Notes on Tools
Notes on Tools
October 12, 2022
I have an obsession with tools and equipment that stems from growing up surrounded by all kinds of tools and machinery; watching and assisting my dad as he used, designed, fabricated, refurbished, modified, and repurposed all kinds of tools and machines; and years spent working at a university where I’m surrounded with all kinds of arts- and crafts-related tools and I’m a stone’s throw from science labs filled with all kinds of thingamajigs. Integral to my studio practice is a steady stream of activity in researching, acquiring, repurposing, and fabricating tools. This activity tends to breakdown into assorted categories as follows:
· Making tools that don’t exist to do something I need/want to do, or fabricating my own different/improved versions of tools that already exist;
· Adapting industrial equipment and processes to my specific studio scale and needs, such as making a tiny, hand-operated ram press when I needed to produce a bunch of small and simple but precise and consistent components for a project;
· Adapting tools and methods I’ve used myself for applications other than sculpting, or that I’ve observed in the hands of other makers and tradespersons including builders, carpenters, masons, plumbers, blacksmiths, tailors, bakers, butchers, and mechanics. I inherited my father’s and grandfather’s tinkering genes and endless curiosity about how things are made and done, and it’s a gift to me. I rarely pass up an opportunity to ask “hey, what are you doing?” or “what’s that tool?” of anyone working on anything if there’s any aspect of it that is unfamiliar to me, or I’ll just ask what a tool is called and google it.
Favorite Tools
My absolute favorite tools are my fingers, and that shows in the work. Beyond that, I have so many tools that it’s hard to pick favorites. But if I were going to name a few go-to tools that I really rely upon regularly in the studio, these would be:
· a thirty-six-inch slab roller;
· giant rolling pins I made from sections of twelve-inch PVC pipe for rolling big, thick slabs without a slab roller;
· wooden rolling pins and a collection of wood slats I use to calibrate thicknesses of rolled slabs;
· a collection of adjustable slab cutters;
· a collection of hardwood dowels, furniture legs, and other long wooden tools of my own making that I employ in working deep within sculptures where my hands don’t fit;
· wooden potter’s ribs of all shapes and sizes;
· wooden doughnut-shaped objects of my own making that I use to push out the walls of hollow clay forms from the inside;
· wood, plaster, and fired earthenware clay forms that I use for shaping slabs in ways analogous to how metal formers use mandrels, anvils, or dolly blocks;
· laser-cut acrylic ribs and shaping tools;
· basic wooden chopsticks, which are everywhere in the studio;
· home-made trimming tools;
· an old, dull meat cleaver I picked up at a thrift store (especially handy because it works for both paddling and cutting, though that is definitely a use-at-your-own-risk method);
· a collection of metal pipe, conduit, and tubing scraps essential to cutting holes deep into wet and leather-hard sculptures;
· long knives—a seven-inch-blade fillet knife, and a twelve-inch-blade ham-carving knife; and
· a wood-handled, four-inch-blade Chesapeake-style oyster knife. I also like Boston-style and Galveston-style oyster knives.