The fourth issue of the annual magazine that promotes know-how and technique in design, craft or industry, looks at the cut.
These days, many of us are focused on ideas of repair, suture, reconstruction, and generally taking care. So why look closely at people who cut, undo, and destroy?
Firstly, because whether we notice them or not, cuts are all around us. In our actions, of course, but also in our words. We cut wood, vegetables, fabric, paper, and metal. But we also take shortcuts, cut each other off, and split the difference; we cut the cake (the better to share it?); we cut our hair, and split hairs, too; we cut off contact and cut ourselves off from the world; we cut off supplies, but also give each other a cut. And when we’ve had enough, we cut to the chase: the French verb trancher can mean “to cut” but also “to decide.” A decision can sometimes give us a way out, or even help us survive.
It’s the same in crafts. Cutting is one of the most basic ways of producing objects. We remove substance, hollow out, clip, and sculpt: we tease a shape out of raw material through removal, through separating elements. In this issue, we’ll meet enthusiasts of the cut, all of them artists of separation: a timber framer who hews beams from trees he chooses himself in the forest. A butcher who patiently breaks down the carcass of a cow, removing the best pieces while not wasting anything. An artisan who meticulously sculpts priceless gems. A groomer who styles a small dog to please its owner, and perhaps gain it even more love. A gardener who sculpts boxwoods into things he sees in his mind and his dreams.
We can’t deny that a cut is undeniably a form of violence. We’ve all been inundated with images, probably mostly false, of early humans inventing sharp objects for hunting, killing, making war, skinning animals, piercing bones, removing scalps, and cutting down trees. Homo sapiens sapiens found its way through, and its place in, vast prehistoric forests by clearing them out, decimating megafauna, and making cuts; thanks to carbon-14, we know the first knives date back at least two and a half million years. We probably learned to cut before we learned to control fire. The cut has been with humanity from the first flints to our current industrial age and has lost none of its violence and hostility along the way.
Even today, the word “cut” evokes images of murder, dissection, dripping blood, and out-of-control chainsaws in horror movies. But could we instead view the cut as a practice of repair? As something necessary for life, rather than antithetical to it?
In this issue, Tools meets with a wide range of people who change our minds. Jenna Castetbon and Romuald Roudier Théron meet a plastic surgeon who works to erase her patients’ complexes and restore their confidence. In the same article, the authors meet a taxidermist, a true artist who gives life and intention back to the animals he cuts apart and relieves of their entrails. There are also people in this issue who cut things that grow back. In Bérangère Bussioz’s article, we learn that pruning has to take place in certain seasons and phases of the moon, when plants’ sap has gone down. Tools also meets people who cut things that won’t grow back, like a stone quarry in Charente, France, that will only be in operation for thirty more years: in her report, Camille Azaïs wonders what it means to cut something apart on such a large scale.
Looking at the cut draws our gaze to raw materials, but also to the tools we use on them – it’s this magazine’s specialty, after all. Industrial chain saws, hand drills, laser cutters: this issue is a compendium of names and shapes, from ancient to ultramodern, from artisanal (Tools for cutting leather, to industrial (Industrial cutting methods. Cutting means finding balance: it often requires both strength and a light touch, as well as precision, sometimes down to the micron. Artisans who work with gemstones and have no margin for error, like those Tristan Pierard meets, are all too familiar with these constraints.