Making Living Places: Craft Song and Imagination

The making of our everyday life is not an isolated activity but involves living with other lives and things. Stones and tables are as much alive as are the trees and the birds. Our everyday life is an entanglement of things. And it is this entanglement that constitutes a place. So how do we make things well? Or how do we make places of well-being? Where things share an inner likeness with other things; a relation of sympathy. Like the one shared between a daylily and a hummingbird or the hand and a door handle. This ‘shaping each other’ leads us to the necessity of craft and imagination in the making of things and places. While craft is concerned with the structure of things, imagination is a spirited flight into the world of dreams. But when both these apparently opposing actions do intertwine, there emerges a song. A creative entanglement emerging out of a graceful correspondence between the material of engagement, the action of tools and the activity of dreaming. To be able to grasp this correspondence the learner is placed with the requisite tools, in a practical situation, and asked to pay attention to how ‘this’ feels, or how ‘that’ looks or sounds – to notice those subtleties of texture that are all-important to good judgment and the successful practice of a craft.