For TK, by TK

This piece started simply enough: I wanted to make a Damascus chef knife for myself.

Somewhere along the way, it became something else; an endeavour, a touchstone to reflect on the opposing forces of nature, the behaviours we inherit, the realities we create, and the strange worlds that exist somewhere in between it all.

I’m not a good man. I’m not a bad man. I’m not perfect. But one day, I’d like to be whole.

That thread weaves its way through this piece.

The knife is a hand-forged full-tang integral bolster chef knife, made from my own 15N20 and 1084 Damascus, clad with gold resin dragon-scale handles and brass pins. It rests within the damascene tail of a serpentine dragon forged from 20mm mild steel. The dragon’s tail is pinned with a small brass star, and its body winds through a yin-yang made from two very different pieces of timber: a piece of red oak off-cut and a piece of red cedar reclaimed from an 1800s church pew.

The Damascus is made by forge welding alternating layers of two different steels together - layers of contrasting materials forged into something that can be later etched to mar the surface and show the true and slightly differing natures of two otherwise very similar materials.

Similar, but different. The timber carries another kind of contrast: one half is new, cut from something that would otherwise have been waste; the other has lived a life already, carries the history of an institution and the memories of people who once sat and confided within it.

New and old.

Creation and destruction.

Light and dark.

The yin-yang is often understood as a symbol of opposites, but I think the more interesting idea is that the opposites are not separate entities. Each contains something of the other. They push against one another, but that pushing also creates an inexorable movement between and around them.

I wanted the dragon to feel familiar, but difficult to place. It has no legs, deliberately sitting somewhere between the long, serpentine dragons of Eastern mythology and the winged, four-legged creatures more familiar in European traditions.

Dragons appear in stories separated by oceans, languages and millenia. Different names. Different temperaments. Different meanings.

And yet, somehow, we recognise them. I find that strangely compelling.

Was there ever a point where those stories were one? Was there some older creature, idea or story from which they all emerged?

Or is there simply something about the human imagination that keeps returning to the same shape? Like evolution and crabs…

Maybe the dragon is not Eastern or Western at all.

Maybe it belongs to everyone.

There is also a small star stamped into the brass tail pin. It doesn’t have a grand explanation. I put it there because I thought “lol, Dragon Ball Z, Steve would appreciate this.” Whimsy can be grand, and an object should carry a little mystery, keep ‘em on their toes.

The same is true of the question that sits underneath the whole piece: Was Puff once Smaug, or Smaug Puff?

And if two stories can travel so far apart and still somehow become the same creature in our minds, could they become one again?

I don’t know.

Perhaps the point isn’t to know.

Perhaps the point is that we are all made from opposing things; what we were given, what we have done, what we believe, what we fear, what we hope to become.

We push and pull.

We draw ourselves in and back out.

We break things and make things.

And somewhere in that perpetual motion, the wheel keeps turning.

Maybe being whole doesn’t mean choosing one side.

Maybe it means learning to live with both.

Made at @EveleighWorks in South Eveleigh NSW;

Photographed at @NSW_Cutlers_expo by @rod_hoare ;

Reclaimed red cedar from @amongthetrees in Marrickville;

Scrap red oak from @anagotetimbers in Marrickville;

Dragonscale resin handle material from @ausmakersupplies