Abstract
Without endless maintenance, the material composition of the world – the cities, homes, transport systems, utilities and social practices upon which we rely – would descend into disrepair and dereliction. Urban arteries would become clogged, trains grind to a halt and buildings crumble. The upkeep of the world is an ongoing achievement then, although the work of countless, unheralded restorers, keepers, cleaners and repairers is rarely honoured. Visible Mending restores attention to workers from England’s South West who take care to repair clocks, shoes, electrical items, tools, bicycles, musical instruments, sofas and clothes. Photographs and brief observational vignettes pay tribute to these menders and artfully capture their habitat.
Objects undergoing repair, as the authors write, possess a biographical narrative that is caught between a past and new becoming. Undergoing restoration, wrought into new material configurations at the hand of the repairer, they have avoided disposal and will have an afterlife, although some objects linger in these places, awaiting a repair that may never ensue.
Photographs feature an abundance of hands, several scarred, tough, lined and ingrained with oil, conveying a sensuous knowledge, and together with the affordances of workshops, evoking what the authors call the ‘perceptual field’ of the worker’s body, the tactile, pungent, sweaty engagements with things in these multi-sensual realms. Their usually unseen equipment, tools of the trade unfamiliar to non-practitioners, invite us to empathetically imagine the feel of a hard, metallic workbench or smoothed wooden handle. These are also situated social worlds, woven into settings in which customers bring workers cherished objects to repair.
The environs in which they ply their trade, with thin shafts of sunlight penetrating dusty windows, are at first glance utilitarian in arrangement, yet these workshops and the objects they house carry a powerful aesthetic charge. Fabric, walls and floors are etched with time-honoured inscriptions and rough calculations. Surfaces are scuffed, stained and chipped through use; objects have been considered and worked over. This sense of the temporal is particularly revealed in Caitlin DeSilvey’s description of the linoleum floor of an ironmonger’s. Embedded with tacks, screws and indentations, she describes it as being akin to ‘tiny fossils, shadows of motion and material’ (2013: 79).
Aggregations of dust, fragments, broken pieces not yet swept away, testify to the process of work. Peculiar juxtapositions of items undergoing repair, tools and personal keepsakes, pictures, antlers and ornaments accumulate. Drawers, shoeboxes, walls and shelves seem chaotically, excessively stuffed with tools and parts, but they are managed according to idiosyncratic organizational codes by which key ingredients may be plucked.
A short, concluding essay discusses the project’s methodology, focusing on how visual material can interweave with the textual. In Visible Mending, the photographs of these homely settings for repair conjure up an empathetic, richly sensory encounter with a usually unseen materiality.
Though these menders are disappearing as items become instantaneously replaceable in a throwaway society, perhaps they will emerge once more with the advent of more ecologically attuned ways of going about things.