Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Five years ago Tim Atkins packed in his electronic engineering career and decided to rev-up his chainsaw.

Tim at Sandringham

Carving sculptures out of trees started as a hobby for Tim 10 years ago and is now a full-time pursuit. Plenty of people want tree stumps brought to life, whether it's in a school, park, forest or adventure playground.

The artist from Exning, near Newmarket, has to be versatile in order to get the work.

He told Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Cambridgeshire: "You have to do various different things. I enter chainsaw carving competitions both here and abroad. It's all word of mouth with people seeing my stuff in someone's garden or in a park.

Nimble tool

Tim achieves a life-like detail in his sculptures without the benefit of miniscule knives or elegant chisels. It's all done with the humble, yet brutal, chainsaw.

At the Wales Woodfest

He added: "It's quite a nimble tool really. With big stuff I start with a massive chainsaw and you just remove the wood you know shouldn't be there.

"Then it works its way down to the smallest, tiny saws which have got specialist chains and bars in them which are specifically for carving.

"You can get a lot of detail and textures like feathers on birds and eyes on faces. It's not the most pleasant of environments to work in but the end results and the creativity I get from it make it all worthwhile."

It's also surely every young lad's desire to hack away all day with a petrol driven hacksaw?

Badger sculpture in Wisbech

"Everyone says I've got the dream life but in reality it's tough, it's good manual labour. I'm lugging the logs into trailers and trying to get things upright with winches and lifting equipment."

How big?

Working locally is extremely important to Tim. Wisbech Council have dotted collections of his creations around their parks and they're still adding more - in fact they could soon be signing up an unmissable addition.

"It'd be nice to carry on doing some more local things. Being able to get the biggest lump of wood would be the ultimate. 15ft is the biggest carving I've done but I am in talks with a Wisbech park about doing a 25ft one."

25ft!? That's definitely no ordinary tree stump. So just to check Tim, you like your stumps big?

"The bigger the better really."

Lovely.