#beyondmaking

[ooficio]

Real Craft

"It’s a popular myth that old skills are dying out. You only have to look around to see high levels of craft skill still practised in everyday making and manufacturing – but much goes unrecognised, thanks to the bad press machines are sometimes given as an aid to manufacture. (...) These days the notion of craft skill aided by labour-saving machinery is common in all sorts of specialised trades. This is part of what I call ‘real craft’: real in the sense that it’s undertaken by highly skilled people in many fields in the everyday world; not in a fine art studio, nor at a heritage site, nor as a hobby or pastime. (...)"

Chris Eckersley, designer and curator for the exhibition Real Craft

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“I’m spinning wool with a stone spindle. The stone has been used for probably more than 30000 years. And when we twist fibers into yarn we are actually creating a spiral. And the spiral is a cosmic gesture of creation. When we look at our galaxy from outer space it is a spiral and we find spirals in many, many places: in the plant world, on the back of our heads we have a spiral. So this is an activity that brings us closer to the cosmos but at the same time we create something that is useful and beautiful with the yarn we have spun. (…)

The use of the hands is vital for the human being, for the flexibility, dexterity… In a way, the entire human being is in the hands, our destiny is written in the hands. And what do we do in the modern world with our hands? We move the mouse, we drive and such, we feel plastic most of the time. The hands are relegated to very little that is actually bringing dexterity in our times.(…)

If you do practical work somewhere on the school ground, if there is practical work going on, the children will all go to that, they’re really drawn to that, they want to experience it. And however the reality is, there’s less and less of that in the home. (…)

Children grasp first an item, then they grasp with their mind. So if they have very little to grasp other than ready made plastic toys, then what their mind grasps is very little. (…)

So it’s this loss of understanding of the value of things, of the meaning of things. And in handwork and transforming nature we also make something truly unique that we have made with our hands, stitch by stitch (…)

And when I do that I feel whole, I feel I’m experiencing my inner core, because it’s a meditative process. You have to find your way, you need to listen with your whole being. And that is the schooling that we all need today. Because we are so egocentric and this makes us think of what is needed by something else. So we are in a way practicing empathy with material, empathy with the design. (…)”

- Renate Hiller, co-director of the Fiber Craft Studio at the Threefold Educational Center in Chestnut Ridge, New York.