Tools My Father Gave Me

A year ago I helped my elderly parents move from their home to an independent living facility. My father is never one to throw out anything that once was valuable or in some possible future may have some utility. Since I first moved out, from every trip home I have returned with some utensil / artefact or invention; an electric lawnmower resulting from the unholy union of an old Victa and a washing machine, a gentleman’s tie press from the 1920’s, rustic toilet roll holder that for years only used to come out when my parents came to visit… Even with this constant flow of gifts, their modest suburban house was packed with artefacts of the previous ten decades. Most overwhelming was the workshop, where I laboured for days sorting / stacking / carting. As I worked and afterwards I reflected on the time I had spent in his workshop and the things I had learnt, the tools both tangible and intangible that go to make up a personal history. The result is a suite of digital prints. The images are all constructed using words from books as marks, the labour undertaken by bespoke software tools I have been developing over the past decade. The prints come in pairs, each pair containing an object and a quotation from the book. The object, the quote, the book and the typeface all relate to a specific time or memory – fragments of a life.