When confronted with musical sculptures made of steel the question of the meaning of steel emerges. What steel means and how this meaning is made is of course open to discussion. In the case of Bob Rutman the inventor of the steel cello, steel was a material used increasingly by neo avant garde artists in the 1960s and as the titles of his work suggest, Industrial Meditation, his claim for them as Industrial Folk Instruments, the industrial qualities of the material were classically juxtaposed with the sacred quality of the sounds and the naïve instrumental quality.

Steel to me represents the quintessence of industrial power. A material stronger than anything found in nature which is forged out of an amalgam of scientific knowledge, sweat, monumental natural forces and the organisation of human effort. In Britain it  was synonymous with communities built around it, the words Sheffield Steel or made in Sheffield testify to the global reach of their work hardened lives. A material which so embodies the spirit of industrialisation that the man god of industrial progress, Stalin, took it as his name.

In the world that I was born into, steel was heroic, by my twenties or the late 1970s, that world was in its death throes and with it steel was fallen, degraded, dying. Those proud, hard working communities now collapsing rust belts of derelict buildings, and broken machinery. With mass unemployment industrial towns were gigantic scrap heaps of industrial machinery, products and labour. For artists of my generation the use of industrial metals in performance was a register of industrial and urban decay often expressed as anger loss, grief, frustration and the pain of transition into the post industrial world.

In the post industrial era, steel, stainless steel in particular increasingly became a material of style. It’s sleek semi reflective surface, ambient in character, clean and easy to clean, became an object for domestic consumption or an architectural material which symbolises the cold power of global capital. Appropriated to speak the language of dominant consumer capitalism, in my eyes, its fall from grace complete.