Knowledge, Gatekeepers and Swindlers

Turning the classic model upside down!

With my practice, both in art and experimentation, understanding the past is a massive part of what I do. If you asked seven years ago that I would be able to speak Welsh, have a working understanding of British History, and shift my interests away from painting to a more sculptural angle, I would have told you Ewch i ffwrdd!

But it's more important than that, understanding the way things were made in the past really opens up your world! To carve a lump of cherry into a frame or a ornamental animal head really brings you to a process that thousands, maybe millions, of people from many different walks of life have copied and done the same. It's something that anchors us to a continuing process of making, a genealogy of art that is just magical!

But there is an hierarchy that is we adhere to that is counter to this. A horrible hierarchy that removes us from a truly inclusive society. An hierarchy so baked into our ways that many different types of knowledge have been or are being lost to time.

So what hierarchy is this?

Long story short, it's the Roman Empire (1).

Every empire has seen itself as an extension of the Roman empire. The British, French, Spanish, even the American states which might as well call itself an empire could fit this discription. You can see this in the laws, language and artistic production.

For example, as an empire stretches out, it tries to show it's importance by referencing the greatest powers that came before. This means many styles fall out of favour to bring back the older ones to show this. Here in Britain, you see that in banks and governmental buildings that try to replicate the old roman buildings that littered Europe. The Royal Exchange at Cornhill is an example of this.

But in the process, we use the material of the oppressor to the detriment of more local craftsman. Wood is seen as outdated, stone and glass slivers it's way in.

But what has this got to do with knowledge? Everything I would say.

To prop up such an idea such as empire, you have to make everyone one homogenous group. You aren't from Derby, you're British. You're not from Quimper, you're French. To get that idea across, you have to get rid of any ideological separation of location and people. Local/Folk art is derided as "primitive" to the standard now brought, meaning more people are alienated from the stories and styles that made them.

An example is the elevation of the "classics" of Greek and Roman literature. They themselves are not bad, they are great, but the idea that they are the best and should supplant stories such as the Mabinogion or the old folk tales is just harmful.

Another reason its dangerous. In the late 1700's to the late 1800's there was a move to categorise everything and remove the folk from knowledge. Each plant and animal was given a latin name, dissected and studied. But in doing so, they completely erased how the plants and animals interacted with the environment. Something we are rediscovering now, though it should never have been lost in the first place.

Local/indigenous people understood the land better than those who seeked to control it. Understanding is Knowledge, but there isn't a correct form that knowledge takes. It can be stories and myths as much as science, and you don't need to learn knowledge through books, you can also learn it from the people you talk to. Friends, family, strangers, enemies. They are all forms of knowledge that we can learn from.

The problem is now that knowledge is respected in books and journals, and those who speak of knowledge could be malicious in their own ways, asking for donations to became "Alpha males", something that was seen as a scientific fact until it was disproven. And now we have lost the stories of warnings and horrors that can lead us down these paths.

The good news here though is that we can make new knowledge and pass it down the next generations. Like woodwork, anyone can do it if they are willing to learn and explore the world a little more than before. The warnings can be relearned, just in a new way, away from mere profit towards inclusion and fulfilment.

I said at the begining I was a painter. I still am, but with the change in interest to a more decolonial practice I have to reckon with the ideas of "Fine art". Painting, sculpture and all the other ways of making art has been poisoned to regurgitate the same stuff that the market requires, or even the state requires. The Abstract Expressionists, my favourite movement, was quite literally funded by the CIA to counter the equally repressive Soviet Union. With that in mind, a lot of paintings are just building upon foundations holding up capitalism. The movement was human, but it was stripped of ideological parts to force a narrative that only destroys. Mark Rothko knew that, and look where he ended.

So now I look away from what's in the galleries and look at what's in the museums and the local craft houses, because that's where you are going to find the real teachers of life.

Just keep in mind that there are monsters in life who want you to be one way, and then there's the pagan way that asks you what do you want to know.

(1) Those bastards again.

Failure

With every winner, there must be losers.

As I get into my woodworking practice, there's going to be learning curves that will either take me down a road of glorious ephiany or throw me down the deepest depths of my own self-loathing.

This bastard lead me down the latter.

You might not see anything wrong per se, but as someone who has been working on this style and it's predecessors years now(1) I can tell when something just isn't working. This guy just didn't cooperate with what I wanted to do.

You might ask, "it isn't finished, how do you know it's a failure?", and my answer is to blame the tools and materials(2) but not for the reasons you think. This is specifically down to the circumstances that lead to this impasse. So let's start from the beginning.

This is the sketch that I based my sculpture on. I drew this about a year ago around the time that I switched jobs. I wanted to make this design ever since, it's one of my favourites. The spiral, the subtle curves(3), the way in my head that it would just shimmer with the sunlight when it hits the design just right. I dreamed of this for a long time but never actually made it.

Until now.

I hacked away at the wood until I had the desired shape of the design, adding chamfers at the yellow points to elevate and highlight the area to carve. It was going so well at that point that I decided to start carving the swirls and intricacies.

That's where the problems arose.

You see, when it comes to wood, you are fighting against straws. Everyone explaining wood grain always uses straws and it works, so I'll just carry that analogy. As you cut you are severing the fibres that make up the wood. if you cut along the fibres you will get a nice clean cut, if you cut against the fibres you are more likely to pull the fibres and ruin all your hard work. This happened to me during this sculpture.

You can see at the top of this picture a massive knotch out the side of the side. I didn't want this, but the wood did. I was working with the grain but at a very small point where I had to sever the fibres at the top before moving forward. Unfortunately, the grain at that point was loose and broke. No matter how sharp the blade or how hard the wood is, this is something you just can't avoid. Sometimes the wood just breaks.

Because of this, I tried to save the sculpture by cutting deeper. This didn't and did work. It solved the grain, but now the design was ruined. I was using techniques more equivalent to chip carving here, and with chip carving, you need a consistent angle of cut to get the desired effect. Go to shallow, you won't get any shadows. Go to deep, and its all shadow. This is what happened to me.

To highlight the grain problem, here was the point of death for this chunk of basswood. After cutting the design in, I noticed that all my lines are following the fibres up the sculpture. No matter how I approached it, the softness of the wood would mean that the problems from before would surface again, meaning that blow out was more than likely to happen again. Basswood is a lovely wood, but this design, for me, was calling for a much harder wood. Oak, Cherry, Ash. I didn't have any of that so I left it.

When I say I left it, I got frustrated and threw it on the ground. Sometimes you just need to let it out I guess.

So what can I do in the future?

I'm going to work with harder woods. Woods that allow for more maneuverability in that way its carved. Oak at the moment is my favourite along with Cherry, but come with their own problems. I'll need to keep my chisels and knives sharp more consistently, as they will blunt with use quicker. But that's part and parcel of the art of carving!

What will I do with the sculpture I want to burn? Nothing I think. I want to explore natural weathering. I'll likely place it in the garden and allow the sun and the rain do their thing to it and see what happens. I want to put this objects in the real world sometime in the future, but to do that I will need to see what kind of things happen to the different woods in the wild. How do the curves and cuts work with the rain? Does it split? Does it go moss? How does moss interact with the carving? Will the sun help it 'sing'(4)? All of these are important to consider I feel.

(1) a whole 5 years I might add. Not a master, but I know what I'm talking about.

(2) "A bad craftsman blames his tools"

(3) My god, it even has a watermark. (Well more of a coffee stain to be honest)

(4) It's the best way I could describe it. The sunlight with the carving is a type of harmony that I love. It doesn't sing to me, then its a bad song. But equally, you could say that its a song that nature wants to sing and once I surrender my sculptures to it, I should dictate how it's interacted with. Something to think about?

Daylight Savings, or Daylight robbery?

The clocks went forward when I'm writing this, it likely won't be posted until waaaayyyy past March, but I feel like it's something to talk about.

Every year we have the same discussions about daylight savings. Is it a relic of a bygone era? Should we get rid of it or should we keep it? Does it matter? I'm not going to give an opinion on either side, but I will explore why it exists.

Because it's interesting, especially if you think about it in a historical sense. Throughout time(1) the idea of a fixed period or duration was extremely abstract, but it was still important. If meetings were to happen, its useful to know when everyone will be together. If you say 'we will meet when the sun is at its highest', that is a time that people will understand. A lot of myths and historic moments usually start with saying 'daybreak' or 'twilight' to give the idea when things happened.

But it's only recently that an actual time system has been used to dictate our lives.

I've been listening to 'You're dead to me', a podcast on BBC radio and BBC sounds that talks about history with comedians and historians. And Greg Jenner. Greg Jenner is important. The episode about Timekeeping (2023) really explored this more comprehensibly, talking about how people used to categorise time.

To start with I'll be talking about time that doesn't effect too much on the day to day life, which is what most of history is.

At the beginning, times were needed to know about the year. Back then, it was visibly evident. You could tell that summer was summer and winter was winter. What's interesting is the different festivities and celebrations that the year symbolised. For example, Harvest happened at the beginning of autumn and the summer solstice shows the beginning of the world becoming darker. These would allow the population to organise their time to better adapt to the change in the climate, as well as to help collaborate with neighbours and friends(2). In fact, in the book Celts by Prof Alice Roberts, she talks that these festivities would be a time to congregate, air out greivences and form bonds. The simplicity of that could be seen in things such as Stonehenge, Woodhenge, and the Brochs up in Scotland.

But as life gets complicated, so does timekeeping. The Egyptians and the Greeks formed systems that used water and the sun to create a more specific sense of temporal location(3). The Chinese(4) even had a time scents, where certain smells in a building could tell you what time of day it is by putting oils in candles.

I could keep going on about the history of timekeeping, honestly thats not a bad thing, but this is about daylight savings right? Let's stick to that.

So, when did it get weird?

It's of course when Britain ruled the waves, around the 1700's.

You see, there were a lot people in Britain who only needed to know when it was light and when it got dark, as they were workers of the land and its not best to work at night. But things changed with the industrial revolution. Suddenly shift work came into being, with people working before sunrise and going home after the sun. No sunlight for you! This was a massive cultural shift as the population's entire daily routine was now segmented into work and home. It's important to note that people often got up in the night to socialise(5), but with the advent of work taking over the day people saw less and less of each other(6). The Puritan attitude of 'Work as moral' and the idea of 'wasting time' was suddenly put into the fabric of British life, effectively cutting off so much of our lives for those who demanded profit.

To show this, there was a man(7) called Richard Baxter (1660?) who solidifies this in an essay saying;

"If you idle away this life, will god ever give you another here?"

and,

"Idleness is the most heinous sin"

He also said,

"...by wasting time, you are guilty of robbing God himself."

If you look at time in that way, you of course see time as something you owe to the divine. Time is devotion, wasting time is sinful.

But who benefits from this? The factory owner, the capitalist, the shareholder, the church. They have placed themselves firmly in the seat that was put there for god. Shift work must be followed as to be a good worker you must do a good job, and in doing a good job the company thrives(8). When the company thrives, you are saving your eternal soul from damnation.

With the change in approach to work complete, to best serve the elite we now get to daylight savings. In short, it created a more hours of daylight for the working during WW1. Meaning that more things could be done to help survive, like crop managemnet and factory shifts. But what happened after the war, and subsequently WW2, when we didn't have such an existential need for daylight?

Nothing, we kept it.

So is it good to keep? Or completely unnecessary?

It's difficult to separate the reality that daylight savings at this point is for control. Control over when we wake up. Control over when we sleep and socialise. But it's also control for systematic cohesion, we will know when the trains will run. It also might mean more sunlight for most of the year.

But that is only going to work if we ware thinking about capitalising our time. Most people are much more laissez-faire when given the option. So could it be more accurate to see Daylight savings as something that is kept to control the population? To get them worried and tired so they don't think too much about how they could actually use their day? Is Daylight savings more to do with Capitalism than to benefit the people? Hell, even when we lose an hour we're thankful, should we when it was taken from us earlier in the year?

To conclude, I don't know. I think it's important to question why we do things, and in reearching for this I've only really seen it be good for those at the top the chain rather than the general population. In Britain we've lost so much connection to the land we call home that its sad to think that in classifying time we have also stripped the basic animal instinct of just embracing now and being content with where we are. The Puritans(9) truly did a number on us that has lead to colonialism and detachment, and justified it with 'What would Jesus do?'. Not this I don't think.

It's important to notice that time is a construct. It exists because we say it does. But that means we can adjust, reimagine it to make it work of all of us, rather than just those who make money off of it. That's why I will always admire those in the past who knew this and tried to show it by threatening clocks. From the Romans threatening sundails, to anarchists trying to blow up the Greenwich clock, I hope we can stop worshipping the dials and just work with it.

Oh, I guess I think its a scam. Daylight savings is a scam.

(1) the concept, not an actual time, idiot.

(2) I believe that its shown in historical records that winter was a time of hibernation but also peace. People became fragile as winter claimed lives rather than war, where warfare wasn't smart as resources were stretched thin.

(3) I'm going to regret not writing this, so let me fill it in here. People who needed a specific times were astrologers and officials. There's a correlation between control and social need, just as there is today.

(4) This is in that podcast 'You're dead to me' I spoke about. Give it a listen, as I'm really paring it down.

(5) It's really interesting, as it means that our sleep cycle is more complex that day and night. Also, nightlife cannot be ignored, its baked into our DNA if this way of forming our day.

(6) You can argue that's happening now. Hustle culture is killing us as a community as well as mentally. Have a break, touch grass, you deserve it.

(7) Bastard

(8) Higher wages? Please, that's way to nice.

(9) Bastards