This four-day workshop at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture focused on the concept of tools. It was intended to be as much about creative thinking as about craft. As described by the artists, “Tools aren't just functional - they're metaphorical. The human condition is a design condition and perhaps the first tool was intention: we don't merely adapt to our environment, we shape it. And we also shape ourselves through the repeated use of tools – each one remakes the hand that holds it and the eye that guides it, mirroring its times, and anticipating possible futures.”

The workshop's technical component introduced participants to hands-on techniques: forging metal, carving cuttlebone moulds for brass casting, creating polystyrene forms for bronze greens and casting, and splitting stone with the ancient wedge & feather method. “But in a world overloaded with devices, both real and virtual,” they continue, “the provocation to our participants was to integrate the casts with found materials from site into individual 'thinking tools'. Contemporary art arguably serves as a tool for rethinking - partly thanks to Dada's radical objects that challenged utility, aesthetic norms, and capitalist conventions, introducing the use of junk, broken tools, waste. The site-specific materials that offered a perspective on deep time perspective was Archaean dolomite, a sedimentary stone ca. 2.5 billion years old and embedded with stromatolites - remnants of Earth's earliest microbial life and the bedrock of the Cradle. Each participant selected, split and polished a stone which was placed in tension with their cast object and the works were titled to express the conceptual thinking.”