An ongoing conversation between Helen Carnac and Andy Horn:

Landscape of memory…

Tybee Island, Georgia, USA, Feb 2008

I am aware that I have been rather ‘slow’ in my response to your last post Andy and this could indeed start to become rather a cliché in my posting habits. Being a new comer to blogging I am feeling rather inexperienced in this kind of format and the challenges that throws up whilst trying to reflect and respond.
Having returned from three weeks away I feel that I have needed to think about all that I saw and did and to discover if that has a bearing and impact on what I am thinking about in this project.

My first over-riding thoughts of my trip are of a more political nature, of poverty and wealth, of elections and of war. My most abiding memory currently of 100s of US troops being paraded through Atlanta Airport, cheered on by, what seemed to be, everybody there.

Over the last week I was interested to watch a highly informative discussion about the aftermath of the Iraqi war, chaired by Jon Snow and broadcast between films, over an hour long channel 4 news broadcast, live from Amman. Despite the obvious difficulty in putting this together and the challenging commentary/discussion I felt inspired to be party to the opinions and debates of these important figures: the opposition; the questioning and the pushing for voices and representations that might be over-looked or completely silenced.

You might ask what my point is and what this has to do with the slow project but it occurs to me that we are fortunate to have the opportunity to have such an open and public discussion and the freedom to discover on our own terms, not at the behest of a political movement or agenda or at least for the most part, barring such issues as the rather obvious positioning of the crafts in historical terms and as you comment ‘closely allied to fine art practices’

I guess a blogging format can extend an opportunity to reach a wider constituency and potentially encourage an International and open debate. I still hope this will happen. Whilst away I thought more of difference rather than of likeness, of how I have very inherent systems of value/s and how and why we all behave and think differently. Whilst the pace of life here seems rushed at times I am aware that this is even more the case in the States, the rush and push seeming palpable.

Having also attended the Society for North American Goldsmith’s conference in Savannah, GA I was most interested in a presentation by Iris Eichenberg. Iris traversed her work from the present backwards. She talked of Heimat and how we can’t escape the landscape of memory and life or perhaps the memory and life of landscapes that we live with and through: how this seeps into all aspects of our practice and transcends all we touch. As she commented ‘Time passing but always returning’

So having come home it is to notions of ‘time’ that I return: of timeliness; of grasping and grappling with time and getting back to notions of being in my own time. It’s time to get back to my practice and the making and that which will ultimately engage me back to a place of my own reality of slowness and the genuine rhythms of my working process.

David Gates, March 4th

Making…… a slow revolution?

Hello Helen and Andy thankyou for asking me to think about your project, when I first thought of how I should frame a response I was drawn to thinking about how we consider the meaning of the word slow and I include the text as far as I got during that one session below in italics, but since tapping out those rather stuttering thoughts I have taken some time out of my usual routine to make a visit to be at the Schmuck jewellery event in Munich. What I did there and catching up with 4 days of emails upon my return has caused me to directly think of my time and its value to me as a maker and to think about the role of the workplace as a craftsperson, reading Richard Sennett’s most recent book has led to many ambling thoughts but I cannot get much further at the moment than to think of him as someone on the outside looking in, in the same way as Peter Dormer learnt letter cutting as part of the process of writing The Art of the Maker Sennett is drawing out what he wants to see and applying it to his utopian vision, for political change, for humanity in our lives; and I do not disagree for one moment with this stance and vision to reconnect with a more meaningful expression of life but as a somewhat dystopian counter to this has been the experience of the foundry in Munich which has just hosted ‘In response to…’, an exhibition of metalwork.

The reason for my visit was partly to deliver some of the work but also to ‘respond to’, as a maker, the project in writing and photographs. And far from the bucolic vision of craft as a haven, as resistance, craft as a utopian next to godliness this is a site where the work simply gets done. My first response even as one who spends many hours in a workshop was god this place is filthy, this is a place where the workers will get cancer this is a place of the urban reality of small scale production, where the commissioning artist or visitor may encounter a romantic picturesque version of what it means to work directly with materials, with heat and noise and dust. It is not romantic. It is filthy. It is much grubbier than my place but it is recognisable, urban, cold, cramped, a site of work and bereft of luxury or comfort. We too drew up some tables to eat communally whilst setting up the show, it took one of us 20 minutes to clean down a table to a useable state, there was little to sit on and every surface, vertical and horizontal was encrusted with plaster dust and wax. People spend their lives here, they are professionals who do a fine job of workmanship they work hard and to exacting deadlines and tolerances but the reality of the romantic view of the outsider of this urban landscape is much like our interpretation of the sublime beauty of the Victorian landscape painting. It is distant, and viewed through the prism of that romantic distance we do not recognise its brutishness and coarseness. It is good that things are still made in the centre of Munich but next door to the sex shop on Schleiβheimer Straβe with the cracked roof lights and the dirt is perhaps closer to the urban heart of small scale production than the romantic view of craft. Where one can really attempt to sit in opposition to the machinery of capitalism.

One of those emails that I had to respond to on getting back from Munich was to explain at length to an enquirer/potential client how I had arrived a quotation, there seemed to be little understanding at a very basic level, even though there was a familiarity with my work, that what I do is based in and dependent on time, even after an explanation that along with most craftspeople my materials are a minor element in a final cost and that most of what we do is rooted in countless hours at the bench, the request is to try to halve the quote, to those who know how things are made it is surely plain that this will result in a different product, maybe not better, maybe not worse but in essence, in its form and nature very different . Not my work.

Thinking about the parallels of craft and the slow movement as it has come to be known mostly through artisanal food production can be a useful way of thinking about what we value in craft. But I think that I have two issues; one is the word and the other is the meaning to maker and the consumer.

Slow is word defined almost entirely by negative connotations, mostly adjectively slow pulls its subject back condemning it to a socially unacceptable condition; the journey home was so slow, the slowest competitor lost the race, slow learner. The word has a social life that defines how it is interpreted; indeed this is how words work but perhaps our word is loaded with the expectations of the world and its systems beyond a simple meaning.

Slow implies some kind of relativism but it is strangely absolute in its condemnatory mode. Things take as long as they take, slow compared to what? This is how long something takes to do, not longer, not shorter. We don’t have a rulebook of times allowed to give form to objects or events; expectations are conditioned by other parameters of inexperience. Partly because most people in forming the societal paradigm are not producers, they are consumers. Consumption as production; shopping as making.
I suggest that the perception of slow comes from the consumption side of the exchange, a panacea to the pace of life? More likely from the maker the ideas of provenance, care, thought and stories, the things that are bound within an object that has taken just the right length of time to be made.

So is it really slow? It is perhaps just the right length of time and time as an experience is just how long it feels. When making, the feeling of time passing becomes part of the object forming, time is part of form. Time marked out by action and movement. Sound and meter. In the rhythm of making the time feels right and feels of nothing at all, time and form as fluid markers in a day.

The processes and actions of giving form are intimate and explicit and demand engagement, a conversation, never just orders. The plan can change; responsive and reflexive. Draw: do: think: do: solve: change. The thinking of doing and the doing of thought. The iterative behaviours of working practices happen progressively and cyclically, not everything happens at once.

I suggest the words timefull and timefullness in opposition to slow. An object or form that is composed partly of time, full of the time that it took to bring to bear and the sense of thoughtfulness and consideration that a word like timefullness might imply.

So the timefullness of the cyclical iterations of problem solving and directing material. And the timefullness of rhythm, stance, action and breath, the linear markers of time and acts.
A sliding point on a bicycle spoke rolling forward.