Rule of Thumb (2014)
Rule of Thumb (Merriam Webster’s online dictionary)
1: a method of procedure based on experience and common sense
2: a general principle regarded as roughly correct but not intended to be scientifically accurate
“They were actually engineers, not toolmakers...They could take everything from the picture to the finished product without anybody advising them.”
“The trade is getting more and more computerized. When we ran it, you did everything by hand and it was beautiful.”
-Frank Misto (check on name)*
Quid Aere Perennius
“What is more lasting than brass?”
-Waterbury City logo
My great-grandfather William Lallier’s book Machinery’s Handbook for Machine Shop and Drafting-Room compiled by Erik Oberg and F.D. Jones, published by the Industrial Press (1916) was the starting point for this work. The book’s design leant to it being used as a tool: page edges gilded to withstand use, leather cover to protect it in the harsh shop conditions, and curved corners to help ease it into the protective box it came with at the time. These protections were put to the test in my grandfather’s copy, where the cover is mostly gone, the rest bound together by electrical tape. The book is full of systems of measurement: mathematical tables, formulas, measurements of taps and dies and other tools, and heat treatments of steel, and more. These numbers, facts, and bits of information help guide and craft the finished product.
My family came to Waterbury from Canada, and what is current day Lithuania to seek better lives. They were tempted by brass industry recruiters seeking out cheap and plentiful labor, with the archetypal promise of streets lined with gold. The workers used these books as tools but were themselves seen as tools. As laborers, machinists, millwrights, platers, and shop hands, they were seen as interchangeable parts in the process of industrialization and rationalization. But there was a pride in the quality of the work, and an intelligence that comes with working and creating with your hands that the workers of the brass mills have spoken to. As a maker and teacher of various ways of working with your hands, I have seen this to be true.
The idea of taking facts, numbers, measurements, plans, and turning them into the finished objects of the brass industry is a manifestation of bits of information, “facts” into a skill, an object, and a greater whole. I relate this to my study of the history of my family: from dates, statistics about housing and employment, their height and eye color, etc. From this information I can start to construct their migrations, what they left behind, and how they survived. Statistics, numbers, facts, measurements show us the whole is greater than its parts. Abstractions become histories and objects that tell stories.
The hands are sculpted from family photographs and are the hands of those that worked in Waterbury industry, as well as of those who supported them and worked at home. In the photographs the hands are holding, resting, reaching, pointing, connecting. They are hands that mixed, machined, balance, measured, sewed, shaved, braided, cut, hammered. There were also the more personal gestures of reaching to a loved one, embracing, hands resting on a head, holding a child’s arm, or hanging side by side with a brother’s arm.
The ceramic hands cover the wall, remnants of the makers and the making, abandoned gloves (as I saw in the abandoned steel mills when I lived in Pittsburgh), lined with the brass that was this town. Brass is inside the gloves (bodies, lungs, blood, brains?), and covers the machinist books, obliterating the facts while revealing other words/truths.
*commissioned by ArtSpace, New Haven, for CT-Unbound (a show about Connecticut history, inspired by books from the Yale University Libraries rare book collection.
