Carrying on the family line

I was born in the industrial east end of Sheffield.  All my immediate family; parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and later my two brothers, worked in the steel industry.  My grandfather, for example, worked in the rolling mills making stainless steel for aircraft engines,  while my grandmother was a buffer girl whose job it was to buff and polish the famous Sheffield silver-plate cutlery. At home she always wore white cotton gloves to hide the raw and weeping sores on her hands caused by industrial dermatitis.  My dad was one of the few family members who had a 'white-collar' job - he didn't come home with dirty hands.  He'd studied technical drawing at school and worked all his life as a jig and tool draughtsman.  He designed the screws for the Thames Barrier (not, as I used to imagine, the tiddley little ones that you can tighten with a screw-driver but the gi-normous ones that open and close the barrier itself).

I was the first of my family to go to college and not have to work in the steel industry. Nevertheless, one of my first summer jobs when I was on art foundation was working in the packing department at a famous tool company.  The few short weeks I was there seemed interminable as, day after day, I boxed up thousands  of hammers, planes, files, screwdrivers, drills and  knives.  It was so mind-numbingly tedious as to put me off hand-tools for life.  I studied sculpture at Art College and we all had to buy a metal tool box filled with hand tools supplied at a special rate by the company I'd been working for.  Throughout my course I somehow managed to devise ways of making sculpture without using any of them. 

Apart from the fact that they were made in Sheffield, from mild steel by a Sheffield company Rabone Chesterman, what I now love most about making these plaited vintage steel tape-measure bangles is that they are handmade in every sense. Like most plaited basketry, my hands are the only tools I need to make them.  More than that they are actually formed around my hand, to pass over my hand and are then worn close to the hand. 

The plait itself is a paradoxical thing: it looks on the surface like a multi-stranded plait but is made from a single length which alternates between warp and weft, the weave unending until the thread runs out. 

After all that seemingly endless packing who'd have thought I'd ever end up using re-cycled strapping tape as one of my favourite basketry materials.  I  love the circularity: what goes around, comes around!  Desire is almost never straightforward.

                                       GREEN JEWEL 2010, polypropylene strapping tape, rattan and vine.
All photos by Sylvain Deleu.