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As I sit and think about the past few days I can only think how lucky I am. One of the great parts of my practice has been travelling and meeting people and one special place that I have visited has been the States, where I have been met by generosity and friendship.
Yesterday for example, we went to meet June Schwarcz. I had not met June before but have known her work as an enamellist for some time and had recently been shown a film of June that an American TV company had made that was quite enthralling. I felt rather excited about our visit. A group of us went for sushi with June before heading back to her home in Sausalito, for ice cream and a snoop through June’s workshop. It is hard to write down thoughts in relation to meeting June right now, as I still feel slightly overwhelmed by almost everything I came upon: this amazing woman, the lemons growing at her doorway and the view out over the bay from the home that June has lived in since the 1950’s were just a start.
June is a remarkable woman, her work is a testament to her exuberance for life, she told me that she rarely has time to go out and does not make it in to San Francisco very often these days. This is mainly because she has so much work that she wants to do, she makes being in the studio her main priority. I feel privileged that she took so much time to be with us and shared her home and studio for the afternoon. There were several things that June said to me that will stay with me I am sure, one poignant point was about time and our notions of how time passes. I mulled this over later as we visited my friend Mike’s parents in Occidental. My first visit to their home had been 11 years ago and yet in some ways it seems like yesterday. As we drove through the woods I remembered/recognised the large old trees and walks made with friends.
Back in San Francisco this morning I am looking through a bag of scrap metal that June allowed me to collect from her studio. The remnants and remainders of her work, the circle remains: cut from shim copper, the marks and touch of the maker.
Hornton & Cotswold stone, Chipping Campden Library (1999)
Dear Helen and Andy
When you asked me to write something in response to your project, my first thought was to write about time. I thought about T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton and the dance at “the still point of the turning world”, which is an image that many artists and craftspeople are drawn to because it seems to speak to the experience of making, of being out of time, of time standing still. This made me think of my late father-in-law, the sculptor and letter cutter Bryant Fedden, because he particularly loved that poem and used it in his work, and then I thought that I would write about him. He embodied many of the values that are reflected in your themes. Bryant exemplified for me a certain kind of craftsman for whom the integrity that he put into his work was bound up with the struggle for an integrity of being.
Bryant was one of the principal reasons that I became a maker. I met him at a time when I was casting around for what I wanted to do with my life. He was a very fine craftsman with a distinctive style of carving, characterized by a sureness of form and a certain lightness of touch. But he also appeared to be reaching for a practice in which work and home, aesthetics and politics; a reflective interior life and an outward looking sense of society were all bound together. He aspired to live in a world of his own making. It seemed both intellectual and practical. Immensely attractive to a young man.
Eventually we established a group workshop, together with my brother-in-law, Matthew Fedden, in the Forest of Dean. We made work together and separately, and other people came, to assist us and to make their own work, attracted by the ethos that Bryant encouraged. These visitors included Bryant’s great friend Li Yuan-Chia. Li is regarded as one of the most important Chinese artists of the 20th Century, but in the 60’s he had eschewed fame and status in the art establishment. He settled in Cumbria, next to Hadrian’s Wall, where he opened the Lyc Gallery, which became a centre for his village community, with the motto space = time = life.
The workshops faced down a valley, across fields, towards the forest. Hills, fields and trees were arranged just so, in a way that seemed considered. In fine weather we would set up a trestle table under a tree and take lunch together in a grand style. We had a strong sense that our life and work was located, in the landscape, in the village, in a community.
When I think of the workshop, of course I think of the good work that we made there, but I think more about the mode of working: the process of settling into work at the start of the day; the mindfulness, the close attention to the present moment; the cycle of work and shared mealtimes; conversations; collaborations; the proximity to the house and garden; the children running in and out in the summer. I think of it as a focal point, which drew people to it and from which we worked outwards to engage with the world – through our making, of course, but also in ways that were somehow facilitated by our work. What do I mean by this? Well, partly it was to do with being around, being fit, practical people, sadly lacking in financial ambition, available to help out, but it was also about constructing a unity between our work and our social relationships. The artist Joseph Bueys maintained that people who worked with “substance”, who came, through patient learning, to understand the give and take of trying to manipulate matter, generalised that knowledge so that it informed all of their being. They lived life with closer attention, took greater pleasure in their daily experience, became better citizens. This is an idea straight out of Ruskin and Morris, and has recently been reiterated by Richard Sennett in his new book The Craftsman, where he argues that ‘the capacities our bodies have to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations.’
The workshops that we shared in Littledean, at their most thriving and coherent moment represented a cherished ideal for Bryant, they were inseparable from and all of a piece with the life that Bryant created together with his wife Kate – a very special thing, a “still point” around which we all gathered. This ideal is rooted in a tradition of craft thinking that is denigrated as ‘Romantic’. But it has a new resonance in the face of the alienating effects of late capitalist work practices, when we are trying to imagine a future without oil. I recently attended a local meeting, which was to consider the role of artists in the Transition Towns Movement. Some people talked about the role of the artist in communicating the problem, through work in schools or through “dramatic interventions”. Well, there has always been a role for the artist as illustrator or fool. Perhaps, though, the Romantic ideal of the crafted existence could help us to model more positive communities. Richard Sennett claims that the urge to be creative and to do things well are innately human, and that the denial of that urge in our working culture is profoundly damaging to our sense of ourselves and to our greater well-being. This suggests a healing role for the crafts in all our lives, in all our communities.
Critical debate around craft has seen a great resurgence in the last decade or so, but it has sometimes seemed concerned principally with positioning the crafts within the grand narrative of post-modern theory. Until recently it hasn’t greatly concerned itself with the kind of principals that are expressed in your themes. However, they continue to have currency for many people who build their lives around a craft practice.
Your project, in reasserting values that are part of a long tradition of craft thinking, is timely and seems to be part of a fresh debate. A debate that places craft alongside other ‘slow’ movements but also at the heart of wider debates about what kind of a world we want to live in.
The literary theorist Terry Eagleton has reflected on the impact of cultural theory in his book After Theory, and acknowledged that it has tended towards a distancing irony, which has been de-politicizing. He argues that, in the face of globalized capitalism and the “war on terror”, “theory must be harnessed to practical political ends”, and more broadly that it must re-engage with what it is to be human.
A human being is a craftsperson!
Yours in hope
Paul
Writing this today at my desk, our advert for the blog sitting within the newly arrived copy of Crafts, with you, Helen, undertaking research in the States, I was interested in the seeming disparity between the ambitions for a culture of thinking about craft represented within the editorial, with its close eye on trends and emerging practices happening internationally and closely allied to contemporary fine art practices, and the world of craft in the UK represented within the adverts and listings.
There are questions for our collaboration, as maker and exhibitions practitioner, about where we position our ambitions and proposal, both for the blog and the proposed exhibition. Something that will become more evident through further discussion and I hope expressed within the blog is how our research and exchange of ideas will be realised in a form that extends what we might understand of craft, and which also connects and resonates within the wider constituency of makers and audiences, whose experiences will be many and varied.
We have been talking about age and how this can be embodied within maker’s approach to their practice. This is particularly in light of your visit to the American enamellist June Schwarz who is ninety this year and continues to be innovative and engaged, enthused by the possibilities within her work. We have been interested in how age can embody a quality of slowness and what this brings to a person’s work. Droog Design represented this by their ‘Go Slow’ installation at Salone del Mobile 2004 in Milan for which Dutch ‘elders’ served and prepared food for visitors, encouraging them to participate in and savour simple experiences facilitated by Droog products.
Ceramic Review’s recently introduced column ‘If Only’, invites potters to reflect on things that they wish they had known when starting out. It is revealing of the value of spent, cumulative time and which combined with lived experience, brings the contributors to a different position and outlook on their life and work: Alison Britton wrote, ‘I wish I’d known how to be less edgy early on in my working life and arrived earlier at savouring uncertainty – the pleasurable and purposeful state of ‘not knowing’ is something that grows stronger for artists, and needs sometimes to be defended, and is perhaps one of the perks of getting older.’ (Ceramic Review Jan/Feb 07)
I particularly like Jane Hamlyn’s observation of the potter Ray Finch (born 1914), whose openness to the ongoing challenges of engaging with material and process, suggests the depth of commitment that a life of making can require and what this reveals about time, ‘Many years ago I went to Winchcombe and was lucky enough to watch Ray Finch throwing a cider jar. He had got to the shoulder and was closing it in and stretching the clay up to make the neck and finish the top….when it started to wobble, badly. He did eventually rescue it, but not without a struggle. I told him I was a beginner and that it was surprising but also really helpful to me in a way, to see him have difficulty. He just smiled ruefully and said “It doesn’t seem to get any easier”.
I have been reading ‘The Meaning of Things’ by the philosopher A.C. Grayling. He tells a story about one of John F. Kennedy’s speech-writers who in 1961 remarked that America was going to put a man on the moon not because it was an easy thing to do but because it was a hard thing to do; and doing hard things is what makes you better. Grayling continues ‘Anything that requires perseverance is a hard thing in the meaning of this saying, and therefore improves you.’ (Ceramic Review, March/April 07).
Helen Carnac wrote:
I have long held an interest in concepts of slowness in relation to time and making. As humans thoughts of time are constant, we are all broadly aware of what time means for ourselves or collectively, although I would argue in the larger scheme of things we may have lost some of the notion of our own time and doing things in our own time and to some extent we are required to work at somebody else’s pace. For me in my practice slowness marks a rhythm in the workshop and a pace within the drawing and making that I do.
As a maker and teacher in metals, my practice is many faceted and these facets interconnect to form a way of working and indeed a way of life. My home also contains my studio and so as Paul Harper wrote in the essay for the catalogue of the exhibition Process Works ‘ It is a short well worn step between the conversation at the kitchen table and the studio’. Indeed the rhythms of everyday life merge into the rhythms of my making practice. The slowness of this arrangement may not seem obvious as I constantly rush around trying to keep up with the different aspects of my working life, however behind this is an absolute commitment and a purposeful decision to be able to engage in a reflective and thoughtful practice, one in which I have chosen to slow down my production and to think and engage in what I am ultimately trying to do.
When Andy Horn approached me to ask if I was interested in collaborating with Craftspace on the ‘Slow’ project it seemed like the perfect opportunity to consolidate some ideas as well as to launch into further and new investigations in relation to slowness and to be involved in the exciting possibility of curating an exhibition.
When I met up with Andy to discuss the project in August 2007 I had just taken down the second part of a three-venue touring-exhibition called ‘Process Works’. This had been my first larger scale foray into the world of curating and although I had put up and taken down many exhibitions throughout my career, this had been a much involved and longer term project. So it seemed the perfect time to work with a professional curator who has been incredibly open to collaborative working and has warmly received my thoughts and considerations.
For me Process Works was a chance to explore my thoughts and reasons for making and doing, ideas of repetition, the making of mistakes and, ultimately the knowing that comes from all these things. I have always wondered at the hidden layers of work, the manifestation of making and the seeming ease in which all this can be concealed and so perhaps overlooked.
One of the most interesting parts of the whole process for me was in a form of slowing down, of reflection and consolidation and working in spaces with others, at points within the process: moving around, looking, sensing and realising whilst doing. I think this perhaps enabled me to understand something of the work that I had not previously: being with the work of others and talking about my initial perceptions of how they worked and how that perception changed through time. Understanding beyond where something has come from or where it was made, what it is made from, what that entails: how the making is a discreet language and how we articulate this was all important and still is.
Like Andy and Craftspace I have a real grounding in many aspects of craft practice and am also very interested in issues of value: in terms of material, sustainability and ethical considerations. Indeed I had been the Co-chair of the Carry the Can Conference, which Heidi Yeo, Elizabeth Callinicos and myself convened for the ACJ in the summer of 2006. This project has been an ongoing concern, and has been borne of an ever-growing interest in how we value material and the real or perceived value of making in our lives.
So as Andy and I have come together and discussed our various positions on the theme of ‘slow’ we have tried to think broadly and deeply about what this means to us and to others. It has also been our position that our thoughts and understanding of these matters are literally that and that in order to discover more we needed to talk openly to others and engage with their positions and thoughts on the subject before we put together an exhibition. It is also extremely important to me as a maker that Andy and Craftspace acknowledge that as a maker I bring a different voice, I use a different language: one of making. I have already learnt much from working with Andy and look forward to a slow and thought provoking onward journey.
Andy Horn wrote:
The journey that has taken me to this proposal, has, appropriately for the theme, been a slow one. It began, several years ago, in shared thoughts within our organisation for an exhibition exploring notions of time based practice and processes of making that might gradually reduce an object to its essence, qualities that appear apparent in work imbued with a minimalist aesthetic. We were interested in the comments made by the potter Rupert Spira in an issue of Modern Painters, comments which resonated with Jake Lever, our Education Officer at the time, who is himself a painter interested in the spiritual values of art.
Rupert had written, ‘A mystic’s job is to explore the true nature of reality, but more is required of the artist. He or she has to simultaneously make manifest the ongoing results of this enquiry in form. So the role of the artist is to provide a way that this presence can be approached and experienced through the senses. Sacred art is work that comes from a deep desire to explore the true nature of our experience, or from an intuition of it.’ (Modern Painters, summer 2001)
When it came to begin to realise these ideas within the beginnings of an exhibition proposal, I felt a need to move them forward and to question our starting point. A touring exhibition needs to reach out to a wide range of people, and as an organisation we aim to select work that represents a wide diversity of positions in response to a theme. The minimalist aesthetic appeared to me to be too exclusive and within the presentation of a gallery context, rather opaque, and I wanted to avoid an exhibition of ‘pale objects’.
The idea, however, of connectivity is a powerful one, and significant within the intimate relationship between craft and everyday life, and I was interested in how this might be explored in ways that visitors may respond to. In this respect, I was increasingly aware of the currency of debate around the slow movement and its call to reconnect people to experiences - those that engage with all the senses, connect us to a place, that are shared and participatory. Listening to the news and reading the papers, who could be unaware of what seem to be inter-related issues of climate change, depletion and rising cost of resources and materials, environmental degradation and the loss of indigenous species, cultures and societies – all of which are a product of our over-consumption in an increasingly globalised society. Politicians, religious leaders, journalists and cultural commentators increasingly exhort us to slow down and make reference to the slow movement as a model for our future behaviour.
Craft is one of the main victims of globalisation. The development of mass production is often at the expense of craft skills, both for industrialising countries where localised and traditional craft practices are overwhelmed by the economics of mechanised, largely urban production, and industrialised countries whose industries still reliant on hand skills are undercut by cheaper labour abroad. Tanya Harrod’s review in Crafts of a recent publication by the sociologist Richard Sennett notes the resistance of craft practice to these economic and cultural pressures, a resistance that might be seen as enabling it come full circle so that is given to represent many of the values embodied by the slow movement. She writes, ‘he identifies craft as an antidote in a world of post-industrial working practices that serve to damage the dignity of the individual, making it harder to construct life stories with a sense of cumulative achievement.’ Crafts, January/February 08.
I felt that many of the themes and debates within the slow movement persist within craft, both within my perception of the interests of many makers and the history and culture of studio craft. There are still certain generations of craftspeople for whom making and lifestyle are intimately connected, particularly for those established in rural locations, and the desire for autonomy is a significant motivation for younger makers. The process and experience of making, of tacit knowledge that brings together the hand, eye, mind, the lived experience and bodily knowledge that understands material and goes beyond learned skill is one which is deeply connected and driven by personal value. It is not something that is gained by being rushed.
The agendas within the slow movement are echoed within the debates of the Arts and Craft movement that continue to overshadow our understanding of craft today. They may be seen, for instance, in its political and moral undertone, its critique of the excesses of production and espousal of the individual, its optimism, its ideals of community engagement, the stewardship of process which seeks an ethical underpinning to manufacture, the desire to give value to material things so that they improve our lives, emotionally resonate and offer lasting value.
To debate the idea of slowness and the possible identity of craft framed by the ideas presented by the slow movement would seem pertinent territory for an exhibition. It is not that we would see craft as an answer to these world issues, but rather to question and explore what it contributes to the debate and its capacity to offer alternative models and values. As an organisation, we were interested in how collaborating with a maker, brings a different perspective and knowledge and connects to their specific understanding and language of making. As such I approached Helen, being initially interested in her role in developing the Association of Contemporary Jeweller’s Carry the Can conference which addressed the ethical production of raw material and the importance of the stewardship of this process within the worlds of jewellery and fine metalwork. Together we have developed an initial proposal for the project. It outlines some of our ambitions and intentions and includes this statement, which I think is a good starting point:
‘Slow is not a new concept in the crafts. In fact it would seem that notions of ‘slow’ are epitomised by Craft and processes within craft production and life. It is not a literal translation of the word that we are interested in, but the current debate in the understanding of the nature of Craft and craftsmanship, which is developing and how aspects of the slow movement are related. However there are more notions of Slow in relationship to time and process, economy and material, nature of production and consumption, community and society that we would like to explore through a set of craft philosophies.’
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