unpicking

May 15, 2009 By Kate in craft, embroidery, History, memory, textiles, the life of things Tags: cloth, craft, death, embroidery, making, memory, poem, poetry, reading, sewing, stitching, textiles, The Emperor of Ice Cream, unpicking, Wallace Stevens 18 Comments

When thinking about process, there is nothing more instructive than unpicking someone else’s stitches.

I found a beautiful hand-embroidered cloth on ebay. I have plans for it. The plans involve deconstructing and transforming it into something else. I began by undoing the slip stitches of its heavy, worn cord edging.

Then I started to unpick the tiny stitches which attach the embroidered front to the cloth’s very fine silk back. The silk is faded but luminous, alive with copper and green.

The secrets written in the cloth began to reveal themselves. Neatly folded hems. Pale green silk thread that moved through the cloth like clockwork. An outer layer of heavy cotton satteen. An inner layer of lining satteen, fresh and bright because unseen for decades. Embroidery worked through both layers. Each thread end carefully woven and hidden. The back of the work faultless in its steady execution.

. . .and just as mesmerising as the front.

It was then that my fascination with the little mysteries of this cloth changed into a something else. I felt a sense of privilege and respect — in unpicking the stitches I was re-living the work of their making, admiring the skill of a talented needlewoman. But my act was also one of trespass: me and my snipping embroidery scissors were destroying a once-whole thing. And as I, blithe, curious, surgeon-like, began to examine the cloth’s insides, I uncovered the truth of its age: the satteen was of a certain kind, and a little older than I’d imagined. I was an historical vandal, cutting through the threads of time.

In cutting someone else’s threads, as in wearing someone else’s clothes, there is the frisson of encounter. We don’t know and will never know the person who made or wore the thing, but they are speaking to us nonethless, in the movement of their hand through the stitches, or in the the shape of their body left in the garment. There is something deeply uncanny in the silence of cloth and clothes: the trace of an unknown and never-to-be-known physical presence. (One does not buy second hand shoes, because one shies away from the ghost of the foot inside.) As I unpicked the stitches, then, a simple encounter between me and the cloth changed into a more complex one between me and its maker. Because I was un-making a made thing my act seemed an intimate one, but it was an empty intimacy, an intimacy with no content. The embroidered cloth was both speaking and not speaking: of a someone living in those stitches and of the silence of the grave.

Wallace Stevens’ brilliant poem, The Emperor of Ice Cream, (1922) has much to say about the dumb intimacy of embroidery — and of death. Stevens describes the covering of a woman’s corpse with a cloth she embroidered when alive.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam
(lines 9 – 15)

Here the corpse is, like the cloth she embroidered, an everyday material object. She reminds us of death’s easy finality. Yet she also suggests the mute compassion of the world of things. We feel the weight of her hands on the lost knobs of the well-worn dresser; her fingers quick movement through the stitches of the cloth that decorates her dead countenance. She does not speak, all we can know is her corpse and her cloth. And it is in the relationship between these two material objects that the essence of the poem (perhaps another object in itself) lies. Gaudy embroidered fantails will never cover death, but each small act of making is an end in itself, capturing the (perhaps pointless) vitality of the human. Now get back in the kitchen (says Stevens) and enjoy your ice-cream.

Having unpicked my thoughts I will get on with the uncanny work of unpicking.

knitter 66

March 20, 2009 By Kate in craft, knitting, Politics, textiles, the life of things Tags: Castle Street, co-operation, craft, Cranford, division of labour, Edinburgh, Edinburgh Repository, Edinburgh Royal Repository and Self Aid Society, Gaskell, handcrafts, Jane Austen, knitting, making, Nineteenth-Century women, Persuasion, selling, sewing, The Repository, Victorian Britain 32 Comments

Those who’ve read it might remember that the plot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion turns on Mrs Smith: Anne Elliot’s former schoolmate who, widowed after an unfortunate marriage, has fallen on hard times. Mrs Smith’s difficulties are compounded by physical pain: Austen describes her as an “invalid,” who is clearly suffering from what today we’d call arthritis. When Anne visits her friend, she finds her living “in a noisy parlour, and a dark bedroom behind…in a very humble way, unable even to afford herself the comfort of a servant, and of course almost excluded from society.” That “of course” says so much about the position of a nineteenth-century woman like Mrs Smith: her situation means a particular kind of social exile is inevitable. The difficulties of penniless widowhood are compounded by disability, and while her polite education might have fitted her for marriage, it has excluded her from the kind of paid employment a woman of labouring rank might seek.

Anne is surprised to find Mrs Smith both cheery and resilient. After a period of observation, she attributes her friend’s attitude to an “elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself.” The employment that carries Mrs Smith “out of herself” is making, and being paid for the things that she has made. She is able to sell sewn and knitted items through an intermediary, a nurse who, Mrs Smith tells Anne, is “an invaluable acquaintance. As soon as I could use my hands she taught me to knit, which has been a great amusement; and she put me in the way of making these little thread-cases, pincushions and card-racks, which you always find me so busy about.”

Women like Mrs Smith abound in nineteenth-century fiction. Because they are of a certain class, they are excluded from the division of labour, and their only means of any sort of financial independence is through the sale of their own plain or fancy work: an acceptably feminine employment in which all women of virtue might apparently participate (for the grim fate of those whose domestic virtues are questionable, see Lily in Wharton’s House of Mirth). In nineteenth-century novels (and indeed, in nineteenth century reality) these women retain the respectability of their rank by not undertaking the grubby business of buying and selling themselves: remember for example, how important it is that Cranford’s Miss Matty is saved from the fate of the shop by the interposition of her long-absent brother. However dire her financial circumstances, then, a gentlewoman stays a gentlewoman by not being seen to sell stuff for money. Mrs Smith happily has the nurse to do the selling for her, and other women might preserve their anonymity though the mediating actions of charitable institutions like The Royal Edinburgh Repository and Self Aid Society, which still exists today.

Founded in 1882, the Royal Edinburgh Repository and Self-Aid Society was established “to assist those of limited means to achieve an independent livelihood by promoting the sale of their own handiwork.” Originally managed by two New-Town sisters, the Society sold on the work of its indigent members at bazaars whose “tea cosies and Shetland wool cravats,” were satirised by a young and waspish Robert Louis Stevenson. Since 1946, the society has operated from a well-placed shop on Castle Street. Though its general social context has (thankfully) radically changed — making and selling things for money is no longer a source of shame for a woman of any class — in spirit and reality, the society remains remarkably true to its original aims and ethos.

(Mrs Vanderbilt’s charity bazaar)

Today you do not have to be a gentlewoman (or even a woman) to be a society member — but you do have to be of limited means, and be able to knit (or sew, or crochet) to a certain standard (everything sold by the Repository is ‘passed’ for quality by its executive committee). The member-makers are identified by number only, and all receive the full proceeds from any sale of their work. The Repository’s commercial politics seem quite complex to me. On the one hand, there is more than a whiff of the Victorian in maintaining the fiction of exchange relations between an anonymous maker and a charitable patron. Yet on the other, there is something incredibly contemporary and utopian in the Repository’s support of co-operative enterprise, its celebration of craft and making, and in ensuring that each maker receives the full amount from any sale.

Ysolda and I visited the Repository last weekend, after she had the genius idea of producing The Definitive Craft Tour of Edinburgh (of which much more later). We were completely blown away by it. The shop is known as “the treasure trove” — and this is indeed what it is. We found amazing Fairisle gloves, tams and sweaters: all luminous and intricate, the work of incredibly talented knitters. There are Shetland christening shawls, and wonderful aran sweaters; baby clothes and blokes cardigans; colourwork, cables and lace.

(Ysolda in the Repository)

Today, it is often hard to buy hand-knitted items without worrying about the labour practices that produced them. While admirable organisations like Thistle and Broom ensure that craftswomen and men receive two-thirds of the profits of their labour, there are many other less scrupulous organisations in the UK and elsewhere who, in remunerating per finished item rather than time expended, are not only paying knitters poorly but illegally. While I personally feel that the Repository would be well within their rights to charge quite a bit more for the things that they sell, you still know that if you buy a handmade item here, that you are directly supporting the maker.

(gloves made by member no. 66)

So I am now the proud owner of a pair of gloves made by member no. 66. They are beautiful. My only wish is that I might pass on my thanks to knitter 66 directly, but perhaps that anonymity which, a hundred years ago was there to protect the knitter from the taint of the shop counter, now has another function entirely: if I were knitter 66, I probably wouldn’t want to be bothered by the likes of me in full-blown rhapsodic knitting mode.

I am still musing on the fate of Austen’s Mrs Smith, and wondering how the modest financial independence she gained from making might have been rather differently inflected, or perhaps enhanced by the collective and co-operative structure which the Edinburgh Repository provided, and indeed still provides. I feel some research coming on. In the meantime, I urge everyone, whether in or near Edinburgh, or if planning a future visit, to make your way to 23A Castle Street, where you are sure to be inspired.

(Tam made by member 245. Now owned and worn by Ysolda)

the grumbling hive

March 1, 2009 By Kate in beasties, design, knitting, the life of things, writing Tags: bee, bee pattern, beer, bees, bees pattern, Bernard Mandeville, brakspear, Carol Sunday, design, hive, honey, Jane Gaugain, Kandel bee, Kate Davies, knitting, Manchester bee, Mary Jane Muckelstone, pattern writing, Rochdale, twist collective, Whitworth, Whitworth bee, writing 21 Comments

The title comes from Bernard Mandeville’s 1705 poem of the same name. Its only relevance here is that I have bees on the brain, and because, since I am feeling peaky (again) there’s been a bit of grumbling going on in this particular hive. Bees on the brain, you say? What’s that about, then?

(landing bee)

1) I heart bees. Whats not to like? Bees are brilliant. I will leave the precise beescience to Tom (who knows more about bees than I) but as creatures with a unique and intriguing social organisation I find them both mysterious and appealing.

(mancbee)

2) Right now, I am busy like the bee. And I find the bee a very pleasing symbol of purposeful activity. In the mid-nineteenth century, bees were often used symbolically in this way – on a a quick walk around Manchester’s city centre, for example, you will spot many bees carved into the gothic edifices of the city’s great Victorian public buildings, and bees still adorn what the planners refer to as ‘street furniture’ in Manchester (such as the rubbish bin above).

My favourite British bee, however, has to be this one:

(the Whitworth bee)

This fabulously jolly creature, standing over six-feet high, was the gift of the people of Kandel in the Bienwald (bee-forest) to those of the town of Whitworth, near Rochdale, with whom they are ‘twinned’. I understand that these carved bees are a Kandel speciality — and isn’t this one just fantastic? I like the fact that its feel and style speak of craft methods that are so characteristically German, even as its union-jack colouring proclaims it as firmly British. I loved this bee so much when I read about it in the Rochdale Observer (or, in local parlance, th’Ob), that my mum found me a picture, and sent it to me. The Whitworth bee-photo now sits on our fridge, and is a very cheery addition to the kitchen.

The details are hazy, but I understand that a sinister bee-themed crime subsequently unfolded in Whitworth — the bee was apparently stolen from its civic home (just imagine the logistics of sneaking off with a six-foot wooden bee) and a replacement has had to be commissioned from the generous folk of Kandel. If anyone has any further information on the Whitworth bee mystery, or news of the secret whereabouts of the original bee, I would be really interested to know.

(brakspear bee. I highly recommend the ale.)

3) I am knitting and designing something involving bees. I *love* it. I really do. Everything about it is immensely cheering. More soon.

4) I am suffering with a terrible throat infection (really not good for delivering lectures – groan) and require the healing power of the bee. I need honey and propolis! Bees, fire me up with your tasty bee goodness! Allow me to buzz at the correct volume!

(beeswax. Don’t worry, I won’t eat it)

Erm, well, that’s all I can say about bees for now: the bees will heal me (one hopes); I shall knit like the bee and the the bee-thing shall emerge from my needles. And if you are really good, next time I’ll talk about the bees in Virgil’s Georgics.

In other news.
1) Today is the closing date for submissions to the parliament. You can send me your owls until midnight, your time (whenever that is). The grand winner of the competition will be selected at random, but I just love all the pics so much that there are going to be a few other minor prizes. I can’t say too much about this (don’t want to spoil the surprise), but will just hint that these lovely Edinburgh designers have generously donated something. More from them later in the week.

2) The Paper dolls pattern is nearing completion. I have entered mathworld. It’s strangely familiar and reasonably satisfying– reminds me of calculating student degree profiles when I was chair of examiners! Good to know that part of my brain still works.

3) Remember I was going on about Jane Gaugain, last summer? Well, I’ve written a feature about her in the new Twist Collective. Go and check it out! There are so many amazing patterns in the issue. It is probably symptomatic of where I am right now that Mary-Ann Stephen’s Sleepy Monkey and Luke’s Diced Vest by Mary Jane Mucklestone speak to me so. Just look at that colourwork! And the yarn for Luke’s Vest comes from lovely Carol Sunday! (Carol’s yarns really are gorgeous, and I am just one of her many Edinburgh admirers). Oh, and I also produced a knitting-walking tour of Edinburgh for Twist (in which you really can walk in the steps of Jane Gaugain), which will appear on their blog soon.

What a miscellaneous post this is. Buzz buzz.

(madeirabee)

toys

December 20, 2008 By Kate in the life of things Tags: advent calendar, Benjamin, dolls, toys, Walter Benjamin 1 Comment

This in response to Colleen’s post. I’ve been enjoying her advent calendar immensely, and today she writes very evocatively about the toys behind advent calendar doors; the promise they contain; and the associations of such objects with domesticity — that is, the way toys act as a sort of preparation for one’s adult life in the domestic interior. “There may even,” she writes of her childhood toys, “have been a sewing machine.” I am intrigued by the way that non-functional toys suggest adult functionality, and so was Walter Benjamin, who collected many of them while he was in Moscow in 1927. So here for Colleen (a door within a door of her advent calendar, if she’ll permit me) is Walter Benjamin’s toy sewing machine.

Walter Benjamin’s Archive © (Verso, 2007).
Benjamin’s caption, preserved on the card in his archive, reads: “Wooden model of a sewing machine. If one turns the wheel the needle goes up and down and as it strikes it makes a clattering sound that suggests to the child the rhythm of a sewing machine. Peasant handicraft.”

Benjamin eventually wrote about the Russian toys he collected in a short essay published in 1930. I think he had a lot more to say about them than he did in that essay. I would like to say something about them too — his sewing machine, in particular, really gets me for reasons I daren’t go into now for fear of descending into a vein of sentiment that may also have something to do with the season. But one day I want to write more about Benjamin’s toys. I’ll leave you with another one that really kills me.

Walter Benjamin’s Archive © (Verso, 2007).
The card caption reads: “Old wooden horsey from the governorate of Vladimir.”

Wool 100%

October 9, 2008 By Kate in film, knitting, review, the life of things Tags: dolls, film, Japan, Japanese Film, knitting, Kyôko Kishida, Mai Tomangi, possession, review, Takeshi Kitano, Twinkle, Wenlan Chia, Woman in the Dunes, wool, Wool 100%, Wool 100% review 4 Comments

Needled reviews:
Mai Tomangi, Wool, 100% (2006)

Really, what’s not to like? In a Japanese cross between Bagpuss and the Wombles, two elderly sisters, armed with pokey sticks and shopping trolleys, collect furniture, toys, and other discarded items from surburban rubbish bins. Their house totters and teeters under the weight of their gathered spoils, and their bodies beat time to the tick of a thousand pilfered clocks. This world of lost memories and found objects is invaded by the destructive, succubus-like presence of a girl they call “Knit-Again.” The name is an apt one, for she is wearing a tatty, badly knitted, chunky red sweater that looks like it might have been designed by Twinkle. But her work is incomplete: the girl labours away at the sweater frantically until her blood-red wool runs out. Only then does she notice what a terrible job she’s made of the knitting: “Damn!” she wails, brandishing her needles, “I have to knit it all over again.”

Starring Ayu Kitaura, Kazuko Yoshiyuki and the wonderful Kyôko Kishida (of Woman in the Dunes fame) Mai Tominaga’s debut feature is strange, unsettling, and very, very witty. Combining elements of fairy-tales and dream work, as well as puppetry and animation, Wool 100% is an incredibly powerful meditation on desire, loss and the secret life of things. It is also, of course, a must-see for every knitter.

(No time for food. There’s knitting to be done)

The girl’s red sweater is full of meaning. The rhythms of it’s knitting match those of the female body through menstruation, childbirth and death. Knitting sublimates sexual desire (“If you knit, a baby will come” one sister tells another, looking with hate and longing at a young man outside their window). And, for the two sisters, who are forced to confront the story of their youth as the plot unravels, knitting also literalises the work of memory, showing how much the past is something that we are constantly making and re-making, in a daily effort of stitching and piecing together. The blood-red yarn is menacing, murderous, and also a figure for the discontinuous narrative thread of the film itself. I was strongly reminded of Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls, in which guilt, trauma, and narrative memory are similarly suggested in the long red cord by which an unfaithful lover drags his suicidal beloved through eternity.

(Takeshi Kitano, Dolls, 2002)

Dolls figure importantly in Wool 100%, too, as do several other kinds of inanimate objects which might, at any moment, spring to life. The objects the sisters collect are living presences: as they catalogue and care for the things that other people throw away, so these things, in their turn, seem to watch over and care for them. Their cuckoo clock chimes to cheer their morning repast; a futon snores and shudders as it envelops its silent sleeper. At the beginning of the film, a group of children sing a song for the two sisters: a neat, suggestive fable that sounds like something straight out of Blake’s Songs of Experience. A sheep sneezes, and an apple falls from a tree: “it is now the sheep’s apple,” sing the children. But, after the sheep munches the apple, it becomes part apple itself, “it is now the apple’s sheep” the song concludes. The subject ends up being possessed by the object it incorporates, just as the sisters are ultimately owned by their things.

(doll-things)

Much of Wool 100% seems to be about finding the appropriate process to deal with things and the memories they embody: to engage with them, to confront them, and ultimately to discard them (there is much funereal burning in the film: painful and theraputic in turns). And the film definitely suggests that there is something more than a little pathological in the repetitive, relentless activities of both knitting and object-collecting (the knitting will never be finished; the collection will never be complete). “Sleep tight,” says the sweater-wearing succubus to the two sisters, before her final destructive act, “when you awake, you’ll have to knit it all over again.” Hell, we all know that feeling.

Wool 100% is available on DVD (but only as a region 1 DVD, those in the UK take note)
Links:
NY Times Review
official Wool 100% site (Japanese)

Nelson knife

August 22, 2008 By Kate in design, the life of things Tags: design, disability, disability living aids, fork, knife, knife-fork combination, Nelson Knife 5 Comments

In a former life, my Ma was an OT. She’s put her knowledge of disability living aids to good use, and this arrived in the post for Tom this morning:

I was interested to discover that this knife-fork is called a “Nelson Knife,” after the famous implement used by the admiral following the loss of his right arm in 1797. Nelson owned several knife-fork combinations — including a luxury gold-plated one — and they are on display at the National Maritime Museum alongside other Nelson “relics”. You can see a picture of one here.

Tom’s very useful Nelson knife resembles its original in name only: while the eighteenth-century device had a separate knife blade screwed onto to the prongs of the fork with a tiny screw, this modern incarnation combines both functions in one piece of metal. It is quite like a cheese-knife, actually, with more substantial prongs.

After looking at Nelson’s original knife-fork on the NMM website, I became quite interested in its design history. A quick search for nineteenth- and twentieth-century patents on similar devices threw up some interesting — if sadly predictable — results. I found flurries of patent applications for knife-fork combinations in the 1860s and the 1920s — that is, during and following the American Civil War, and the First World War. Both wars created many one-armed men, and obvious markets for the Nelson knife. Of course, there’s nothing startling about the discovery that wars make disabilities, to which people and their tools must adapt, but it has made me look at Tom’s humble implement in a new and rather sobering light.

Thanks for the Nelson knife, Ma!

sounding out

July 24, 2008 By Kate in memory, quilts, sewing, textiles, the life of things Tags: craft, memory, quilting, quilts, t-shirt quilt 5 Comments

Me and the quilt have been sounding each other out for some weeks now.

I have been trying various things on the quilt top. Various threads. Various directions. None of them felt or looked quite right. Whatever feeling I followed, the stitch lines just seemed wrong. Stitching the quilt top seemed to work against the wonky lines of the panels, against the stripes of the t-shirts. I felt I was losing Belle’s clothes in the stitches.

But then I tried tying the corners of the panels with sock yarn, so that the tie-ends showed on the quilt back.

This looked right. Sort of sounded right too. Like gracenotes rather than interference.

So I’ve sounded this quilt out now. It is tied, and trimmed, and I have the binding ready. It will be finished this weekend. A celebratory picnic is planned.

till then . . .

process

July 17, 2008 By Kate in craft, food, rant, review, the life of things Tags: craft, farming, food, gender, Gordon Ramsay, Grayson Perry, Janet Street Porter, knitting, Laurie Taylor, masculinity, messy tuesdays, process, Richard Sennett, sociology, The Craftsman, The F-Word, Thinking Allowed, veal, work 10 Comments

Needled reviews: The F-Word. Tuesdays, 9pm, Channel 4
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Allen Lane, 2008)

Don’t get me wrong, I do not like The F-Word, but it is worth watching it occasionally for a few cheap laughs. You know the bit I mean: when Gordon tells you how to make his pea and lettuce soup in just one minute, all in words of just one syllable. Riotous! We are somehow meant to see Gordon’s failure to use any adjectives at all as the signature of his virility, “full of balls, energy, and really great food,” as the Channel-4 tag-line puts it. (Full of balls? Sure is. . .) And the gender stereotypes peddled in Gordon’s brisk how-tos are just as strange and crass as those associated with Nigella. Man does not describe. Oh no. Describing words redundant, and unmanly. Man only know how to use imperative. Imperative style of cooking instructions works best with short, firm words. More difficult with two syllables. Very hard to make the word “mushrooms” sound manly. “Mushrooms” does not sound like manly decree. Man quickly mutters “mushrooms” then gets on with real business of shouting Real Man Words. “WHISK! TOSS! STIR!” etc. If Nigella’s mellifluous, adjectival style is supposed to be read in direct relation to her cleavage, then the F-Word’s use of the imperative might be seen as the culinary equivalent of a wanking circle, with wee Gordon in the centre, braying out commands (Shaft! Girth! Beat! Etc)

Gordon.

But I bring the F-word to your attention because of a particular moment in Tuesday’s show. The redoubtable Janet Street Porter appeared on set, fresh from her carefully stage-managed experience of rearing and slaughtering two veal calves. The viewer had already been treated to the money-shot of the poor beasts’ deaths, and what we clearly needed now was Janet to preach at us about our lamentable food-buying habits. We must never buy cheap meat again. No we mustn’t. Instead, we should feast only on luxury meat products humanely reared by media luminaries. While dispensing her new-found farming wisdom, Janet was dressed in a formless top, machine-knit in a vibrant shade of puce. It was a truly hideous garment (sorry, Janet).

“I suppose you knit that yourself?” said Gordon, inferring that Janet’s experience of slaughtering “her boys” had turned her all rustic, or something.
“No I fooking didn’t, Gordon,” retorted Janet, “this is a designer item.”

puce

Now, I know that I’m more sensitive than your average jane to anti-knitting slurs, but this was about so much more than knitting. Janet enthused about how raising the calves, and watching the process of their lives and deaths, had completely transformed her perception of meat. She now knew what was involved with what she put on her plate. And everyone should think about how the meat they eat is raised and killed. Apart from the patronising attitude, and the unavoidable questions Janet did not address about cost, class, and the ethics of raising a niche luxury product like veal, this is sort of fair enough. Yes, Janet. We should all think about process, and production. But, the problem is, that she hadn’t really engaged with process at all. She had merely played a game to camera: a game with a neatly plotted narrative arc, with contrived hooks and encounters, with a particular rhetorical language (that of reluctant maternity—quite bizarre) and with moments of typically ‘direct’ and ‘irreverant’ Street-Porter-like entertainment. “’Oh no, it’s pooing again’, moans Janet,” to quote The F-Word website. Janet had engaged about as much with the slow processes and difficult realities of farming as she had with the making of her sweater, and her quick retort about the obvious superiority of ‘designer’ to ‘hand-made’ spoke volumes.

So is it just me, or does so much of this currently popular moralising about process (particularly as it concerns food) have an incredibly hollow ring? It is just far too easy for Gordon, Janet and their like to preach to the middle classes about the importance of the means of producing edible luxuries, before nipping out to snap up, promote, or sell other commodities with little thought about the process of their making—or the livelihoods of their makers, for that matter.

But one place where such discussions of process are neither hollow or easy is in Richard Sennett’s excellent new book, The Craftsman. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should. In a series of radical, lyrical essays, this venerable sociologist makes the case for a reassessment of the idea of work itself. The making of things for use or beauty are never, he argues, a matter of individual brilliance, the romantic imagination, or isolated talent. Rather, for him, excellence lies somewhere between the eye and hand, in material practices and processes, and the slow engagement with them over time. Sennett’s notion of craft is something equally applicable to the design of a mobile-phone or a line of linux code, as much as a Stradivari violin , or a particular recipe for Poulet a la d’Albufera. For him, all these ‘crafts’ involve the same struggle with tools and processes, the same issues of encountering and solving problems, of developing and refining skill and focus, of learning how repetition itself can be creative, and of coming to know the singular pleasure of doing something well for its own sake. It is a book of tremendous breadth and sweep but which is also rich in details. In fact, for me, Sennett’s singularity, both as a writer and a public intellectual, is found in such details: in the bumper that really bothers him in the parking garage of a post-modern building; in his discussion of the symbolic values of bricks; in his thoughtful self-awareness of being an outsider as he watches a group of healthcare professionals transfixed by the image of a troublesome large intestine. And any man who can begin a sentence with the words “consider, for instance, an irregular tomato” and from that opening build an argument about the how an idea of virtue inheres in thing-ness, is OK by me.

Epinglier (pin making) Diderot, Encyclopedie (1762)

Lurking around the back of Sennett’s thesis is a familiar argument about the de-humanising effects of the modern and post-modern division of labour. He is quite explicit about his fondness for the all-encompassing curiosity of the mid-eighteenth century, or the undifferentiated artisanal labour of the medieval workshop. Not for him Adam Smith’s efficiently produced pins. This practical resistance to the division of labour—and the division of knowledge too, perhaps—is something he clearly applies to his own intellectual craft-work. He writes about the way children treat the spaces and equipment of playgrounds just as articulately as he does about Martin Heidegger.

Sennett’s thoughts about process have multiple and resonant contexts for me. For example, his remarks about being-in-the-thing came to my mind very strongly, when I read Mandy’s account of the pleasure of the rhythm of knitting her swallowtail shawl:

“We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labour, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it’s nothing like this. Doing something over and over is stimulating when organised as looking ahead. The substance of the routine may change, metapmorhose, improve, but the emptional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled crafsman has extended rhythm to the hand and eye.” (p. 175)

. . .and his section on mess chimes very strongly with Felix’s and Kirsty‘s Messy Tuesdays posts:

“To arrive at that goal [that of being fit-for-purpose] the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess—wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.” (p.161)

And what Sennett has to say about the importance of modesty, and the awareness of one’s own inadequacies, while engaging with material processes is very moot too. Perhaps this is something for Janet and Gordon to bear in mind.

*You can hear Richard Sennett talking with Laurie Taylor and Grayson Perry about craftsmanship, and process in this episode of Thinking Allowed.

the precious, the miniature, the mundane

May 18, 2008 By Kate in craft, design, exegisis, the life of things Tags: badges, eye miniatures, Grainne Morton, Jewellery, Mundane Appreciation Society, portrait miniatures, settings 11 Comments

I’m following the train of a thought here, and very much bouncing off the ideas of Felix — who has just written a superb post about the joy of the tiny, one-inch, button badge. The tale of her numinous birds — separated from their childhood context, immortalised on a badge, then re-united with their original source — really gets to the heart of the allure of the badge-object, and has made sense of why I find badges so appealing. Its got me thinking generally about the miniature, and the metonymic.

If you are wondering what on earth I mean, you will find both in the work of Edinburgh Jewellery artist, Grainne Morton.

(image courtesy of the artist)

Morton works with found objects — tiny pieces of old lawn and lace, details, buttons, scraps of things — and, through a precise and very beautiful use of settings, combines all this wee stuff into small, numinous objects. In the brooch above, for example, the floral setting joins the unconnected scraps it contains, lending them the cohesion of a single, lovely thing. But what is so interesting about Morton’s work, to me, is less the formal unity of objects like this one, but rather the way that, in other of her pieces, the tiny fragments of stuff suggest themselves as figures or metonyms: they seem to be the last remaining parts of an absent whole. For example, the wee details in the piece below seem to be bits of a half-remembered story; what remains of a buried memory; the relics of a lost narrative that can’t ever be told again:

(courtesy of the artist)

The setting does so much work here. It acts like a spider-diagram of memory — drawing threads and connections between the different fragments — but it also lends each fragment the luminous quality of a piece of stained glass. Through the setting, the piece becomes a window, shining out of a pale-blue past which will never be regained. Proustian jewellery!

Miniature, wearable objects have long carried this kind of metonymic function (that is, as parts of an absent whole). In the Eighteenth Century, wearing a miniature portrait of one’s beloved made a presence of their absence as the tiny representation of the person stood in for the person themselves. When combined in lockets, friendship boxes or mourning bracelets, the miniature took on an even greater commemorative potency, as actual parts of the lost person (such as hair) might be preserved alongside their image. Wearing the fragments of one’s sentimental attachments about one’s very person reached a sort of peak in the eye miniatures popular at the end of the century:

These miniatures were often produced following bereavement, and there is so much more to say about them than I can here*. What really interests me, though, is the way that this particularly powerful part of a person suggests (in a very distinctive way) the lost memory of the whole person: a memory which, like those called up by Grainne Morton’s brooches, will never be fully regained. For it is not just the past, or memory, or the dear thoughts of your beloved that you see in the eye. It is loss itself, looking right back at you.

Grainne Morton’s pieces do not (of course) suggest The Void, but I think theres an obvious comparison to be made between the use of settings in her work and that of this eye miniature. Surrounded by jewels, and jewel-like itself, the eye is made precious by its setting. It is made into a separate thing — a fragment separated from its whole — a tiny detail that, because it is broken from its context, can now be looked at, scrutinised, properly treasured.

It is Grainne Morton’s use of settings that makes her brooch of pale-blue fragments seem so precious and evocative. And this brings me back to Felix’s button badge, and to badges generally. Setting any detail or fragment into a tiny wearable badge-thing has an effect that is just powerful as that of the portrait miniature. It makes the scraps precious, as well as calling up the wonder and absence of a lost, proustian whole (See Felix’s post again!). And what’s so great about badges (unlike eighteenth-century miniatures) is that they are cheap, portable objects that everyone can wear. As such, they highlight how the ordinary is also immensely precious, intensely numinous. This is what’s so fantastic about the work of the Mundane Appreciation Society. By setting incidental stuff in an object that is tiny and lovely — but also democratic and accessible — their badges make jewels out of the everyday.

*See Hanneke Grootenboer, “Treasuring the Gaze: Eye-Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision” Art Bulletin (Sept, 2006). See also Marcia Pointon, “Surrounded With Brilliants: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth Century England” Art Bulletin (March, 2001). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an incredible — and quite spooky — collection of late eighteenth-century eye-miniatures.

other people’s things

April 2, 2008 By Kate in textiles, the life of things Tags: found, textiles 9 Comments

I have been getting troubled by the tam. It is a nice tam. After passing it a few times, abandoned on the path, I just couldn’t leave it for the rain to rain on and the dogs to piss on. But it isn’t mine. And how will its owner find it again?
So I made a sign:

. . . I put my details on it, and I went and put it where I found the tam.

Kate Davies Designs

Category Archives: the life of things