The Tool Appreciation Society

The Making of a World 

By Emma Crichton-Miller

Commissioned by Thirteen Ways on event of The Tool Appreciation Society solo exhibition Linda Brothwell

“Around two and a half million years ago, a new species of hominid evolved in Africa. Palaeontologists call these direct ancestors of ours, homo habilis. What marked them out from every hominid before them, was that they made tools. Australopithecus had used the sticks and stones they found to crush and pick, but homo habilis, “the skilled man”, could imagine a tool for a distinct purpose and make it. This distinguishing factor enabled these first humans to carve meat for food, which supplied generous amounts of protein to grow their bones and brains; it enabled them not simply to live in the world, but to shape it. And so, the long march of human capability begins with tools.

If tools identify us as a species, they also mark us out as individuals. We are all distinguished by the tools we use to master our environment, whether it’s a sword, a spade, a pen, a needle or a cooking pot. These forms reflect our anatomies, our temperaments, how we live and move, as much as our activities. And, the way that our tools are fashioned is a key indicator of where we are from. We lavish not just our ingenuity but our creativity and love of beauty on these most intimate intermediaries between our selves and our world. While today many tools are universal - Bic biros, Fiskars orange handled scissors, the Apple iPhone - others are specific to certain regions, specialist uses or indeed individuals, who invent or customise the tools they use. The tools of our trade not only enable us to earn a living, but identify us as active members of our society. Without them, we almost lose our personhood. They are the means by which homo sapiens, separated from the world by his consciousness, regains his sense of being at home, materially transforming the world to accommodate him through his own skill and imagination.

This autumn, Hull’s libraries will be filled with examples of tools from Britain and the world, as well as books documenting the use of tools throughout human history. Travelling the world, artist Linda Brothwell, who is passionate about tools, has sought out fellow-obsessives, craftspeople such as trug-makers, gun engravers, book binders, net braiders, stained glass artists, Orkney-chair makers, all of whom cherish the tools they use and which allow them to express their skills. As she knows well, you cannot separate out the materials you use from the tools you use to work with them. Brothwell’s own passion is broadened into a love of historical tools, these physical objects, so often hand-made, frequently highly localised in design, which speak of the making histories of specific cities and regions. Commonalities and differences abound, not just in the tools, but in the experiences of their users, such as Hull’s head-scarf revolutionaries, the fishermen’s wives who fought for better conditions for their husbands in 1968 and the strong Haenyeo (sea women) of South Korea’s Jeju island.

The key inspiration for The Tool Appreciation Society, is the gesture of Walter Oglesby, a renowned Hull barber, who hung tools in his barbershop in the 1980’s in tribute to dockworkers who lost their jobs to modernisation: one skilled person’s homage to the skills of others. The ambition is to leave Hull with the legacy of having hosted the foundation of a nation-wide movement to cherish tools and tool-making, in the spirit of Oglesby. Through our fascination with tools we are led deeply into past or into parallel cultures. By our handling of tools, we gain an intimacy with these places and people and an informed appreciation of their ways of life, that is not achievable purely through imagination.

Beyond nostalgia and cultural curiosity, however, tools still have a central meaning for us today. We use tools not just to master our environment but to care for it and for the people around us. Surgeons use needles and scissors among a panoply of implements to heal people; we use tools to repair broken furniture and objects; we use tools to make homes, to produce beautiful functional objects and to create art. In this light, through his use of tools, homo sapiens becomes homo curans.”