A KNIFe IDe A

Using responsibly-sourced materials to create properly unique kitchen knives, Bernard Caille of Nottingham Knifeworks is helping to raise people’s cooking game while raising awareness for sustainable living…

How did Nottingham Knifeworks come about?

I wanted to do something more creative. My day job just didn’t offer me that. Why knives? Well, many years ago I trained in blacksmithing and metal work. I grew up in France and the education system took me in that direction, but after training I came to England, and never got a chance to use these skills. 35 years later, I decided to do something completely different, and Nottingham Knifeworks was born.

How do you create your knives?

A knife must be functional, so that’s where I start. It is a tool that needs to do a job and do it brilliantly. One of my other passions is cooking, so I know how important a good knife is. I think about the aesthetics, the flowing lines, the feel of it. Since making my first knife a year ago, I have refined my designs and now settled on one that I really like. Having said that, I love to experiment, and sometimes I’m asked to create a knife with bespoke specifications; I love a challenge and doing something different.

Where did this passion for cooking come from initially?

I grew up on a farm, so the understanding and respect of produce was always at the heart of our daily lives. I did enjoy spending time in my mother’s or grandmother's kitchen, where I marvelled at the alchemy that is cooking. I arrived in London in the late eighties and worked as a waiter in a French restaurant - and that’s where I properly picked up the cooking bug. The food scene in the capital was going through a revolution and I was lucky enough to eat some amazing food.

How does your knowledge of and passion in the kitchen inform your process and your products?

I try to make knives that are as user-friendly as possible. So many of my customers tell me that my knife has become their go-to knife for all cooking.

That’s a great compliment. A knife needs to feel comfortable in the hand, not too heavy but just enough weight to cut through those ingredients with ease. I love to cook simple but tasty food. A basic tomato sauce can become delicious with good ingredients and seasoning. I use the same principle when making a knife.

You have a real focus on sustainability when making your knives. Tell us more about that… Key for me are the materials I use – both in terms of sustainability and durability. I love being creative with the materials I source or make. The steel is from Sheffield, less than fifty miles away, and is up to 95% recycled. The plastic handles are 100% recycled material. The wood from the vines I use in some of my designs, I literally pick from the discarded pile in the vineyard, every time I go to France. Other wood I use is from Nottinghamshire.

What’s your favourite material to work with and why?

PaperStone is the easiest to work with, it’s made from recycled paper and a natural resin and looks really cool. My favourite is old vine and resin, which is the hardest and most demanding to get right, but the results are incredible. It looks fantastic and is durable. No two handles made with old vine will ever be the same.

What does the future look like for Nottingham Knifeworks?

You use some pretty unique materials - recently you’ve done some exciting stuff with denim, and you’ve always got some cool wood knocking about. Can you tell me a bit about how all these materials complement your knives?

My latest venture is using old denim jeans to create an incredibly durable and very different-looking handle. When you decide to recycle, you realise that you can make almost anything work. There are some amazing recycled materials out there, like Smile Plastics and PaperStone, that are normally used for surface design but lend themselves incredibly well to other applications. A lot of trial and error is involved in this process, not everything works and looks amazing. As for wood, I occasionally use local walnut and am currently trialling some spalted beech.

I’m not aiming for mass production. I am a one man band, so production is limited. Working efficiently and honing my skills are goals for the next twelve months. Learning new techniques and refining designs is what I love. Every knife has its own geometry and purpose, each one is unique. Creating something that someone else enjoys using is what gets me up in the morning. nottinghamknifeworks.co.uk

The incredibly talented Payta Easton talks us through her ode to Nottingham…

Tell us a bit about yourself…

Hi, my name is Payta and I'm a freelance illustrator and electronic music producer. I use a range of analogue hardware for my music and often play live shows. I've lived in Nottingham since 2020 but I am originally from Singapore. For work I am a specialty coffee barista.

What was the inspiration behind the cover?

The inspiration behind my cover is the transition between winter and summer. March is the season transitioning into spring which, to me, represents the celebration of life and rebirth. I love the Nottingham music and art community, so wanted to celebrate some of my favourite independents by illustrating them in my design.

How does it compare with some other projects you’ve worked on?

This is definitely one of the longer projects I've worked on. Usually, I focus on illustrating my signature wonky animal characters interacting on a close-up scene, but for this I wanted to gain a broader perspective of Nottingham.

Tell us about some projects you’ve worked on in the past… payta.bandcamp.com

Previous projects I've worked on include rebranding The Carousel's cafe. I designed and painted the large wooden banner hanging above their cafe and bar, and I illustrated designs for their new menus. I've also worked on plenty of other personal projects including illustrations for album covers, hand-painted commissions, character designs for music events, tea packaging designs, and recently I collaborated with All Caps, a coffee roastery, illustrating wonky dogs for their coffee packaging. In terms of my music, I am constantly making new albums and EPs for my Bandcamp, as well as composing new tracks for my live shows and events.

What have you got planned for the future?

I have several upcoming live synth music events dotted throughout the summer. I am also going to two festivals to volunteer with their art and decor crew, helping set up the festival with signage and installations. I aim to continue getting involved in more art projects and focusing more on my music.

cRAg hOPPINg

Creswell’s First Collectors is the latest display at the Museum of Archaeology at Lakeside Arts. Local archaeologist Ben Normington introduces this ‘collection’ of artefacts made by early humans who lived in the Creswell Crags gorge in Nottinghamshire during the Ice Age…

The Pleistocene, more commonly known as 'The Ice Age', has forever been one of the harder aspects of our world’s history to understand. It was an environment completely alien and cut off in an informative sense from the one we occupy today, despite our ancestors roaming it. The Museum of Archaeology at Lakeside Arts has put on a fantastic new display encompassing some of the wonderful finds that have come out of the local Creswell Crags gorge over the years. The crags themselves lie in between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and are home to some of the northernmost evidence of hominid occupation in Europe. The collection here, while small, encapsulates a great deal of the key tenets of life during a time dominated by mega fauna and encroaching glaciers.

In the left-side of the new display cabinets, we see a series of bones from animals that no longer reside on the British Isles, even in an evolved sense. The remains of a cave hyena show perfectly how different the landscape and the life living within it would have been during that time. Looking in the right-side display cabinets, there are artefacts that would delight even the grumpiest of archaeologists, with an array of stone tools made by our fellow hominins (and, for many people in Central Europe, ancestors). Though lacking in some of the elegance we see in later tools, these are beautiful in their own right. They mark the existence of human pioneers spreading our earliest technologies and thriving in what would have been some of the most extreme conditions at the time.

Leading on from this superb glimpse into the ancient story of the land, a clockwise jaunt around the remaining exhibits takes us on a tour, telling the story of our ancestors who inhabited it. We see an array of amazingly delicate and masterfully crafted stone tools ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic, within a broad collection of fine cutting implements and much larger hammers and axes. These serve as an amazing example of how the same technologies have been reworked and perfected by us over time.

From here on, the museum guides the visitor through the Bronze and Iron Ages, showing how humanity’s path in the area skyrocketed. Displays of beautiful metal tools, weapons and cremation urns demonstrate this monumental shift in production value in comparison to the millennia predating them. It isn’t just tools that we see erupting from this period, though. It’s incredibly important to remember that within England, it’s within this time that we see metal jewellery and coins coming into circulation, demonstrating the progression toward a civilisation much more akin to our own. We are then offered a glimpse of life in Roman Nottinghamshire. This period occupies the largest portions of the museum, which is understandable considering how much the Romans left behind. The artefacts from this time stagger the mind in their refinement, with beads, metal work, jewellery and pottery much finer than anything that came before it. The large lead container is a must see.

Leaving the Roman period behind, we enter my personal favourite period: the Anglo-Saxon Early-Medieval period. The arrangement here is superb for a museum of its size and, honestly, I could write another article of its own on that, but sadly that's not what I'm here for. From here, we move through the Norman and Post-Medieval periods toward where we are now. I know I've just rushed through hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of human material history, but I hope I made my point. All of this fantastic innovation, all of the culture that has been allowed to develop in this area, started with people braving the cold and coming back to the northernmost reaches of this little island time and time again.

Holding over 250,000 years’ worth of this small pocket of the world's archaeology is a monumental feat, and the way it has all been curated is beyond amazing. The museum as a whole is well worth the visit and anyone interested in the deep pre-history of Nottingham should most certainly check out this new display of artefacts from the early collectors of Creswell Crags.

Visitors can see Creswell’s First Collectors for free between 12-4pm each Thursday to Sunday until Sunday 2 July. The University of Nottingham Museum is located at Lakeside Arts lakesidearts.org.uk