‘Why make drawings like these when we have cameras?’

My parents’ house was one of those large bungalows with a well cared for garden. It also had the large double garage that, like so many others, served as an overflow store for my family’s past possessions. In my parents’ garage, this included a large stock of DIY materials, DIY tools and an ever-expanding collection of salvaged elements from broken objects that ‘one-day’ would be re-used. At the far end of the garage, seamlessly integrated with this supply (or perhaps inextricably entangled with it), was my father’s workspace. On one particular visit home I found myself foraging amongst these supplies searching for a particular artefact, recalled by my paternal quartermaster, as being stored for just this very eventuality. It wasn’t long before I became distracted by other items from my past and entered into the reverie of a daydream. Standing there on my own in the cool dimness it occurred to me that, at some point in the future, all of this would need to be ‘sorted out’ – which was a way of avoiding saying ‘thrown away’. I realised suddenly how unsure I was of being able to come to terms with this sanctuary of memories when it was no longer being available to me as a ‘touchstone’ of home and of my parents. Here in this ordinary garage I could feel so clearly how all of the tools and materials carried with them my father’s presence, and how the entire workshop bore the traces of his life. The stacks of timber, the never to be re-used components, the dust and the cobwebs, the once organised and softly rusting collections of screws, nails, bolts, washers (all conforming to a half evolved private taxonomy) – all of these things, as with a nest, described at their boundary a facsimile of my father’s presence – they implied him with a clarity that was moving and which asked to be acknowledged.

Also moving were the recollections of the moments spent together with my father and my own sons, as he tried to pass aspects of his knowledge and technique on to them in their excited endeavours to make and to shape materials. At first it felt that very little could successfully be passed on – such is the excited and capricious attention of young boys. But at any given moment I also felt that I knew exactly what my father was going to say to them before he said it. There would be the craftsman’s maxims, the principles, the cautions and the technical guidance. And so I realised that he had been successful in passing these things on. Had not I had already learned these things from him myself?

But unlike my father, probably because of him, I am not a ‘Hoarder’.  I knew I could never resort to making one of those rather fearful half-sacred shrines out of the garage by refusing to allow anything to be changed. However, I also knew that I would always want some access to this part of my history. So I began to make the drawings. After all, “one day, none of this will be yours”.