The Maker's Maker

If I look back 70 years or so, I doubt I have known a day in my life without being engaged every day and wholly involved for many hours making. I'm talking eight to twelve hours a day. My memories from early childhood are truly vivid. Fabrics wafted from mid-air to spread and undo folds and rolls from bolts of cloth onto my mother's cutting table followed by the distinctive rustle only pattern-paper tissue makes with the pinning that connects paper to cloth right before the click, click, click of scissors on a wooden tabletop. How can such things not impact your life at ages three and four, five, six and seven? Both my parents influenced my life but it was the industrious way my mother worked, created and made that had the greatest influence in making me a maker myself. Watching an art maker in a person's young and formative years has power. The dynamic to it is rarely mentioned and therefore seldom even acknowledged as much more than, well, just labour. Of course, and it goes without much saying anyway, most young people and their parents and even their grandparents now are more unlikely to know a true maker of anything within the spheres they move in. In my young years, most streets had several makers of one kind or another. By that, I mean seamstresses and knitters, painters and decorators, woodworkers of all kinds and even a cooper here and there or a clog maker. Not so today, although one or two of you will try to correct me. In much of the world's makers that I speak of, manual workers making with their hands have been pretty much rendered redundant––surplus to requirements. AI is the techno-industrial extension to further destroy both corporate and individual arts. You watch! But I don't deny its potential nor would I shout out, "Smash the looms!" even though Luddites did have very legitimate grievances and arguments that have indeed proved them at the very least partially right. They were endeavouring to counter the greedy ownership of mills and businesses, politicians and those living a privileged life and the ones that still hold such office today. Most things in your home now come from another continent and not likely to be the ones you associate with.

Watching any maker making has a dynamism to it in the same sense that dunamis represents the 'dynamic' to make what is as yet unmade. Dunamis (Ancient Greek: δύναμις) is a Greek philosophical concept meaning 'power', 'potential' or 'ability'. It's central to the Aristotelian idea of potentiality and actuality. Potential; the power to make. Dunamis or Dynamis also reflects Dynamis (Bosporan queen), a Roman client queen of the Bosporan Kingdom. When I use the word dynamic I mean empowering. My mother empowered me by my merely being able to watch her as she worked systematically and with discipline she imposed on herself every day. She then encouraged me to make also and always with my hands.

It's a small thing to make a buttonhole in fabric but it takes much skill to get the stitches to lay flat without distorting the fabric and straightly aligned perpendicular to the curves when needed. Making buttonholes is the tedious and precise act seamstresses and tailors in a pre-machine era carried out in all of their dress-making, tailoring and so on: I see this as the equivalent of our dovetailing wood sections one to another with sharp cuts that hold together in gapless synchrony. The swivel and twist of the scissor tips around the as-yet unmade buttonhole is an art seldom seen by we ordinary people today. It was a working woman or man with no money to speak of who made every day of their lived lives and supported or supplemented their family income by such work. My mother's amazing ability was common to any seamstress and tailor and, through this seemingly common thing, it became mine too just for the seeing of it and a decision to strive for even though I did not know then the impact of being the child of a maker and designer would ultimately have on me.

If being a manual worker puts someone in a class then I am well settled indeed as a working class maker. I generally don't use the term because of its past connotations but not because I'm at all ashamed of being so. It's more the other people that use the term I try not to agree with or associate with in the same way I wouldn't use being an 'academic' as a category of people. Surely journalists and news presenters can by now be adjusting their language because we who go out of the door of our homes most days or sign in from our sofa office are then merely working people like all others. In times past we used terms like navvy, labourer, shop assistant to ensure categorisation of the more unskilled. We also used terms like, "You can do better than that or do better than this for yourself." Meaning don't undersell yourself by being this or that when you could be the other. My woodworking teacher, when I told him I would pursue woodworking for a career, said that very thing to me. "You can do better than that." It was as if my future would reflect on a failure on his part to steer me in the right direction. I'm glad I didn't listen to him. I must be one of the most contented workers in the world. I still cannot wait to get to my work every day.

I try to imagine a life without making and it's impossible. Making has been and still is my life. Trying to do what I did with my life might be more impossible today than ever before. When I applied for my apprenticeship interview in 1964 I could have written to fifty joinery companies in the town where I lived. I did write to several and all of them offered me an interview. I went to the first one, got the job and started two weeks later. Undoubtedly this was the best thing I ever did. I don't believe in luck. That suggests something so much less than dynamic.

You may not be or have been a professional maker but that is unlikely to be a negative. Exposing youngsters to any art form of creativity will impact their lives and especially so when you encourage them by steering their making, giving them space to make and enjoying their company. My work through the latter decades has been to create makers like myself in the hope that I am creating influencers of a responsible kind to work with their families in their own homes just as my mother did with me.