Pliers and wooden hemispheres
Pliers, wood, acrylic. 15x8x2cm. August 2024
A work featuring a pair of workman’s pliers.
Workman’s tools and handyman’s tools are a frequent feature of my work, with my first sketches of them dating from my early twenties, about fifty years ago.
I’ve always liked the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic qualities of hand tools. Pliers, such as the ones here, have legs that are suggestive of human legs and jaws that are suggestive of crocodile jaws or perhaps pterodactyl jaws. The business end of tin snips and garden pruners resemble the beaks of birds, and hammers have heads.
Another appeal about hand tools is their robust usefulness. They tend to look strong and they make hard physical work that much easier.
They are also nostalgic. In my youth my father had a garden shed that contained racks and racks of tools that were in constant use for repairing broken household items and for constructing basic items of furniture. Now such tools feel as though they may be on the brink of extinction as people no longer fix things and as what tools there still are tend to be power tools which lack the simple physicality of hand tools