TOM TURNER

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS

The drone unravels into yarn,
each loop a prayer, each stitch
remembers what the hand has done.

What flew in metal now rests
in fibres—surveillance softened,
threat made tender.

Hours fold into hours: the hook,
the pull, the patient knotting
of what refuses to explode.

This is how we disarm the sky:
one mindful motion at a time,
opposing violence,

making the unmanned manned again--
or womaned, fingered back
into the body's slow insistence.

The drone that cannot kill
still hovers. We hold it
like a question with no trigger:

Can care undo what care has made?
Can the hand that crochets also

unknit the war, the watching eye,

the remote control of grief?
The yarn says: possibly.
The yarn says: begin here.

Lay down your weapons.
Pick up your hooks.
Let softness be the lasting word.

Tom Turner Artist Statement

These work present military weapons rendered in crochet—a medium traditionally associated with
domesticity, care, and the handmade. By translating an instruments of warfare into vulnerable
string, the work interrogates the distance between violence and nonviolence, between the hand
that destroys and the hand that creates.

The act of crocheting weapons is itself a form of laying down arms. Each stitch represents hours of
meditative, repetitive labour—the same hands that could hold weapons instead hold hooks and
fibre. The weapons, stripped of lethal capacity, become disarmed through transformation. What was
designed for surveillance and strike capability is now rendered harmless, even absurd, in its soft
materiality.

Drawing on the lineage of artists like Deirdra McGowan (whose work examines craft, labour, and
political resistance), this piece engages with craft as protest. The "lay down your arms" imperative
becomes literal: the work asks us to consider what it means to dismantle tools of war through the
language of care-work, to render the threatening benign through patient, domestic labour.

The crocheted weapons exist in tension—simultaneously toy and threat, comfort object and
reminder of surveillance and destruction. They ask: What would it mean to truly lay down our arms?
Can we unmake violence with the same hands that made it? The work offers no easy answers, only
the quiet insistence that transformation is possible, one stitch at a time.

I crochet to disarm. These weapons—handmade from hemp string and wool—are slow, domestic
counterpoints to the speed and anonymity of modern warfare. By rendering military machines in
materials associated with craft, repair, and the body, I invite viewers to reframe power as fragile and
negotiable. The stitches map a human rhythm onto objects designed to erase human presence; each
loop is an act of refusal.
Lay down your arms is both a plea and a method: the work asks weapons to be translated into
gestures of care. The weapons’ silhouettes are intact but their texture is soft; menace is neutralized
by the visible labour of my hands. As a male maker, I confront also inherited associations of
masculinity and force by choosing a traditionally domestic technique to speak about disarmament,
vulnerability, and responsibility. The pieces are not an indictment of individuals but a call to imagine
alternatives—mechanisms of protection that do not depend on distance, secrecy, or violence.