The Massey hammer

In 2006, Brisbane-born artist Robert Barnes accepted a residency from Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, to paint the site of the former railway repair workshop at Inveresk. Part of the large industrial complex dating back to the nineteenth century, Barnes chose as his subject the abandoned forges, coke-encrusted furnaces, benches and tools of the blacksmith shop for a series of thirteen canvases, grand in scale and rich in texture, colour and history. As Barnes once explained, 'The ordinary becomes the extraordinary'.

'The Massey hammer', executed in the artist's trademark thick, impasto swirls of grey and brown oil with flashes of red and yellow glistening from chains and the scattered remains of discarded tools, is a nostalgic reflection upon the end of the machine age. Produced by B&W Massey of Manchester as early as the 1860s, the steam hammer enabled rapid and accurate blows to be struck for the die-forging of mass produced articles such as bolts, rivets, wrenches and other tools. Barnes paints the motionless metal giant, silently entombed in its factory shrine, without human presence, stilled by the progress of time.

To complement the painting, Barnes wrote 'The Massey hammer', reflecting the artist's wonder at this towering mechanical giant and desire to link the past with the present:

A space owned by power
The verb of black
which moves the ground
the workman's gavel demands
a sentence for case hardened steels
that's true for time
Precise in length and then transported manually
with ball greased chain rattling
now made permanent, with my paint, for every age.