Take Me Make Me Workshop

Last Saturday JMB Collective were at Camberwell Open House.  We were giving out Take Me Make Me boxes - a kit of stuff to make with and asking people to have a go at making something from the ingredients in the kit.  Some of the results are pictured here!  Each kit had a different set of familiar objects in it, we hoped it would inspire people to look differently at the objects surrounding them at home, and what their potential could be.
We had a lot of interest and gave out 60 kits (thank you if you were one of those who took part) and got some great feedback from our visitors. 

Kit preparation

Tom Price

Necklace prototype

Ring base

Video at the V&A

This is a snapshot of my video, Making a Bangle, playing in the Power of Making exhibition currently showing at the V&A.

Making a Bangle

I made this short video explaining how to make a bangle, hope you like it!

Making a Bangle from bridget harvey on Vimeo.

The Art of Craft

  

Image is taken from the original article

Tomahawk hairdryers by Jean-Baptiste Fastrez, whose site is here 

Here is the link to quite an interesting article about the rise of craft making, from the Guardian.

Matthew Harris

Lantern Cloth No. I  Image taken from Matthew Harris's site

 Matthew Harris is a textile and paper artist and writer.  His work is inspirational, using dyed and hand stitch cloth for textile based mark making.  

See his site here for more information about him and his work.

Belleville Boutique

Belleville Boutique is a beautiful cafe, deli and homewares store with an attached gallery space based in Westbourne Grove.

I have made a series of trays, knives and spoons to accessorise duralex glasses for them, also cotton cuffs for the glasses, should you wish to drink coffee from them.  They are all carved from maple wood, hand shaped, dyed and polished.  The spoons follow the grain of the wood, hence their gently curved shapes.

Ira Glass on Story Telling

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Craft Masters

 

 

Images of master craftspeople from around the country including the picture above, 

link to the gallery on the guardian site here.

The Use of the Made

A question which popped up when reading yesterday:
Is it (witnessing) the use of the made that validates the maker? (and the made?) (and even the making?)

I don't think it is, I am not sure that making needs validation, a reason. I believe that the pure action of making (whatever the discipline and intended result) is enough in itself to create meaning for the maker.

However, does making become more valid if there is a purpose for the made object outside of the makers hands? Does making become more important if it offers social value (a blanket knitted for a charity for example)?

(The book & page etc that inspired the question:  Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, p187ish)

A bit of thinking

One arrangement of the thoughts I was having after re-reading parts of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft (otherwise known as The Case for Working with your Hands), a bit more David Pye and listening to Richard Sennett and David Gauntlett on the radio yesterday.  I have arranged this in a variety of ways - flickr link to come - and this is by no means the end of my post-it notes and ideas on the subject, but for me at the moment the main questions are as follows:

Are modern methods of sharing (you tube tutorials etc) any less valid than traditional master/apprenticeship tutorials?

Is physical making more valid than out souring ones making, and just having the idea or concept yourself?

By valid I mean does it hold less value (emotional, financial, experiential)?

There are obviously things that one cannot get from videos or online picture tutorials, similarly to learning from a book, that you do get with a master teacher, learning directly from an expert, but is that due to the lack of skill with which we use the resources (could we make our video tutorials more detailed for example) (idea discussed by Richard Sennett on R4 show, Thinking Allowed)

Is an idea or concept any less of a made thing than a physical object?  Does the skill of the outsourced maker lie in not adding their own personality to the object they have been asked to make?

Many many questions sparked off by these heard conversations and read ideas.   More to follow on this.

Knotting and Binding

 

Morning experiments

David Pye

Reading this book (written 1968) has truely got my brain going.  This is a primary list of questions/thoughts it has inspired in me, and quotes from it:

'On the workman's depends a great part of the quality of our environment' (p17)
'It may be mentioned in passing that in workmanship the care counts for more than the judgement and dexterity; though care may well become habitual and unconscious.' (p20)

If risk is only in the workmans hand, does the making of a (successful) machine lead from stored risk to stored success and deflated/depleted risk?
'"Is the result predetermined and unalterable once production begins?"'(p22)
Can risk lead to the creation of certainty?

'The workmanship of risk has no exclusive perogative of quality.  What it has exclusively is an immensely various range of qualities, without which at its command the art of design becomes arid and impoverished.'(p23)
Is this still relevant?  I believe it is, however I also believe the quality of mechanical production has improved sine the advent of computerisation.

And once again, the tool as an extension of the hand crops up (p28) - when making, are we, the makers, part of the machinery?  Do we become the tool?

David Pye

Am currently reading this book and thoroughly enjoying it.  David Pye was a great thinker.  His best known idea was about the workmanship of risk - where one slip of the human hand making the object could ruin or change the outcome of the whole piece - and the workmanship of certainty, mechanised mass production, where a machine churns out many identical and well made copies of one object.

What makes a maker?

 

Recently I have started to question what makes one a maker and what drives us to make.  I have noticed that during the recent co-design workshops led by The Textile Sampler and the previous workshops to those that the participants, myself included, light up and become more energised as soon as they are armed with a making tool, even if it is as simple as a felt tip and a post it.  The discourse comes alive and ideas flow.  However I have also noticed that the more involved in making one becomes the less interactive it can be - the participants, absorbed in their making/drawing/experience, quieten down and withdraw from group communication, albeit it with occasional input - they are still listening, a very different but equally important form of engagement.  I wonder if the same interest bubbles up in a business environment, whether people in those fields feel more alive when given the chance to create/draw/write in a bright colour.

Interesting Article

http://www.beautifulwood.co.uk/blog/grayson-perry-on-art-and-craft.html

Worth a read!

Work in progress