hands

March 10th

Shortly after launching Bodkin Beak, I sustained an injury to my hand. I cut one of my fingers rather badly in a kitchen accident at home (I’ll spare you the details!) My second finger tried to step up, but became swollen and sore through overuse. I then had three months off from my day job while the hand recovered. My kind employers encouraged me to use the time while I was off work, to push my fledgling button-making business as much as I could (it doesn’t tax my left hand thank goodness). After Christmas it had recovered enough to return to my day job.

I’m employed as a mender for a local rug weaving firm. Before that I was a mender in a woollen mill that has been in this town for centuries. I often marvel at the fact that my paid employment is the PRECISELY the same trade as was followed by previous occupants of this cottage 150 or so years ago. How rare that must be nowadays? ‘Mender’ and ‘wool picker’ are job titles that crop up again and again in the censuses for this area. Before that there was a glover living in my cottage and also a brick-maker. Like previous occupants, I’ve nearly always earned a living through using my hands.

This finger injury and the limitations it has imposed (I still have some nerve damage) has made me reflect on what it is my hands essentially like to do (and what they might miss if the nerve damage and discomfort I feel when firmly pressing my finger against a hard surface, proves to be permanent).

I miss playing the melodeon. It’s the melodeon’s bass notes and bass chords that draw me and they are played with the left hand. So now I play the guitar instead, where the first digit on one’s left hand generally plays the higher notes and the other fingers are better positioned to play the lower notes! Whichever instrument, I’ve always preferred to play my own tunes rather than anyone else’s, so I guess I’m free to make up tunes around the notes and chords I can reach minus my first finger. A definite plus!

I think it’s fascinating to delve into why a maker is drawn to their chosen medium. The American writer Barry Lopez, in his beautiful essay “A Passage of the Hands” which is essentially an autobiography of his own hands, wrote the following:

‘I began to see that the invention, dexterity, and quickness of the hands could take many directions in a man’s life: and that a man should be attentive to what his hands loved to do, and so learn not only what he might be good at for a long time but what would make him happy.’

I’ve always been interested in the materiality of the substrate. In art college I remember stretching a huge canvas ready for a painting and then finding myself unable to apply paint to its surface, so diverted was I by the weave of the canvas. I suspended it from the ceiling in the middle of my studio space, so that I could better see the weave with the light shining through it. Perhaps not such a coincidence then, that some 40 years later (while employed in Fox Brothers woollen mill) I was paid to look at the light shining through the weave of cloth (in order to observe irregularities in the weave).

I feel compelled to use textiles as an expressive medium, to imbue them with meaning and narrative. For me, fabric is the only substrate capable of supporting the things I want to say for it speaks of my experience (I’ve worked with textiles in some form or other for many years). Textile trades are a rich source of expressive idioms still in English usage. It is my language.

Why did I favour textiles rather than clay, glass, wood or silver? Well, my hands seem to like persuading flexible materials, the joining together of sympathetic, or surprising juxtapositions of fabrics through the accumulation of individual, purposeful stitches requiring the close tactile engagement of the hand with cloth, that the wielding of a needle necessitates. Pushing a loaded paintbrush around a canvas is done with extra centimetres between the fingers and the surface. That doesn’t do it for me, I don’t want those extra few centimetres of distance. Portability is important to me as well. To be able to carry my craft with me where ever I go (easier with textiles than glass or silver work!) gives me a feeling of being at home in the world. Where ever I am. Handling textiles is charged with memories of time spent with my grandmother, and the garments, sewn, knitted and crocheted, that were made for me by herself and my mother when I was a child, and so textiles speak to me of relationship.

A few weeks ago a Robin flew onto my hand. I listened to him singing his subsong just inches away from me, his throat was moving but his beak was closed. My hand felt blessed. This year, I wish you the same luck I have had, in finding those things that your hands love to do - in order to be happy.