From Malcolm Martin, carver...

This is carver Malcolm Martin quoted in Paul Harper's address to the Furniture Society Conference "The Poetics of Making":

"My understanding of carving has been framed by these tools and this work they have created. Framed not only in the intellectual and imaginative sense, but in the very way that muscle groups within my hand, wrist, arm, shoulder, back, legs, control the gouge and the resulting mark. This is a very physiological process, not merely psychological. Because I have learned to carve in this way, in this practice, with this gallery of works, I am, in at least one sense, co-temporal with the Egyptian or Mediaeval carver, which is to say that as carvers we inhabit the same world, the same time. Their gestures, action, have become mine, mine were theirs. This is what creates links across time, and why the presence of an ancient object so made is to have times meet in a way that is absolutely shocking."

What Malcolm Martin describes is the foundation of human culture. Take the hand away and see what's left of it.