The Reckless Chisel

Secret fractures – Art as Self-Harming

Why do I sometimes let my emotions get the better of me? For the same reason I let it rain last Tuesday. Robert Brault

Life had given me lemons – in the form of a bitter-sweet fracture, loss and hurt. For a while the drama of it, the relentless groundhog days of searching for meaning in a toxic mental soup, kept me from the hollow sadness of acceptance and being able to move on. Temporarily things literally fell apart; my work in progress, a fragile soapstone carving, split in two under my chisel. I understood this as a sign and superstitiously stopped working. But eventually a new idea nosed its’ way through my slough of despond, and so (as my daughters would say) I ‘grew a pair’ and strode back into the studio.

The great object of life is sensation – to feel we exist – even though in pain it is this ‘craving void’ that drives us to Gaming – to Battle – to Travel to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principle attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment. Lord Byron

A fresh piece of stone is always daunting, and impatient to lose myself in the process, I intended to race through the initial stages of stone removal that required hard graft. So, I got myself a bigger chisel because in my head a bigger chisel=speed, I decided to complete this initial phase in the shortest time possible – in a morning…

And reader I went for it – driven by a weird (and unnatural?) zeal. Nothing was going to stop me, ART would sort me out, distract and heal me. I pummelled that poor stone with my chisel desperate to get to that bit of the process where things slow down, into the still space where I know the magic will happen, between an idea beginning to take form and before becoming fully concrete, (I was going to say, set in stone…) Four hours later the studio a white-out, I emerged like Scott of the Antartic, dropping my chisel from exhaustion, but never mind, now I was ready to start the ‘real’ work of the carving tomorrow.

Where there is anger there is always pain underneath. Eckhart Tolle

But that night my thumb joint (on my left-handed hand) began to give a curious little click on movement and soon became so agonisingly inflamed and painful it locked itself straight. For the next few weeks, unable even to write, I lived on paracetamol and wore a splint. It turned out to be trigger thumb, a common repetitive strain type injury and the only non-medical treatment? To stop doing whatever had aggravated it in the first place. It took three months to be able to dress without yelping by then I was just about able to write, though still weeks away from carving.

The first rule of holes: when youre in one stop digging. Molly Ivans

During the interim, without carving, I was forced to distract myself so I opened a shop on Etsy, joined a gym and surfed the net for carving videos (and God some of them were truly awful) then one day I was stopped in my tracks by a master carver, I could tell this just by the way his hand was in constant dialogue with his chisel his wonderfully seductive and expressive videos on process, went some way to sating my stalled carving brain. It began to dawn on me just how blind and potentially dangerous my haste had been…

My online sculpture guru helped me to understand the necessity of not only approaching the stone quietly and to think about where and how I was placing the chisel, but in the same way that I approached the magic time in the middle of the process. He spoke with such reverence about the stone as if it were a living being, and far from being inviolate, was vulnerable to any undisciplined bashing that could cause secret fractures that then might sit in wait and derail your progress later i.e., bits could drop off…

 I have had just about all I can take of myself. S.N. Berman

Chastened, I realised that I had only been receptive to this enlightened thinking because of what had happened to my thumb, caused by vibrations from the heavier hammer and hasty chiselling – but mostly from my impatient recklessness. On reflection it seems that the stone has yet again taught me a vital lesson.

Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials. Anni Albers

I had gone into the studio and allowed impatience to overrule respect for the tools and the stone, demanding that art distract and heal me, as I believed it so often had done in the past, but then it was always as a side-effect or consequence of pure focused artistic intention – not via agitated childish demanding. There is of course a time for recklessness in the making of art but if I’ve learnt anything from thumb-gate it is that strong emotions carry a forceful charge that when picked up by tools and materials it has the power to amplify and bite back.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect. George Bernard Shaw

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