Responsible Making
Finds excavated at Babylon between 1902 and 1914 in Berlin (British Museum) I have talked before, in this space and more widely, about how I am a maker who does not make things. For a number of years, it has been a sort of existential issue for me, especially since I spend my time surrounded […]
Conversations with makers: Rob Anderson
I recently worked with Rob as part of Ambiguous Implements – a cross discipline exhibition that presents a collection of contemporary works that playfully reconsider the familiar objects of our day to day domestic life. I chaired a discussion at the Ambiguous Implements symposium featuring emerging makers, where we discussed strategies for developing and sustaining your career. I was suprised by how honest Rob is about his making practice, and the material-led methodology for making that he has evolved. I wanted to find out more about this process so caught up with him at Sheffield Institute of Arts where he is doing an MA in Jewellery and Metalwork.
Conversations with makers: Rachel Jones-Jones
I first met Rachel at the 3rd year work in progress show and was immediately taken by her project on failure and risk taking. I invited her to be part of the Makers & Tools project last year, and was thrilled by her engagement with the concept despite the demands of finishing her final year collection. Since then we’ve shared some excellent disucssions about the nature of making and our creative practices. In this conversation I caught up with her during her first term as Artist in Residence and we discussed what it’s like taking those first steps post-graduation, what it means if you’re not making and coping with failure.
Books to inspire: Why we make things and why it matters
With January being such a good time to take stock and reflect I thought my book recommendation this month should be a book that allows you to consider your creative practice through the eyes of another.
Peter Korn’s Why we make things & why it matters is a beautiful book. Part autobiography, part philosophy for living (and making) it is deeply personal and yet completely relevant to all people who aim to make a living from the work they do with their hands.
Guest blog post: Katy Gillam-Hull
This month there is a bonus Wednesday so I thought it might be nice to invite a maker to write a guest post and hear a different voice for a bit. I met Katy Gillam-Hull fairly recently, at New Designers One Year On, and due to the nature of her work (with found, historical objects) I felt like I was talking to a kindred spirit. I’ve been interested to hear her talk, recently, of a change in her practice, or the need to think about a change, so I asked her if she wouldn’t mind putting her thoughts down into words, to elucidate the current state of her making practice. Enjoy!
Thinking through making: wondering about tools
Not so long ago I made a couple of objects one after another. Of the two things, one gave me more satisfaction during the making, and the other brings me more joy as a finished object. The piece of twisted metal, that I spied on the pavement and pocketed, was quickly filed and made into a wearable object. The other thing – a tool – was a serendipitous moment where I realised that a brass ‘ring’ (a strip of brass folded into a geometric shape) that I made in first year of my BA and which, every time I wore it caught on my clothes and was too sharp on my skin, would finally have a home, wedged into the crack in an old wooden handle.
Continue your creative return – Locate your practice
Last week I recommended the excellent book – What they didn’t teach you in art school: what you need to know to survive as an artist. By Rosalind Davis and Annabel Tilley – a book full of excellent, practical advice on how to survive in your chosen career.
This week, I thought I’d recommend a book that will help you think more broadly about your practice, and how to locate it within the context of contemporary craft/art/design.
Notes on my creative practice: when is making not making?
Yesterday I made two things. One may stretch the definition of ‘to make’ and the other possibly falls under ‘re-purposing’ more than making. As I made them I wondered about this, whether the verb to make has enough elasticity to hold all the things we makers do as part of our practice. Even if, maybe especially if, we do not create things out of raw materials. You know where you stand with a maker who takes the raw material and creates something that didn’t exist before. It is magic, it is astonishing. It takes vision and skill combined. It takes patience and commitment. But what of the people who take something as it already is and adds to it, incorporates it into something bigger, adapts it or alters it? What then? It seems to me that there are still all the elements as before – the vision, the skill, the patience and commitment – however we might interpret the work as slightly different.
Introducing the Makers & Tools project
The Makers & Tools project came about out of conversations with makers. Just before Christmas, I was asked by a magazine to interview contemporary craft makers about their relationships to their tools. I selected six emerging makers, working in different materials and with different approaches, whose work intrigued me. In one interview, the maker told me how at the start of the academic year, she and her fellow MA students were asked to bring in tools for a tool swap, a kind of ‘get to know you’ activity. I asked her if she knew what happened to the tool she gave away, whether the other student ended up using it; she didn’t know. And out of that small element of our conversation, the idea for Makers & Tools grew.
Books to inspire: The Man who Made Things out of Trees
I picked up the book and knew immediately that a friend would like it. That an exploration of the possibilities from one tree would appeal to her. I knew that it would hold descriptions of the connection between material and process, material and object, material and craftsperson, that would make sense to her maker’s sensibility. I was excited to read it, so that I could send it on, with glowing praises and hopes that she hadn’t yet discovered it. I read the back cover, and smiled to see how Grant Gibson was ‘smitten’ by it. The promise of becoming completely absorbed in the prose. Of falling in love with a tree and the objects that it would produce.