BTWC at bStore

BLEEDING THUMB WHITTLING CLUB AT b STORE

b Store
24A Savile Row
W1S 3PR

OPENING Wednesday December 1st, 7 - 9PM

Whittling -- to reduce or eliminate gradually. The word applies as much to an action performed on wood with a knife as it does to some mediation between physical being and an abstract notion such as TIME. For over a year now, Bleeding Thumb Whittling Club has provided tools and wood, pickles and coffee, to those who wish to explore the realm of whittling.

Whittling is an intrinsically modest occupation, yet precisely as such, BTWC views it as a kind of de-alienation process; an effective way to engage with robust experiences of temporality and materiality. Starting out, you can obtain an excellent knife for the price of a pizza; you don't need much wood, so even exotic varieties are cheap (or free, as off-cuts from someone's fancy work-top (or you can go to a forest and whittle what you find there in light filtered through birch leaves and reflected off its white bark)).

Our broader interest in the role of craft versus alienation in the advanced industrial age has led us to look at a score of previous responses to this question. Following Appalachian self-sufficiency culture in pre-war America and the post-hippy "Back to the Land" movement which descended from it, one member has created a rudimentary banjo which will be played on the opening night. Another part of our exhibition touches on the early years of the Bauhaus school of design, where focus was on workshop activity as a way of learning. We are also pleased to present our second publication, where among other things, a utopian marriage of these viewpoints is discussed.

Blades on my mind

First using, and then collecting knives, you eventually end up wanting to make one yourself. So I made a knife some time ago & decided recently to try to do it more regularly. I´m not in the position to make my own blades quite yet so I stick with my pre-made favorite; the 'Erik Frost 120', and concentrate on the handle design for now. The first few knives have been very simple and traditionally Scandinavian, but since Jack started to leave Japanese tools around the wood-workshop I kind of got the desire to make a knife inspired by the Japanese Kiridashi knives.

The Kiridashi is a general utility knife used for cutting, marking or carving. They have a simple chisel ground edge and look a bit like a scalpel since they don´t normally have a handle. What interested me in these blades is the way that they are sometimes inset in a block of wood where one continuous bit is used as both handle and sheath. I tried to use this technique but with a long Mora blade. Im not sure of the technical success of this combination, but the looks are sort of in the right spirit. This knife wont be any good for chopping so I´ll give it to my mom with the hope that she will use it to cut her Polish sausage using the paring/pull cut.

Walnut wood and aluminium inlays

Soviet knives

These knives were made by my grandfather a long time ago in Ukraine during the scarce days of the USSR. It was very hard to get hold of a lot of things so my granddad made these in the factory where he worked from some scrap. Pretty nice job with proper rivets and so on.