Hand Tools is a series celebrating craft and craftspeople. With increasing mechanisation and digitisation, the humans involved in labour are invisible.  Many old tools have been superseded either by more efficient electric iterations or tools which are produced rapidly en masse.  The availability of cheaply fabricated objects, at the expense of the worker and the environment is the epitome of Marx' proposition of alienation. 

As many old tools languish in old draws or on walls of gastropubs I endeavour to take the old tool on a new journey. In a sense Gothic, imperfect, inspired by the natural world and embracing the individual.  

​

 'It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity ' -  Ruskin

---