Eriksmoen, meanwhile, preferred something less, shall we say, artificial, and would ask her father to take her to Olvera Street in Los Angeles, the city's oldest street and living museum.

"I was totally fascinated with the adobe and the old houses, and we'd go up to the old Getty before it burned down in Malibu, with all the Roman stuff," she says.

"I still have drawings I made when I was 12, from Latin class, of the Roman bed and the Roman chair."

Today, Eriksmoen is head of the furniture workshop at the Australian National University School of Art, a position she's held for the past two years. Her artistic practice in fine woodworking leans towards the reclaiming of the old, or bringing objects from the wild into the domestic sphere.

When she moved from California to Canberra with her family to take up her latest post, she brought with her the bedroom and dining room furniture she grew up with, passed down from her grandmothers.

"I don't think they're to be held up as perfect designed objects, but I also don't understand why I'd take them down to Tiny's and go get something at Ikea," she says.

In other words, furniture, to her, is as much a part of the family as her dog, the only difference being the bed didn't have to sit in quarantine for a month once on our shores.

We're talking over coffee in Kingston's Green Square, not far from the Gallery of Australian Design where Eriksmoen has recently wrapped up her latest exhibition – Feral: Rewilding Furniture, a series of works made from found timber, much of it broken wooden timber. The work examines "the gap between the living world and the built world, suggesting animate and sentient qualities in constructed, furnituresque objects".

She also curated another recent exhibition, The ACT Witness Tree Project, featuring works by her students investigating the local history and heritage of felled trees.

It's a trajectory Eriksmoen has been on since early in her woodworking studies – the idea of furniture and pets being items that integrate themselves into domestic life.

"I think my arc of my design career started with wanting to envision something from scratch and having my reasons for it and making it happen, and now I've decided that the only way forward is to be willing to give up a lot of ownership and control," she says.

"Because in the end, you still have a tonne of agency with whatever you're working with. But I think it's just more viable and realistic, because I think that – and this goes back to the seeds of the feral show – that idea that we are allowed to have total control and ownership to enact our visions leaves a lot of damage in its wake, unintentionally."

Eriksmoen has always been, in her words, a drawer and a maker, but her career didn't always tend towards making things. Far from it: she studied science in college and chose geology as a profession. But there were always artistic yearnings creeping into her studies. At the all-girl boarding school where she finished high school, she took ceramics and printmaking, and halfway through university, she took a year off to study art in Italy.

It was as simple as it sounds: she enrolled at the Istituto Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, and set off to, as she put it, "just get it out of my system".

"I always loved art, and I would always get into these conundrums, even in boarding school, where I was such a perfectionist with my art work...It would obsess me so much that in some other class I'd always get a C, and I'd get an A in geology and art, and totally fail Spanish or something," she says.

It all went according to plan. Eriksmoen immersed herself in art for a year, returned to Boston College and completed her science degree with perfect scores, and began life as a geologist.

"Geology's very visual because it's all about observation," she says.

Eriksmoen worked for two or three years in southern California – beginning after a major earthquake – and then, as is so often the case for would-be artists, she began taking a night class. The only reason she chose woodworking, she says, was because welding was full.

"I was instantly obsessed," Eriksmoen says.

"That kind of making focus is so Zen … it kind of draws you right into that concentration. And I think the noise and having the ear protection on, it makes you in your own little world. It was so energising and it was very addictive."

She took her next annual leave at a summer intensive craft camp in Maine, followed by another two-month stint in North Carolina, and finally enrolled in woodworking school – College of the Redwoods in northern California – where she completed a two-year certificate, studying six days a week, chased up by a master of fine arts in furniture design at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in 1998.

Eriksmoen taught for a semester in Portland, Oregon, before breaking the bank and fleeing back to her old job as an engineering geologist, working in California and Oregon. Like everything she did, her work was all-consuming.

"You cannot do the kind of field work in geology I was doing and anything else," Eriksmoen says.

"I was doing ceramics again but they'd dry up and crack by the time I got back from my fieldwork."

Between working and woodworking residencies, she studied more of her craft and taught night classes.

"It was really good to have a source of income that's not based in your own craft," she says.

"What happens is, if I was trying to make an income as a woodworker, I would probably be doing kitchens, which is great money, but once you're known for kitchens, it's pretty hard to bust out and take a break and make a conceptual piece of work because your mind is on the kitchens and you need that next kitchen job and you have no brain space or bandwidth for doing a creative work in the same [space]."

Now that Eriksmoen is lecturing and teaching full-time in Canberra, she says taking months-long residencies – Colorado, Philadelphia, Thailand – is essential to maintain her practice. But she has always had an affinity with teaching, from basket-weaving and summer camps pre-graduate school, to night classes at museums and regular stints at the California College of the Arts. It was there that she met Australian artist Donald Fortescue, who had studied at the ANU School of Art, and steered her towards Canberra when he learned the head of furniture workshop, Rodney Hayward (another alumnus of the College of the Redwoods), was due to retire.

"I think the thing is, this is an art school, you have to be able to think across media, think very conceptually, think on many levels, but you also have to be a really good maker," she says.

"In furniture, it's a little bit unusual to have someone that's trained really traditionally as a maker, who also is trained as an artist, who's up on their theory and all of that. I sure could be stronger on my theory, but who actually thinks that way across both? And that's why Donald had pegged me as someone who could do both things and still teach people how to use a hand-plane or cut a dovetail joint, and also talk about why Duchamp is important."

Eriksmoen says she applied for the position on a whim, hoping at the most that she would be flown to Canberra for an interview. In fact, the school interviewed her via Skype and offered her the position, leaving her to discover this mystical country upon her arrival.

She sheepishly admits to having almost no preconceived notions about Australia, other than a kind of "floating Texas".

"It's kind of the same shape, and there are cowboys here, right? Eriksmoen says. "And they shoot big animals?

"I was, like, why would I go to Australia? But now I'm very apologetic. I'm like a typical American, I don't want to be."

When she arrived with her husband Bryan and then two-year-old son Shepard, the first thing she noticed about Canberra was the birds.

"It's pretty weird moving from another English-speaking country to Australia, because you expect it to be exotic," she says.

"And I think my first thought was, I think it's actually like St Louis. It's a city with a lake in the middle, with a bunch of trees, except it's St Louis with parrots."

She is now on a three-month residency in Philadelphia, where she's participating in an international turning exchange – an aspect of woodworking that she says has been missing from her repertoire.

"There'll be six of us, I think, and I've proposed to be the one that takes everyone else's scraps and failures and off-cuts and makes the stuff from the waste," she says.

"I'm kind of continuing in that realm of letting there be variables, working against things I can't control."