Jacob Riddle: How to Grow a Hammer

May 21 - October, 2026

How to Grow a Hammer is a series of large, cast planters with willows growing through hand-forged tool heads crafted from salvaged Tesla car parts. Over time, the willows will become harvestable handles for the tool heads they have grown into. The work weaves together the legacy of the Luddites, who wielded sledgehammers as deliberate political critique, with willow's regional history as a material of repair and resilience, creating a tool that is both symbol and living thing. 

The work draws from two traditions at once. The Luddites, a 19th-century labor movement, wielded sledgehammers against automated looms not out of fear of technology, but as a deliberate political critique of how that technology was deployed and who it harmed. Willow, long used across this region for baskets, arrows, medicine, and stream restoration, continues to be a material of repair and resilience. Riddle brings these histories together in a tool that is simultaneously a symbol and a living thing. The tool heads are built from Tesla parts, components of a company whose interconnected empire has drawn mounting criticism for environmental impact, the amplification of hate speech, and an unprecedented reach into government. What separates a sledgehammer from a thrown rock is premeditation, and premeditation is a form of argument.

Riddle’s entry into this work came through a memory of a mentor who, after breaking an axe handle, hung the axe-head on the branch of a young tree and said that one day it would grow a new handle. That image, of faith in time and readiness, has shaped Riddle’s approach to art making.  These living sculptures are patient neighbors, rooted and slowly becoming, asking only one question: at what point does consideration become action?

Jacob Riddle is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator with a passion for foraging connections between technology and the natural world. Riddle is an Assistant Professor at Washington State University, teaching in the Digital Technology and Culture program.