ARTIST Michael Myers hushes his voice when he speaks about the legendary Bodgers who lived in shacks in the woods around High Wycombe when it was a thriving furniture town in the 40s and 50s.

To Michael, the woods behind his home in Melbourne Road were his "streets", and contained secrets that were to fascinate him to this day, decades later.

Michael says: "As a boy I more or less lived in those woods.

"I liked nothing better that to sit with the Bodgers, those skilled artisans with magic in their fingers, who worked in makeshift shacks in the woods, making their old chair parts. I got really interested in their stories and through them I learned about the lore of the woods and the lore of wood itself. The idea of these craftsmen working so close to the land was so fascinating to me. "

The wood, which burned on his fire over the winter months was never far from Michael's mind even when he went to the sweetshop.

"Lorries loaded with giant logs of exotic timber were forever rumbling past on their way to Wycombe's sawmills. My neighbours were cabinet-makers, chair-makers, upholsterers.

"I did a paper round and realised that most of the people working in tobacconist shops had missing fingers. What lots of them did if they lost fingers to circular saws, planers and guillotines was use the money to buy a sweet shop."

Michael soaked up the atmosphere, going on to study furniture at the High Wycombe School of Art and Design, just off Easton Street, his talent later winning him a scholarship at the Royal College of Art.

His artistic career flourished and the self-confessed "ideas" man worked successfully for years as a film producer and later a visual artist in Canada.

But now Michael has returned to his "streets" with an inaugural exhibition called Joints, which will be at Wycombe Museum, perched on top of the hill overlooking his old playing fields.

The museum, with its collection of 19th century hand tools, classic furniture pieces and one of the country's finest collection of hand-made Windsor chairs made by local craftsmen, against the backdrop of the surrounding Chilterns and its supplies of beech, ash, oak and elm, seemed the perfect way of paying homage to his umbilical connections.

It was also an emotional return to the workshops at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College where the Joints installations were made by Michael and a team of design students and where Michael was re-acquainted with an old pal from the Royal College of Art, dean Peter Cornish.

Michael says: "These are the basic building blocks of furniture-makers. All I was taught was that the ability to make a good joint is the sine-qua non of craftsmanship. I came to regard a well-made join as a thing of intrinsic beauty, a perfect synthesis of form and function worth celebrating in its own right. Whether it's a sturdy mortice and tenon or a set of delicate feather dovetails cut to give distinction to the side of a drawer, a properly fitted joint embodies those qualities I've always considered to be at the root of good design."

He continues: "For young people this gives them a fresh way of seeing how furniture is made. Outsized dovetails or mortices will fire the imagination of a ten-year-old and maybe lead him or her into a creatively productive career. These are also pieces of sculpture."

Michael says Joints is inspired not only from the bedrock skills of local craftsmen, but also the minimalist constructions of Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd and Fred Sandback.

For Michael's groundbreaking exhibition the first in the grounds of the Priory Avenue-based museum in High Wycombe he has assembled about a dozen skeleton-like structures.

Following centuries' old traditional patterns, he exposes the normally hidden anatomy of the commonest types of joints used in furniture with his white sculptural pieces.

Michael concludes: "Joints is my way of paying homage to a way of life embedded in High Wycombe's past and my own. Giving something back is always a gratifying thing."

Joints, Wycombe Museum, ongoing 01494 421895