In memory of a father’s manual labour

In Chip Off the Old Block, Ross Trevail wonders what it is to be a father to his newborn son. In this beautiful, considered book, Trevail muses on class, masculinity, and working with one’s hands.

When Ross Trevail was a child, he wanted to be like his father. He wanted to be able to work with tools, to make things out of wood. He wanted to be a boy who was practical, who could fix things, who could make a table, who could make a perfect service, who could join two pieces of wood together with a perfect mortise and tenen joint.

He wasn’t that kind of boy and he didn’t become that man. Instead, he took up photography, he moved South from his childhood home in Scotland. He left his father, his country, and his class behind. And then he learned that he was going to become a father and the memories came flooding back. What does it mean to be a father?, he asked himself. ‘I suddenly felt a need to make something with wood,’ he writes in his introduction to the book. ‘Perhaps it was out of fear that I wouldn’t match up to my vision of what a dad looked like but I found myself making small objects and then bigger ones. The shame and inadequacy started to shift…. Working with wood has become a way to combine creative and physical labour, the connection between my dad’s world and mine.’

This modest book is a chronicle of this process. It’s an examination of what gets passed on and what gets left behind, the class we belong to, of social mobility and the ways in which class is expressed through dress, through face, through what we do with out bodies, our hands, our minds.

Integrated into the book are some of the things that Trevail (a former student of mine) made during the making of the book. These are things made out of wood, things that represent a recognition of his father and who he was, that step back from Trevail’s social mobility and returns him to a being who works with his hads as his father worked with his hands before him.

It begins with a jigsaw puzzle in a box. The puzzle is made out of wood and so is the box. There are pieces of his father in there and pieces of himself. They are mixed together.

A portrait of the back of Trevail’s head connects to a portrait of his father’s head, and then one of his son’s head, slicks of blonde hair angling down a taut toddler’s neck. There are the objects Trevail fashioned in homage to his father; a wooden hammer, a wooden fishing lure, a dart. These objects link back to Trevail’s childhood, to time spent in the garden shed, to the pastimes of his youth, to the power of the hand to fashion and to make.

Then there are objects that connect to his son. Trevail makes him a mobile strung with screwdrivers, hammers and saws. He makes a bar for his baby son to crawl under, a new ritual for a new being.

He writes text to go with the images, vignettes on what it means to be a father, on the memories of his old childhood, on what his father might have felt.

I run my son’s bath

a nightly ritual

but as I look down

I see two hands moving through the water instead of one

Both mine and my father’s

And I wonder if he saw the same

when he ran mine.’

 

Get to the back of the book and the jigsaw has been completed, one half Trevail, one half his father, and then there is the baby’s hand, gripped tightly around a wooden dumbbell, carrying that same baggage, that same load for the generation to come.

A Chip off the Old Block is published by Clip Cloot Press

56 pages 160 x 210mm Swiss Bound on 170gsm uncoated paper Printed in the UK First edition Designed by Lovely Type

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Ross Trevail is a photographer and lecturer currently based in Norwich. Within his practice, Trevail explores masculinity, class, labour and representation, primarily within his own family. He is particularly interested in the dialogue between physical and critical labour.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His latest book, Sofa Portraits, is available here.  Follow him on Instagram.