Profile of Linda Brothwell
by Emma Crichton Miller
Linda Brothwell is an artist whose subject is making. She trained as a metalsmith and jeweller, first at Sheffield Hallam University and then at the Royal College of Art, but from the very beginning it was not so much the what and how of making but the why that fascinated her. Today, she is known for a practice that combines meticulous craft skills with social and historical research and art-making in the public realm.
Tools have become her fascination. As she says, 'I've spent my artistic career under the influence of tools. Tools connect us to our familial, regional and national heritages, helping us to locate ourselves, emotionally and physically." Alongside tools, she has made an art of repair, what she calls 'acts of care', where the skilled uses people make of tools to build their lives and their communities are honoured and emulated through a combination of tool-making and interventions. In 2009, she was shortlisted for Design of the Year for her Bench Repair at Experimenta Biennale in Lisbon and for the Jerwood Makers Open in 2013 Brothwell made Acts of Care: The Sheffield Edition. This year, The Tool Appreciation Society is her homage to Hull's own history of tool-use. As well as mining the local context, the work reaches out to tool-users and tool-lovers everywhere, documenting Brothwell's researches into tool use from Hull to South Korea.
Brothwell has always been a maker. She grew up on a farm where "being able to use your hands, understanding materials and using tools" was intrinsic to a childhood spent building treehouses and not coming home until tea-time. She took a course in blacksmithing and worked for an artist-jeweller before embarking on an apprenticeship. "I did a lot of repairs!" she says. When it came to her own jewellery, Brothwell was concerned less with display and more with the powerful personal meanings these small objects have for their wearers: "they are touchstones to mark passages through time or to make connections with family, heritage and history," she says. At University, she came upon the work of the conceptual Swiss jewelers, Bernhard Schobinger, Otto Künzli and Christoph Zellweger, "who showed me how you can talk about issues and be politically engaged through jewellery." It was while in London, studying at the RCA, that Brothwell discovered her true vocation. As Brothwell took the tube home late at night she found herself repairing the rips in the seats, with a needle and thread. Looking back, she admits that this clandestine, compulsive act looks very much like an act of care, a need to interact with her environment and with the people around her. As she mentioned this her course tutor commented, "Maybe that's your practice." challenging Brothwell to think, "If so, what would the work look like?"
Since then Brothwell's art has become wide- ranging and multifaceted. Her second Act of Care, The Lost Letters of Liverpool, began with weeks of meeting people in Liverpool to talk about their personal histories and stories of making. A faded photograph of a man called Shlomo Keller, who came to Liverpool from Poland, inspired her to imagine how he, from a hardware store in Rymanow, Poland, might set about making decorative brass letters, using traditional Polish piercing, chasing and repoussé techniques, to repair damaged street signs in Liverpool. The final work involved making dedicated tools, documenting the Wycinanki (paper-cutting) techniques and decorating Liverpool with this public jewellery.
Now, in Hull, Brothwell has expanded her method. Weeks of interviews with makers ship's compass-builders, wood carvers, net braiders, potters, tilers - have combined with a full immersion in Hull's history. Here her Act of Care is to renovate a disused public lavatory near the central library - the flamboyance of Hull's Edwardian-style tiled lavatories, now Grade II listed, being themselves a mark of generous civic space-making. A volunteer attendant will sit amongst fresh and marble flowers which replicate the weeds, plants and wild flowers documented by botanist Eva Crackles growing on Hull's bomb sites after the Second World War. Brothwell has remade details such as brasswork, numbers on the doors, wooden inlay on the door frames and textile work, and will leave examples of the specialised tools she made to accomplish this in the lavatory. Examples of the local flora in marble can be found in the open, around the libraries - the hubs of the project. These pioneer plants will remind visitors that libraries are seed-beds for pioneering ideas.
It is hard to do justice to the multiplicity and richness of Brothwell's public art making. It is rooted deeply in expert making and in social history - it flowers in so many different, unexpected ways, in gallery spaces and in the public realm. It's nostalgic and creatively forward-looking. As Brothwell says, "It's a funny old career I've carved out!"
Emma Crichton Miller is a journalist and regular contributor to Apollo and the FT.
