The Importance of Craft

If craft is the art of work, and I believe that that is what craft is, then we ourselves become a live canvass filled with an ever-changing palette of colour and texture. It puts our work and the way we work, the materials we harvest and garner, and the delivery of it in finished work, in order. We cut the natural from its root, blossom, stem, fruit and much more to refine it, whether that be to dye, soften, weave, mould, shave, hammer, axe, adze or saw for the need. Craft once provided support in our growing the essentials of life, to agrarianism itself; no one can deny it was a perfect marriage between those who grew and those who worked their craft. These two were inextricably woven in perfect union and this union created the harmony of something many if not most cultures, in their newfound sophistication, have lost--craftwork.

We use the term craftsmanship as the generic reference to whats made by hand and made well. Exemplary craftsmanship still exists but only in a minority of people and yet this level of workmanship was as pandemic as the coronavirus that now besets us. In a hundred years we have transitioned from cultures where everyone knew someone, many, who made with their hands. Today, most people will know no one who does such things and a culture that has no desire to do such things and yet deep down a man in a suit selling real estate, a lawyer at a desk in Manhatten, a woman managing her business will express in some way the desire to cut make and build something of beauty with lasting qualities with their hands. Success in business and finance may have the reward leading to certain security and even comfort, but making has its own intrinsic value that can never be bought or sold. The ability to make skilfully with only your hands and a few hand tools parallels the reward of soaring as the eagle, hovering as the kestrel and finding contentment without any pursuit of money is the most tangible reward of all. How do I know? I have done it! And I have known no equal for the working of it into my life. My greatest contentment has been to take the raw and transform it by my hand into art itself. Craft matters!

My work over the past few decades has been to encourage others to invest what time they have to spare in developing their craft in woodworking. It has never been my intention to speak against machining and machining technology, but what I have done and continue to do is show and indeed prove that handwork is much more reliant on skill and that developing of that skill is never static but highly intrinsic to our wellbeing, exercise, sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. I have said often that machining wood is not the same thing as working wood using hand tools. I tire of people saying there are two ways to make the journey as though one equals the other by way of reward. How can that be so when it's the machine that does the work on the one hand and the other requires the whole of human effort. To say such things is to compare the athlete running the marathon or the spring with the commuter riding the tube over the same distance. It should be self-evident that he latter, the hand toolist, engages willingly with the greater challenges of high self-demand in the same way the athlete does. Especially is this so in a consumerist culture that demands all of your daylight time and energies just to survive. Industry and commerce consume our very best hours in the day and then too the years in decade upon decade. The sadness too is the reality that it then tries to reward us with the illusion of something called retirement when our bodies are worn down and moving quite quickly to being worn out. I know that this is not the same for all. Successful people with good health often go on to do rewarding things as an era when they volunteer into more occupations. I just want everyone to reflect a little more on crafting the years you have into the future. Nothing more.

My work life has thus far been different than most. I learned the discipline of craft and applied the art of it to bring order to what I made and continue to make. I look back on 5.5 decades of making and know that I would do it all over again. I can scarcely recall Mondays not being my most favourite of days. I enjoyed the planning of my week, the cutting and cutting and cutting of my wood and at the end of every week seeing something standing in front of me that brought the reward of making it and the reward of passing it on.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I still have as much work to do as ever. It hasn't stopped me from looking into the future and a future I still see with the most amazing hope. The past prophets of recent months and years predicted a decline would come to Britain when Britain reestablished itself outside of mainland Europe. The decline now faces Britain for a different reason and of course, it faces the whole of Europe together with it's neighbouring and distant continents. The falling pound is the same as the falling economy on a global scale. The greatest sadness of all is the sad loss of life, this is the greatest and most incalculable loss of all. My handwork enables me to reflect on such things as these; craftwork keeps me sane and then maintains that sanity too.

This is not the first time I have said such a thing and many have latched on to what I say in that. I don't bury my head, isolate myself selfishly away, pretend nothing is really wrong but I still laugh every single day at something I see as funny. I still listen for news of my brothers and sisters around the world and search out their wellbeing, or at least news of them. Losing our loved ones, hearing of friends passing, sickness and disease in an epidemic and now a global pandemic means that we all feel the pain. You see, we are supposed to. We are supposed to absorb the pains of one another so that no one suffers alone. In the past, I have made many coffins for friends I have lost. I cut a dozen dovetails to each of the corners and my planes and hands have planed every face. Mostly they were simple. Pine, that's all. But the thing was, in the making of those wooden caskets, I could sense the pain of the children left behind, the sad loss of parents that should never see their children pass before them, such like that.

So our reasons to make with our hands are to support one another in some primordial depth we have yet to see the reason for or understand. The meaning of handwork for me is to follow those ancient paths of vocation where understanding my materials from the inside out and then too to engage with human life in every way I can, provides a path of total certainty into an ever-unfolding future.