Thinking through making: wondering about tools
Not so long ago I made a couple of objects one after another. Of the two things, one gave me more satisfaction during the making, and the other brings me more joy as a finished object. The piece of twisted metal, that I spied on the pavement and pocketed, was quickly filed and made into a wearable object. The other thing – a tool – was a serendipitous moment where I realised that a brass ‘ring’ (a strip of brass folded into a geometric shape) that I made in first year of my BA and which, every time I wore it caught on my clothes and was too sharp on my skin, would finally have a home, wedged into the crack in an old wooden handle.
Introducing the Makers & Tools project
The Makers & Tools project came about out of conversations with makers. Just before Christmas, I was asked by a magazine to interview contemporary craft makers about their relationships to their tools. I selected six emerging makers, working in different materials and with different approaches, whose work intrigued me. In one interview, the maker told me how at the start of the academic year, she and her fellow MA students were asked to bring in tools for a tool swap, a kind of ‘get to know you’ activity. I asked her if she knew what happened to the tool she gave away, whether the other student ended up using it; she didn’t know. And out of that small element of our conversation, the idea for Makers & Tools grew.