Woodcarving the past

Wooden printing blocks
During the late 1800s, the Liberty works at Abbey Mills produced beautiful block-printed silks by hand. These made Arthur Liberty a key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, which rejected the mass-produced workmanship of the industrial age. The reconstruction cameo for this Time Team programme was based around the artist woodcarver, Russell Parry, who was given the task of producing a finely carved wooden printing block in just three days.

'As a wood carver, I'll carve anything,' says Russell. 'The printing block technique is a little like glorified potato printing. Here I'm making a relief printing block for printing fabric. The design I'm doing is a copy of a matching set, which still survives in the Liberty archives. Up until the 1840s all printing blocks were carved by hand. After that they used metal dies to stamp out the complete design in wood. I'm actually hand-carving a copy of a metal stamped design, so it's a bit complicated.'

Fine tools
Using a selection of fine gauges and chisels, Russell works on the wooden plinth without using a hammer. Following the drawn-on design, he steadily pares away all of the wood that isn't part of the pattern and the floral relief gradually comes alive.

'I've probably got about 50 various tools that I use in carving,' he says. 'The wood I'm using is lime as it's quite soft. The more common wood used was from fruit trees, like pear or cherry, as that's much more hardy and longer lasting.'

Artists or artisans?
So were the carvers great artists or purely using their skill as part of the production technique?

'Though skill is required to make a piece like this the craftsman would have had no artistic flexibility at all,' says Russell. 'The printing process requires blocks of different colours to be stamped on top of each other and the original design would have been created by a separate professional artist. The poor chaps who actually carved the blocks would have only been able to follow the lines. If any of them had any artistic flare they must have been very frustrated.'

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