When Manufacturing Workers Make Sculpture: Creative Pathways in the Context of Australian Deindustrialisation

Abstract

Introduction: Engineering Patternmaking The subjects of this article are not ordinarily discussed in writing about Australian art. For that matter, the subjects of this article are not ordinarily discussed at all, in almost any discipline. The subjects in question are engineering patternmakers— and patternmaking is now a relatively obscure industrial trade. From the midnineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, patternmakers performed a fundamental role in pre-production for metal casting and also, by the mid-twentieth century, for a variety of plastics manufacturing methods. The trade produced the threedimensional forms that were necessary for moulds to be successfully produced. Patternmakers were not designers, since in their industrial roles they did not generate the original ideas for the forms to be manufactured. But neither were they production-line workers: their hands did not touch the finished products, and their work was rarely repetitive. Working from engineering drawings, patternmakers planned and produced the three-dimensional shapes used to generate mass-produced objects, usually using wood, but also resin, fibreglass, plaster, or metal. Alongside toolmakers, patternmakers made the forms for everything that was cast or moulded: from large earthmoving equipment to Tupperware containers, from glucose sweets to a car’s rear-vision mirror. In essence, patternmakers physically generated the original forms expressive of twentieth-century mass-production and consumerism. But to be a patternmaker who is also an artist? That is another thing altogether. The patternmakers discussed in this article are not examined in relation to their industrial work. Instead, I engage with the deindustrialised aftermath, when many patternmakers have shifted out of the manufacturing industry and into more creative endeavours. This article reveals how, for some patternmakers, their art practice can be seen as an assertion of technical, craft-based mastery in a context that no longer values their trade skills. For others, moving from patternmaking to art has fulfilled