What is a Pickle Fork?

As a child in my grandmother’s attic,
I spotted a silver-pronged object
abandoned in a laundry basket,
with its mother-of-pearl handle
gleaming in a shaft of light.

I was astonished and delighted
when the adults agreed I could keep it.

Loving its mix of metal and pearl,
its mechanical precision and proportions,
I kept it for years and years,
with no clue what it actually was or
what it was designed to do. 

As I cherished its precious material,
exquisite craft, and undefined purpose,
I realized I also was defining what
I valued in my own work in visual art.  

An assignment for art students was born:
Choose and describe a physical object;
Then — surprise! — connect and contrast
that chosen object to your visual art. 

Two decades after bringing my mystery object
into the classroom, I still had no idea what it was.
Its lack of known identity grew integral
to its repurposed life in pedagogy.

One semester, as I explained the assignment
and passed around the pearl-handled prongs,
a student looked at me in apparent disbelief.

“It’s a pickle fork,” she said. “To serve pickles.” 
Of course!

For 30 years, Laura Holland taught a writing course for art majors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she previously developed art classes for children and incarcerated adults. After learning bookbinding techniques to use in the classroom, Laura began making and exhibiting artist books, and has curated several exhibitions of students’ book art. She has a degree in History and Philosophy of Religion from the University of Chicago and a BFA in Painting from University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2017, she joined Gallery A3, an artists’ cooperative in Amherst, Massachusetts.