Chatwin was born 1945 in Birmingham and studied at Birmingham College of Art and Design; with Pamela Martin (1949-) he established a workshop in Leicestershire in 1981 making intricately constructed dyed wood laminate pieces as jewellery, bowls, platters, vessels and boxes.

Chatwin and Martin developed a unique method for laminating wood to form the basic material. Thin tiles of sycamore are hand-dyed in a vast range of colours and glued together to form a layer block. The block is then cut, glued and cut again, and realigned any number of times to form intricate patterns of stripes. In other pieces the blocks are shaved carefully to expose layers of colour in a more painterly way.