material culture

When I was about to begin high school my Grandfather Pedersen had a number of wooden pencil boxes made for his grandchildren. Those boxes were made from the most distinctive local timber: Silky Oak. Sanded and polished, silky oak has a beautiful, shimmering, honey toned surface. At the time I treated the box as harshly as I could. It was so anachronistic; I wanted it to look ‘genuinely old’ as quickly as possible. The inside of my pencil box is covered in teenage graffiti: the names of bands, mostly, and the message, “please let me pass maths 1984”. My Grandfather died the following year.

There are no existing objects to connect me directly to my Norwegian ancestors, no piece of clothing, no old bible or other documents, not even a photograph to know them by. I have these items for other branches of my family tree. This wooden pencil box, so incredibly old-fashioned when it was given, has come to ‘stand in’ for the material culture that is lost to me. Something about the procedure of my Grandfather distributing these boxes suggested the echo of a tradition.

I am an artist first and foremost and I work with ‘stuff’. It has become part of this project to imagine what that stuff might be in this context. My Father loves to work with wood. His father built the family home out of timber in the basic Queensland post-war style but my Father prefers something more ornate: the turned and decorative wood effects so often found in Scandinavian architecture. The Vikings worked with a lathe powered by the spring of a young sapling bent and tethered to a pedal. My Father’s lathe is a home-modified affair that is probably a major carbon culprit, but this love of timbercraft could be vital link with a my lost material culture.