The Story Tools Tell

As an artist-craftsman I stand at the tail end of the development of the crafts through thousands of years of the artisan, of the unknown, egoless craftsperson. The heritage that I am in the shadow of has evolved through the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. The tools of the early artisans have disappeared, the evidence and heritage of the early period are all but invisible. The line I follow is of only the very recent past, of my tutors and theirs, of a language of making centred on a post-industrial aesthetic. I have seen myself as a handcraftsman, as a maker who uses relatively simple tools and techniques, many unchanged for generations. Yet in all truth, my lineage is that of iron and steel, of industrial thinking and relatively sophisticated technological development. For much of my working life, I have taken the tools I used for granted, as I did my own ability to handle them.

The writing of my book has passed through the two-year anniversary of my workshop fire. The workshop was fully rebuilt nearly a year ago; the interior shows some scars of the burning, the outside is all fresh wood and shininess. I built new wooden workbenches recently, ordered all the cleaned teaching tools to pristine cupboards and am in the process of putting the finishing touches to everything before the courses start again. It looks great, sparkly, shiny, no sign of black. Yet there has been a niggle at the back of my mind, an itch I wanted to scratch but didn’t dare unless I scratched it raw. I have a cupboard in the machine shop, a tall, narrow space packed neatly with stacks of dark grey boxes, each labelled. Amongst those that say machine parts, fibre pads, spare saw blades are a collection of large and small ones labelled as planes, old wooden tools, blades and so on. I have seen them on my periphery for the last two years as I have rebuilt order around them, yet I have left them alongside the open buckets of other filthy components where they are.

Image credit: Lou Tonkin

Recently my hands pulled me to the cupboard, dared me to bring out all those boxes and take off their lids. Inside were the half-rotted remains of tool corpses, and I started on the long and laborious process of bringing them back to life. Two years ago friends had come to help me after the fire, a retinue whose hands nurtured the most precious tools, cleaning them as they sat round tables chatting in the soft autumnal light. Those tools that were not a priority went into the buckets and boxes, a conscious desire for them to be ‘out of sight and out of mind’. The cleaned tools have re-rusted, have goaded me in my effort to move on, have moved me to comment continually that my carefully kept tools had never had rust before.

Life is not neat.

Tapping at the keyboard, my fingers extensions right now of my thoughts, I see them blackened at the ends, traced through with dark lines etched into the skin. They speak of iron tools cleaned and sharpened, of the oxide leaving them to lodge in my skin. They speak of the fire, of two years past, of the job I have dreaded and delayed till the right time. So, these tapping hands hold trauma, yet I move beyond it as I have started to heal those neglected tools. The soot that burnt onto them from the atmosphere of heat and flame lies once again in my skin. The smell that occupied the breathed air of my every moment now casts a faded memory into the breeze that has blown the rest of it away; its sweet acrid shadow rests on the edge of my consciousness, and I wonder at the accuracy of my scarred memory, which remembers it as bitter tar, resinous and cloying, stuck into the fibres of my clothes and the filthy strands of my neglected hair.

There are six or seven large plastic containers on the floor, four of them almost too heavy to lift. They are filled with hundreds of soot-patinated tools. Old wooden planes, spokeshaves rusted red-brown alongside multitudes of matching chisels and other blades. There are compasses and scrapers, saw sets and saws that are rusted beyond salvage. Wooden handles blackened at the centre with soot, char towards the edges, a heat signature reminding me of where they once were stored. Looking up into the white, dry and clean roof of the workshop, the bright lights and orange floor, I remember the darkness, the horror.

The rust, soot and tannin etched in my skin are vestiges of a scream. The sweetened smell of it blessed by time is no longer full of horror, only of the promise of resurrection, of what rises, of the phoenix bright and clean angling its flight towards the sun. The wire wheel, wire brush, waxed caress burnishes the past back into the past, just a shadow of memory scratching at the synapses. I wonder at the glow that surfaces, the burnish of the wax I have buffed into it, feel a lack of trust in it as if it were not real. It is the now, the maintenant, the present moment of attention, the maintenance of care which helps resurrect memory afresh. I have not enjoyed the actual job; hundreds of tools and blades picked, dismantled, scrubbed clean, waxed and reassembled. I don’t like the black filth imbedded in my skin; I don’t like the darkened water running down the sink’s edges. I don’t like the smell. It is only when I write that I understand the beauty of it, that the actions that allow me to clean the tools have an effect so far beyond the physical. Somehow the manipulation of the tool, its articulation in my hand, helps heal me, sets my teeth, fettles the cutting edges, and brings me fully back into my human purpose and potential.

An emptied bucket fills slowly with bright flashes of silver and bronze, cleaned tools bedded down neatly awaiting their future. It is not about the need I have of these tools that has driven me to clean them. Those that were important were cleaned long ago.

I have cleaned them simply because I couldn’t leave them as they were.

They were neither living nor dead, zombie half-life with no purpose in either. That they shine is good enough for me, that they are now fit for purpose, whatever that will be. To be gifted, sold, used or tucked away. They are tools again. No longer rusted iron and the green oxide of copper flushed bronze.

I wonder what they mean to me, these tools, tools at all. I would not be a craftsman without them. Wood would be a stranger, not a friend. I would seek connection only as an observer, unable to partake, to disassemble so that I could reassemble. My fingers would itch from the fallow ligaments and muscles of flaccid hands. They would itch for purpose, for meaning, for the metal edge that would make them significant, make me significant.

A tool is an extension of a hand. My tools are an extension of my hands. A rusted tool cleaned and repurposed becomes an extension of a hand new to its use. Our hands have grown with tool use, are now as if always designed for it. The tapping of my fingers here – a shorthand for their potential. I look at my hands and know they are not hands alone, know that their potential rests within the articulation of the body they are attached to.

As my fingers hold the blade, I sharpen, twist it in the light, my forearm facilitates the pivoting of my hand and of the tool to catch the light. As I lift it further my shoulder flexes, the muscles contracting, the potential of my hand rippling through my upper body. I manipulate the tool, my manus holds it and the action I practise facilitates the life force of the tool.

I, a human, manipulate my destiny through my interaction with my surroundings, and tools allow me to do this potently.

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