hen mastery of the gesture is achieved, what it feels like becomes inscribed within our deepest recesses. Through consistent repeatability and deliberate flow, the gesture develops its own intimate relationship with the material, whose fragility, resistance and strength continually poses challenges. Learning and doing teaches us to sense, and foresee, our own limitations. After all, we are only made of energy, electrons, protons, neutrons fighting indefinitely for their place, a vast game of musical chairs, a profusion of energy in search of equilibrium.

The moment the tool touches the material, this equilibrium is weakened – potentially to the point that it might be destroyed. Whether with fine tweezers to handle a component of a delicate assembly or a hammer to pound a lump of red-hot metal in the forge, we impact the material, at the risk of exceeding its limits and ruining it.

There are of course ways to calculate and predict the degree to which a part might be deformed. When it comes to the gesture, however, these calculations and predictions cannot be external inputs: they are arrived at, intuitively, by the hand itself, from deep within its muscle memory and reflex sensitivity. Indeed, the brain is much too slow to react to the immediate feedback from the material.

Materials are unpredictable; they take on so many forms and react in so many different ways that the hand, to be fully in command, must be able to “receive” and “transmit” signals while partially dissociating itself from the rest of the body; so it can absorb only positive energy and free itself of any tension.”

Excerpt from Horological Alchemy | Editions Favre, Lausanne