Iron railings

At five, we dragged
sticks along railings
and walls

holding hands
carelessly, obliviously,
without knowing we 
were linking our 
hearts forever.....

(Ageing Well, by Emma Wood)

Goldsmith

There's something compelling about watching people making things. I took my camera into the studio of my friend Eddie Doherty for a series of black and white images of his work as a maker. 

Eddie is a goldsmith who works mainly on high-end commissioned pieces - you can see some of his work here. I'm a regular visitor to the studio, and it always fascinates me to observe how his work progresses from initial sketch to beautiful, hand-finished, often mirror-polished artefact. The metalworking techniques he uses are often hundreds of years old - his hands here could be those of an artisan from the nineteenth century. So could many of his tools. His jewellery is clearly contemporary, custom-made for modern individuals. But I like the way the making of it and the wearing of it belong to such a strong and wide-reaching tradition. Nothing is really new.

Old things

Nothing better.

Trains

I spent a happy couple of hours with my camera at the Ulster Transport Museum today. I'm not interested in trains in a trainspotterish type of way (obviously I am way too cool), but I do love old trains in a sculptural, metalwork, design-ish sort of a way. Again, they tick my boxes of heritage, beauty and decay.

One of my great-grandfathers worked for the Midland Railway in the early years of the twentieth century. His role was looking after the horses in the railway yards, but I like to think that he might sometimes have climbed up into a train like one of these and admired the beauty of the brass work - and the hammer marks which make it human - just as I did today.