Sickle

mixed media,
18” x 8” x 5”
2017

While on a prolonged tour of museums and galleries in Europe during 1972 and 1973, I chanced to spend some time at the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva. There I saw a bronze-age sickle, with a remarkable wooden handle. Due to the value of the tool, it had clearly been in use for generations, and the handle as a result had been worn down to fit the hand of its users. I was struck by the relation between the functional cutting blade and the indexical personal particularity of the grip, as the palpable link between the thing and its use. The idea remained with me, until I finally acquired an old forged steel sickle, and replaced its handle with a laminated baltic-birch plywood block, which I carved and sanded down to comfortably fit my hand; it is not unlike the fitted grips of contemporary match pistols. This modern addition sets up an irreconcileably contradictory relation between a simple ancient tool, and an impossibly overdetermined handle.