John Joseph Mitchell and Joel Tomlin

Joel Tomlin’s (b.1969, Sheffield, UK) studio is a place of files and chisels, axes, hand saws and pliers, there are no power tools. Every mark and shaving, every cut and carve is made by hand. Slowly, and with love. Wooden sculptures jostle for space on crowded surfaces, lumps of timber gathered from the streets line the floors, and everywhere there are tiny objects made from discarded off cuts of wood and tin. Some of Tomlin’s sculptures have what he describes as ‘conversational attributes’, a sense of one work communicating with another, or relationships building between things. It encourages an anthropomorphic reading, especially when the objects are gathered in groups. It seems inconceivable that some sort of life doesn’t continue when the studio door is locked at night.