The Builder Refused Solo exhibit by Matt Wood, April 25
The Builder Refused
The act of making is always an act, an intervention. We do not see the world. We see the made world. A made thing comes from what we think the world needs, passes through the eye, the hand, the mind, the tool, and out into the world. It escapes us. It does its own work: on the next eye, the next hand, the next mind. A made thing can be a footstool, an opinion, a political system, a life. The world we make is always ending and always being made anew.
This show is comprised of two bodies of work: The Hand Tools and The Sacrificial Sheet Paintings.
The Hand Tools
These are hand tools, specifically carpentry tools, from my own kit: hand saws, planes, hammers, chisels, a folding rule, a square. They are painted flat black with enamel paint and written on with gold oil paint marker. The words on them have been generated by an AI Large Language Model.
Hand tools are teachers. They carry within them the wisdom of their long use. Their design is iterative, formed by the needs of the countless unnamed carpenters that have come before us that needed to work wood in the same ways: to cut, square, form, fit, join and finish.
Hand tools teach through error. A hand saw will teach you how to make a straight cut by yielding crooked ragged cuts until you learn how to use it well, how to handle it, its nature, and the nature of the wood it is cutting. A plane will teach you about woodgrain through tear out, uneven edges and countless ruined boards. The hand tool has no opinion of us. Its judgement is purely material. The cut is straight or it isn’t. It waits for you to get better, to pass through the necessary humbling of apprenticeship and into the wisdom of respect - for the material, and for the tool. The hand tool assumes you are not yet finished and asks you to grow.
Artificial intelligence, specifically a Large Language Model, is a different kind of tool, one we haven’t seen before. It is a tool made of words - our words. It is a tool we can speak to. It sounds like us, which makes us think it is like us. This may be an emergent characteristic of the words it is made of as much as the algorithms it runs on. Because, language is also a tool. Like a hand tool, language carries within it the wisdom of its use, of all the unnamed human speakers that have used it before us. Words, even more than tools, have the power to make the world. They build the made things of the mind.
The words an LLM uses are not neutral. It flatters us. It finds us where we are and encourages us there. Not because it likes us, but because it was built that way: not to tell us the truth, to keep us in the conversation. Those two things – truth and encouragement - can overlap, but they are not the same thing, and the difference matters more than we have yet to understand.
What sort of apprentices is this tool making? If we believe the flattery of our unchallenged opinions, our unexamined beliefs, our untested skills, could we lose the inclination to expand ourselves against the world's resistance? Will we cease to do the necessary work of remaking it? Might we even begin to forget that this is our sacred duty to do so?
The Sacrificial Sheet Paintings
These are sheets of MDF: medium density fibreboard - perhaps the least loved material in woodworking. They are the salvaged sacrificial sheets from the bed of a CNC router. In CNC work, the sacrificial sheet is the substrate that holds the material in place while the machine cuts through the material above. Typically, these sacrificial sheets do their work of protecting the machine and supporting the material and are thrown away. I have opted to honour them instead.
The sacrificial sheet is something like the machine's unconscious. The unintended output. What happens when it is busy making other plans. Traced into its surface are the marks left when the process wasn't producing the desired object, The router paths criss-crossing its surface are a record of work performed. However, when time and sequence are removed and the order of events is gone, everything is simultaneous. In that way the sheet holds something like flattened time. A week of work, all present in one moment.
These unintended traces become something new: a pattern orderly and precise, yet entirely random. It looks familiar, like something that would carry meaning or intent, but in a language we don’t know how to read. The mind longs to find order in the lines, to find sense in the forms, and senses something nascent in them. A discarded piece of the made world seen anew is also a kind of making.
Tools change. They always have. The CNC router put a computer between the hand and the made world, removed skilled work from the shop floor, and replaced the knowledge that lived in the body with a file that lives in a machine. This is not entirely a loss to mourn: more complex forms became possible. Unpleasant, repetitive work was reduced. But something migrated out of the hands of the carpenter and did not come back.
The CNC machine stands between hand tools and AI. It is a tool change that we have already lived through. With these sacrificial sheets, I am looking for something that slips through the process of optimization. My hope is in the ability of the human spirit to find beauty or meaning in something that the system does not recognize as valuable.
When a new tool overwrites the tool that came before, it can seem like nothing but loss. But there is always a remnant. If that remnant can be redeemed, it can then redeem. The builder refused can in turn refuse. The stone that the builder refused can become the chief cornerstone.
It has happened before.
Matt Wood Gerrard Art Space, Toronto April 22 – May 10, 2025
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