Hole & Corner
‘Waiting for the Hammer to Fall’
Hole & Corner Magazine - The Collections Issue
Author: Richard Benson
If you happened to travel on night-time public transport in London in the early 2000s, you might have noticed a young woman, sitting on her own on a night bus or a last tube, engaged in activity that made her seem half like a character from a fairy tale, half like one of the capital’s mildly mad people. Dressed like a cocktail waitress, she would have appeared to be picking and pulling at the fabric covering her seat, but on closer inspection, you would have seen that she was actually darning it. Closer still, it would have become apparent she wasn’t merely darning; having patched up a hole or tear, she would embroider a face, a character, or words spelling out an anonymous greeting. The solitary, nocturnal, needle-wielding fairy-girl was ignored by everyone except for the occasional little old lady who sat down beside her to discuss embroidery and, sometimes – because the girl wasn’t really all that good at it – advise her and suggest better kinds of stitch. She didn’t mind their comments; she thought it was a nice way to meet random people. She was that kind of person.
She wasn’t mildly mad at all. She was Linda Brothwell, a jewellery maker from Nottinghamshire, studying for an MA in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Art. The bouts of embroidering were spontaneous good deeds on her way home from working at a cocktail bar in the West End (‘It was very late. I was probably delirious!’), but one day she told a tutor about them, and the tutor said, ‘That should be your work,’ meaning her art work. After that, she began documenting the repairs and made a little book about them. She made a small embroidery set for the task, with threads already cut so she could work quickly and reduce her chance of being spotted by staff (she did ask Transport for London for permission, but they refused). And it came to feel like more than repair work. It came to feel, she says, like talking to strangers; restoration as conversation.
Seven years later, she is 33, and renowned in the art world for her unique, documented restoration projects, which combine art, craft, tool-making and preservation. In 2009 she was shortlisted for Design of the Year for her work in Lisbon’s Experimental Biennale, using traditional wood-inlay techniques to repair public seating in the city. In 2013 she won the Jerwood Makers Open for Acts of Care: The Sheffield Edition, which involved making repairs to a former metalworking factory, with tools specially made for the job, in the tradition of industrial toolmakers. She connects worlds. The first time we meet, she is demonstrating the use of those tools – forging hammers, shim tooth-cutting chisels, stiddies – to a curious audience of bohemian-ish festivalgoers at Port Eliot in Cornwall. The next time we talk, she calls from Porto in Portugal where she is working on an exhibition, The Technical Unconscious, with the city’s stonemason collective, making, among other things, plumb lines fashioned from stone.
Tools – specific-purpose, custom-made implements rather than the multi-purpose commercial ones you find in B&Q – are a recurring element of her work. When she was called on to provide exhibits in the 2009 Design of the Year show, she showed the portable set of tools she had used in Lisbon. Her jewellery collection, Tools for Actions, shown at the Saatchi Gallery, is inspired by tools, and ‘celebrates their beauty and cultural significance’. And the Acts of Care work in Sheffield explicitly set out to articulate her feelings about them; part of the process was learning how to use old tools such as punches and file-cutting chisels; ‘Traditional techniques employed to perform acts of individualised care within the public landscape,’ as she describes it.
It’s partly about the ability to make tools, meaning that you can do a complete job from scratch. It’s partly because the use of traditional tools connects you to history. And it’s also about the relationship people have them, the relationship that to her seems like the relationship some people have with jewellery; personal, intimate, fetishy. Most people who work with tools a lot dislike other people borrowing from their personal set – and it’s not just because they can get damaged or worn; it’s also that they feel like things you need near you, almost like cowboys in Westerns need their guns within easy reach. Robin Wood, the wooden bowl turner featured in Hole & Corner issue 3, says that when he is using his lathe in public displays and people reach forward to try to touch his tools, it’s ‘as if they’re trying to touch my bollocks’.
‘Tools connect us,’ Brothwell wrote in a publication given away during the Acts of Care exhibition, ‘to our familial, regional and national heritage and through these links they also help us to locate ourselves, both emotionally and physically. In a way, unlike other objects, tools speak of the action that is afforded to them through material choice, ergonomics and scale. Having the potential to then be engaged in a subsequent creative act, invites the imagination of what has and could be done. It is by working with our hands on a micro scale that the large scale changes occur.’
Born in 1981, Brothwell grew up on a smallholding in the Nottinghamshire countryside near Newark. Her mum and dad were new to agriculture; their main business was pigs; their guiding principles, improvisation and learning on the job. The family story is that when they moved in, the sum total of her mum and dad’s tools was a solitary shared spade. While her dad and grandpa built a house for them, and her mum worked as a schoolteacher to supplement the farm income, Linda, her two sisters (both older) and parents lived in a wooden caravan. ‘I always used to be making, often wooden boxes,’ she recalls. ‘I’d be running around with a penknife and carving stuff on a tree, or making a tree house and falling out. It seemed normal.
‘It was about resourcefulness, growing up in that environment. It was also about problem-solving on the hoof, making things up as you go along, but also carrying stuff around as well. Like when you have your overalls held up with baling twine and you carry stuff around in your pockets, like a pebble or a little twig or a penknife and things. Having these objects that are your own, it makes a lot of sense on farms somehow.’
Her school wouldn’t let her do an art A-level (‘They thought you only did art if you were thick. Which was nice, you know – thanks for that’). So she did three unrelated subjects and then served her apprenticeship at a local shop selling handmade jewellery. It was the Swiss jewellery designer Otto Künzli’s piece Gold Makes Blind – a bracelet of gold encased in black rubber – that made her realise she wanted to train academically and study art, and she went to do a BA at Sheffield University at the start of the 2000s.
Sheffield – that strange, hilly city in the middle of England where history and the future have for three centuries enjoyed an oddly productive relationship – changed her. ‘It was partly because of all the traditional workshops there. It’s mind-blowing when you go there for the first time. I’ve been to other places doing jewellery degrees since, but Sheffield is completely special, because they have all the metalworking tools, and the infrastructure is there. As a student you could visit the workshops and talk to all the men about how you would make something, or you could borrow their tools. You don’t know what half the stuff does, but looking at it you know you can make anything you can visualise, which is an incredible feeling when you’re coming into your first day of your degree.’
Her experience echoes an observation that Wood also made – about the shortsighted assumption by Britain’s local authorities that traditional industrial bases must be rejected and cleared to make way for future-facing ‘creative industries’. There was great creativity in the old smokestack work, too, as much as there is in the need for physical production in the 21st century. Having said that, the old world can be a bit, er, traditional in its attitudes, and I wonder what the men in their workshops made of a hammer-loving lady in their midst. ‘They were grumpy!’ She says. ‘But they’re always grumpy with everyone aren’t they? I didn’t mind it. In fact I think Sheffield’s a city full of the best grumpy people in the world.’
Acts of Care, sited in the Sheffield works where the world’s first stainless steel was made, was partly about the ‘loss of skills and the philosophy that allowed you to interact with the environment’. The loss does not affect only the old factories and workshops though, she points out; there’s a problem with the lack of skills teaching in academic establishments, many of which teach skills by request only, so they can rely on computers and lectures, which cater for larger numbers.
‘So people are taught to make things on a computer,’ says Brothwell. ‘And of course that’s valuable, but you need to know the other way as well, because even if you’re never going to make something by hand, you need to be able to talk to the person who is. You can only understand the limitations of materials by working with them. You have people coming off courses now who view the people making the things as just technicians.’ The point surely applies to other arts and industries as well. It is reminiscent, for example, of Andy Weatherall’s belief that when making music, even if you’re not using actual instruments, it helps to ‘get it out of the computer’ at some point.
Brothwell hadn’t thought of working with tools and worn places until after her MA at the Royal College, where she became interested in the things that migrant workers carried with them, and ‘what anyone carries when they move from place to place; how you feel a connection with home, and what’s important in the cultural heritage to the individual.’ When she started photographing things and interviewing people, she became fascinated by states of disrepair, by what people who owned the object saw, compared to the reality. ‘So when you see, say, a thimble that’s been bashed and battered, they might be seeing their grandmother and the day she gave it to them. I became interested in the difference between two realities, and in the traces people leave as they move.’ It was a short step from that to embroidering bus seats and then working with what she calls ‘broken spaces’.
Brothwell is keen to point out that she doesn’t want ‘to paint the world sepia’; if the use for something has gone, the point is to find a new application for the skills rather than to hang on to the past. Neither is she obsessed by work: noting the ongoing interest in outsider and folk art evidenced by this summer’s somewhat muddled Folk Art show at the Tate, she observes that there would be a great exhibition in looking at what people in traditional industries did outside working hours – the amateur painting, dressmaking, building and music.
When she gets time off, she goes climbing with her sister and/or boyfriend (a web designer, who photographs and films some of the craftspeople Brothwell works with). She’s been doing it since she was 12, an enthusiasm developed on family walks in the Peak District. Climbing ‘mixes that monumental scale of your surroundings with a quiet, personal conversation. When you’re climbing, you’re problem-solving, and the movement is very quiet and personal and there’s an intimate connection between you and the environment, but at the same time you’re in this incredible, huge space. It makes a lot of sense with the work.’
And when it comes to the work, she has rather a lot of it on: three big exhibitions coming up, other projects in discussion, and, as we were talking, the looming deadline for The Technical Unconscious work. ‘It’ll be OK so long as I don’t drop any of it,’ she says, nonchalantly. ‘That’s the problem with granite – it’s superhard, but if you drop it, you’re done for.’ I feel a pang of lightweightedness when she says this, my sole problem – of making sure that my Wi-Fi’s working – suddenly seeming insubstantial. I should perhaps now print out this feature and go and etch it into the seatback of the number 24 bus. Is she never tempted to do some of it with Computer Aided Design (CAD)? ‘No,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t involve the sort of conversations I want to be having, or the questions I want to ask. I have no opinions about other people using it, but for me it doesn’t sync with the work. I can’t imagine doing a prototype hammer on a computer.’ lindabrothwell.com
