Carving the limewood cravat | Recreating Grinling Gibbons' limewood cravat | V&A

Grynlin Gibbons was a woodcarver working in the Baroque period. He's got work all over England in most of the stately homes, just kind of stunning collections of instruments and birds and garlands. Because he is so famous in the woodcarving world, it is the kind of aspirational pinnacle of where you want to get to as a woodcarver in a lot of ways, so he's a don of the woodcarving world. So this is one of Grynlin Gibbons' most famous pieces and it's a cravat which was owned by Horace Walpole and was actually worn to a party and fooled some of his guests into thinking it was real. So that gives you an idea of just how realistic it looks and it's very fine carvings of Venetian lace underneath a bow at the top. I'll be working from a combination of photographs I've taken of the original when I went to visit the V&A and they've also taken a 3D scan of it created a 3D print which gives me the outline and some of the kind of forms and details. The 3D print works very similarly to the models that carvers would have used in the past, so often if you're making a complicated carving you'll create a clay model and you might cast that in plaster and you'll be working to replicate that in the wood and the 3D print acts as an excellent stand-in for that. I'll be taking measurements to find the high points and then translating that into the wood and you gradually find points across the carving and you'll cut down to those and gradually refine the surface bit by bit. Bryn Llyn Gibbon's almost exclusively used limewood and you can see in his work particularly exactly how fine you can get, you can carve lace work from it, you can carve your strings of instruments, so it allows you to get that real precision in the carving. It's a sort of fact-finding stage, I'm taking lots of measurements from the model, transposing them to the wood carving. It's mainly a lot of measuring, a lot of finding where things are and getting them in the right place so that when you're adding all the detail that's going to sit over a really nice form. It's a stage I enjoy least I think because it's so important to get right, high stakes for messing something up. Chisels are quite varied, there'll be gouges, you get spoon bank gouges, back-bent spoon gouges, fishtail gouges, so there's quite a variety of names and little v-tools as well. Sometimes the first process would be called roughing out or blocking out, where you're getting in the main shapes and the main heights and it is a rough and blocky process which gives rise to the name. Sometimes people call it stabbing out which is when you're really outlining the cuts with the edge of your chisel to define the shapes that you're going to make. Gradually refine the surface bit by bit. When you have those locked in you'll cut in some of the details and the finer bits. I'm going to get as much done as I can do in within two weeks. I suspect here would have been much quicker. So first I found the curve profile over the whole object and then it was a matter of finding the measurements and outlining the edges of them and then taking cuts in either side and taking a shallowish gouge and coming in to cut out the bottom. You can see in the model of the carving that Gwynlyn Gibbons has done these really kind of decisive cuts. It's a very efficient way of working. It was really nice looking at that because it looked initially like the cuts would have been hollowed out by a kind of steep-sided eight or nine sweep gouge and it's really nice to see that he's taken these quite decisive cuts and one of the ways you can see he's sped the process up without sacrificing any of the quality. A lot of wood carving is done without a mallet so you're just using the pressure of your hands to move the chisel through the wood and that gives you more control particularly when you're undercutting and it's got very delicate. Replicating something somebody's done, especially when it's hundreds of years ago, because you're still using the same chisels, you're using the same tools and as you're working on it you can see the decisions they've made to how they've worked it, how they've worked particular problems out, where they've slipped and the chisel has cut a little bit deeper or they've had to change things and you're quite literally following sometimes the same kind of cuts which is a really interesting way of getting to know how that person was thinking or how they were approaching a job. I've used a little gouge to make these c-shaped or u-shaped marks that run sideways that Gibbon's used in a lot of places over this and I've used some flat chisels to take out the little v-cuts either side of the punch work which is another detail he did a lot of. And little gouges, the same little gouge I've used for the u-shaped cuts to give texture, I've also been using to give the shape of the material and stitching over these these nice round stitched areas, raised areas. The chisels have stayed relatively similar between now and when he was working I think. Now I'm going to be using a small v-chisel just to put the line detail lines in these strap work pieces that connect the larger kind of floral areas. It's nice to be able to learn from a master of wood carving even though we're still we're 300 years apart but you get to know the object really well as well because you spend days looking at it and measuring it and you just you end up seeing and noticing more about it than you would any other time otherwise because if you go to a gallery you're not likely to spend more 20 minutes looking at something but this you you know you really get get to know. When you come up closer again you can see the the way he's stylized the lace work and that's where all the magic happens I think. It's taking something that looks realistic from when you're not examining it closely and then you realize that he's done these things that make it makes them seem more realistic than if they were exact copies of life.