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The aim of my practice has been to create the most beautiful tools that I can, and to celebrate form as well as function. As a young aspiring blacksmith, one of the first things I learnt to forge was a hammer; this sparked a passion for trying to forge the best hammer that I could possibly could.
When I first started forging a friend of my dad lent me a small anvil and an old hammer to use and said to me ‘a Blacksmith needs a proper hammer’. This stuck with me throughout my years of learning, and I became obsessed with creating a ‘proper hammer’. I wanted this body of work to show my progression as a tool maker and to be a visual reminder of how my practice has refined over time. As a result of forging many hammers over my career as a blacksmith, an idea of what I would define as a ’proper hammer’ has coalesced and the aim of my practice has been to achieve this pinnacle of hammer that I have envisaged.
It is very important to me as a tool maker that tools are used as they are intended, not just left hanging on a wall, and I wanted to reflect this by using the first tools I created to forge the later more refined iterations, and by leaving the marks of use on them in order to create a sense of identity as a ’proper hammer’. A key part of my practice has been to create a design language which can be used to identify a tool as having been made by me and to have the tools be visually distinct from the norm of blacksmithing tools.
