It started with a rusty nut.
Not a metaphor — a real one, found in my garden, and still sitting on my desk today.
2018 - A head that had gone a bit quiet.
Life felt like it was speeding up and slowing down at the same time — busy, but dull. My "nut", the one on my shoulders, was going rusty. I needed a focus, something made with my hands. Around the same time, that old lump of iron turned up in the soil. I kept it. And somewhere between the two, The Rusty Nut got its name.
Where it began - Where the hands learned.
It began with signs — hand-painted railway boards, platform numbers, lettering picked out by hand and framed in weathered wood. That was where the eye and the hands got their training: how a piece should feel, how it should wear, how good it is when something's made properly and made to last.
Then came the stone....
Cast stone — poured by hand, heavy, smooth, no two pieces ever quite the same. Exactly the material for the kind of objects I wanted to make: quiet, considered things, built around the small rituals that slow a day down.