“I have always felt caught between two languages, though I can only speak in one,” visual artist and writer Sara Baume reflects in her latest book. “The one I can speak goes down on paper . . . the one I cannot speak goes down in small painted objects.” Through Baume’s Handiwork, a compendium of word and image, both of these dialects converge. Such a reconciliation is a feat for any artwork, but particularly for one as diminutive as this. Its pint-sized print edition is itself an objet d’art.
Following her novels Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking, Handiwork is Baume’s first non-fiction book. Its form is equally polyglot, blending memoir with art and nature writing, and meditations on grief with facts about the migration of birds within a micro narrative. There is even a bibliography citing Baume’s references to design-history texts such as William Morris’s Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Ultimately, however, Handiwork is “an account of a year spent making hundreds of small painted objects in an isolated house”. It is both a celebration and a scrutiny of the costs and rewards of a life spent making art.
Certainly for Baume, the boundaries between life and art are indecipherable. Her house is one where “toothbrushes live side by side with paintbrushes”, where “at dinner time, a drinking vessel is added to the other glasses on the low coffee table . . . so it often happens . . . that I plop a sullied brush into the clear water, or take a thoughtless sip of the paint-tainted stuff”. Handiwork offers deep insights into the plight of the artist, into the need to create. For Baume, every minute away from a workstation “is a case of flapping on the spot”, a status in which “I perceive my real life to have stalled”. Delineations between the self and the artwork are equally obscured so that “when a bit breaks off, as bits often do, I hear myself cry out, as involuntary as if it was a part of my body that had snapped”.
Such passages might be wearing for the more sardonic reader yet these reflections serve to expose cynicism and demand patience and an open-heartedness from the reader — the key components of the artistic process. Like Baume, the reader of Handiwork might begin to question at “what stage of life a person stops making small painted objects”. This book does not romanticise the graft involved in making a livelihood from art, however. The price of getting a single object right is “100 discarded objects and 100 days, an entire winter” and a constant anxiety centred upon productivity.
Written incrementally over the course of 2018, partly in response to the building of a sculptural exhibition, each fleeting page of Handiwork houses a thought. Some numbered pages are left blank, and testify to days spent redundantly summoning an idea, or to the failure of words in grief. Either way, its distilled form is perfect for pandemic-panicked minds, though its assessment of enriching days spent indoors is of course an accidental metaphor. The legacy of Handiwork was one bequeathed to Baume by her grandfather, a craftsman of model horse-drawn carts. However, it was from her father, who died of cancer, that Baume inherited the “propensity for handiwork, but also the terrible responsibility, the killing insistence”.
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The furniture, gates, paths and articles created by her father are not just a point of remembrance for Baume but “the things and places in which he still lives”. Baume reminds us of the importance of how we spend our days. For “at the very end of life, what did my dad remember? . . . No significant moments of transcendence . . . of torment — only the things he did over, and over”.
In this meditation on the authenticity of life and art, the passing of time and the legacy of deed, Baume makes the “glorious crushing ridiculous repetition of life” look like Handiwork.
Handiwork by Sara Baume
Tramp £9.99/€13 pp232