One bag

Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material

Materials and facture - the way something is made - are not neutral. The decision to produce slowly, by hand, in an increasingly industrialised world is political. Rather than develop ‘new’ materials, or processes, the aim of my research is to develop methods that allow a rethinking of old materials and processes. How might Craft concerns intersect with those of other disciplines? How might language open up the relationship between body and resistant material? The difficulty of this relationship is accepted and embraced. I produce slowly and I produce little, which allows me to reflect on the significance of what I am doing and the resources being used. What is made is made - there are no seconds, no waste.

My principal research method is copying. This allows me to concentrate on the relationship between body and material without clouding the water with the fiction of originality. I start with seemingly simple things and try to open them up to perception, to “retard perception and render it reflexive”, in the words of Niklas Luhmann. The starting point for the final exhibition is one bag of porcelain. It is hollowed out (laboriously) and as many cup copies as can be made from the insides will be displayed with the excavated block.

The documentation necessary to practice-based research has become, to an extent, the work itself. Photographic and written records of making become the basis for speculative forays into moving image and creative writing. Feedback loops are set up: make - record - write - display - make. This exhibition is part of a loop, an attempt to explore display as a means of thinking and of generating dialogue about facture and embodied knowledge, about media and their supports.

My ultimate aims are to generate cross-disciplinary dialogue about the value of making, to develop new ways of interacting with potential audiences and to identify thinking that might be engaged with to expand the boundaries of craft practice. For a while now, I’ve been puzzling over how the practicalities of making a living might intersect with the possibilities of gift exchange. All the cups produced will be given away, carefully.

As I make, I am reflecting on the individuals who have most influenced my thinking, through talking and texts, over the course of the project. Each cup will be offered as a gift to one of these people. I see this as an act of generosity - a return for the intellectual generosity, or creativity that inspires dialogue - but am also cognisant of Marcel Mauss’s reading of reciprocity - gift giving as a form of control, with the expectation of some form of return. I make no bones of my desire to elicit the attention of figures who might be interested in making in general and the work that I am doing, in particular.

As a means of drawing attention to the value of making and of introducing the possibility of financial return, the exhibition will instigate a further experiment in exchange. After negotiating a cup form and making hours to be expended, I will produce cups to commission for the same hourly rate as the commissioner is paid in their job of work, whatever it might be.

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