handiwork is my first book of non-fiction. It was written, haphazardly, over the course of six months in 2018, during a period of time in which I was spending many more hours working with my hands than writing. I felt strangely guilty about the energy I was putting into the development of sculptural projects and set out to justify it to myself in writing. During the same period I became very interested in migratory birds and at a certain point the two subjects came to seem connected. This focused my reading matter and note-making; the structure of the book started to emerge.handiwork is a book of intervals. There’s as much blank space inside it as text, plus a series of photographs. It describes the house where I live and how I habitually use it, the various work stations that have been established over the years and how I move between them during the course of an ordinary day. It’s about my relationship with the making of small, painted objects, as well as writing itself. And it’s about my relationship with my dead dad, with William Morris and John James Audubon, with migrant birds and model railways, with time. The photographs came about because Lisa Coen of Tramp Press requested some kind of a visual of the book’s most significant bird, the northern wheatear. Instead of making a drawing or trying to photograph a living bird, I decided it would be most faithful to the concept of the book to build a series models out of plaster, carved and painted.

Extract from handiwork

When the exhibition is ended – I will go, alone, and take it down again. 

I will dismantle the installations, break each back into their many parts, wrap the parts and re-nestle them into their padded compartments. I will match small painted objects to envelopes, to boxes, to slots. I will re-pad, re-press and re-prod the bathmats and dog blankets, re-secure the lids of the rigid plastic boxes, all eleven, and affix new labels – the address of a destination in the opposite direction, of our house, this house. 

And it will all go back the way it came, bearing a few specks of damage, the cost of its display, the autograph of its passage. 

It will be winter then. 

It will be winter then. 

A winter slightly harsher of weather than the one before, which was slighter harsher of weather than the one before. 

A winter that will bring a wind that unfastens the twine, the hair bobbles and the cableties with its fingernails, wrenches the feeder from its pole, and scatters rotten seed across the swampy lawn. 

And so we buy a timber fence post from the garden centre, and Mark drives it into the lawn beside the old pole, and holds it in place with a Christmas tree stand – a welded steel ratchet designed and made by my dad, years ago – and drills a hole through an old drinks tray, screws the tray onto the top of the fence post, 

and makes a bird table. 

In the box room above the kitchen extension, adjacent to the bathroom, up the stairs from the mixing station, the sawing station, the painting station, the carving station; where the ungainly, discoloured tube of the extractor fan sags from one edge of the roof; where the exterior wall is damp-freckled and the cracks of the boarded floor filled with variegated filth; where the curtain rustles even though the window is closed, and the radiator ticks even though the heating is off – 

this is where the small, painted objects – returned, restored – sleep. 

Sara Baume is an artist and writer based in West Cork. Her debut novel Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and has been widely translated. In 2017 her second novel, A Line Made by Walking, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. She has also been awarded the Rooney Prize and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. handiwork is her first work of non-fiction.

handiwork is available from Tramp Press: https://www.tramppress.com/product/handiwork/