quality, inviting a different kind of attention. Not just how they work, but how they feel to hold, how they sit in a space. They’re pieces that reward touch. “I want people to use them, not just look at them,” she says. “To reach for them every day.”

That everyday use is part of what she loves most about woodwork. The way it enters people’s lives quietly - on a table, in a kitchen, beside the bed. “It’s not precious,” she says. “It’s part of the landscape of living.”

Elise wears the TOAST Eden Wool Cashmere Raglan Cardigan, Stripe Crew Neck Tee and Organic Cord Barrel Leg Trousers.

Discover our New Makers 2025 collection.

Words by Lauren Sneade.

Photography by Marco Kesseler.