Hands

It's a new year and a new chapter of The Frosted Bough:  Essays on Minimalism.  I finished the chapter on the Voluntary Simplicity movement and am now almost ready to write "Making and Making Do."  My idiosyncratic research has been to visit the quilters at Connecting Threads who gather together every Thursday morning just down the street from me at the Balkwill Centre to make quilts for women's shelters and premature babies.  They are one of the happiest groups of people I have ever spent time with.  I'm talking this afternoon to someone who has taken part in a repair cafe.  I'm heading out next week to visit Zane Wilcox's studio to see what he has to say about minimalism and ceramics.  I also have fifteen pages of notes that I hope to whittle down to 7,000 words or so, but even at a quick mental glance, I can see that there are a couple of things I really want to say about craftsmanship.  One is about hands.  Another is the fact that people who make things seems to me to be happier.  The third is that craftspeople inhabit an entirely different kind of time, one we could all imitate.

So, hands. What have you done with your hands today besides type and wiggle and click your mouse and swipe the screen on your phone?  People who write knowledgeably about craft have noticed that, lamentably, many of us don't do much with our hands.  Yet they've evolved through thousands of years to be flexible and knowledgeable.  Competent crafters probably celebrate the moment, consciously or not, when their tools don't come between themselves and their work, when their tools are not something they are fighting to use effectively but become a mere means to an end.  I saw that when I was learning to throw mugs and bowls as research for Home in Stormy Weather. I certainly didn't see it in myself but it was clear in how my teacher, Randall Fedge, centered his clay and then brought it smoothly up from the wheel to make a beautifully-shaped bowl. In fact, it may have been clearer to me precisely because I sucked. The distance between his craftsmanship and my lack of it was  palpable. He did not think about the wheel, only about his hands shaping clay.  I do experience my hands' knowledge occasionally when I'm practicing the piano and my hands merely shape a tricky passage without my actually thinking about what they are doing. In fact, they are more likely to do this when I'm focused on the music I want to make rather than on the fingerings necessary to get the notes to flow. There is complex neuroscience behind this, but yes, our hands know things.  

Hands are expressive.  Outside the grocery store while I waited for Bill to pick up orange juice for our OJ and prosecco on New Year's Eve, I saw a father stroke his eight-year-old daughter's long dark hair.  So much was said by that gesture. In my reading on craft, I have learned about the early craft guilds and how they became the studio system for artists who had enough commissions that they could employ a cloud expert or a background painter or someone who could capture the folds in fabric.  But the artist who ran the studio often saved faces and hands for himself. Here I think of my mother's hands, which embraced so many competencies, from painting a ceiling to kneading bread to sewing a dart to shaping itself just before she caressed my cheek.  Rodin sculpted hands that pray, implore, struggle to grasp, understand, explain, express pain. The artist painted hands himself because they are shorthand for character, a kind of minimal expression of the sitter's historical and personal situation and frame of mind. Or I think of Michelangelo's Creation on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, the hand of God reaching out to the hand of Adam in a transcendent moment. What Michelangelo created there is the sense that hands bring forth of embodied creation--which is more or less what craft is. 

Hands are also the conduit of other kinds of sensory experiences, I thought to myself Monday morning when I made a lemon meringue pie that I knew would delight both Bill and Nikka for New Year's Day dinner.  My hands held the firm fruit as I grated the fragrant lemon peel, and they knew by the surface of the lemon when I'd gone all the way around.  My hands got little giddy at the feel of lemon peel in their fingertips as I put it into the measuring spoon. How could something as insubstantial as dandelion fluff contain this  powerful fragrance? They pushed down hard when I juiced the lemons. They were competent as I separated the eggs.  They sensed what a magical thing an egg is with its crisp yet vulnerable shell.  And of course they let me eat the pie.  Our hands feel and grasp and throw, but they also mediate so much of our sensory experiences if only we'll let them off the leash of our devices. We actually call the feel of fabric, its drape and texture, from the sheerness of silk to the heft of tweed, its "hand."

Here's where hands and craftsmanship and minimalism come together.  Craft isn't inherently minimal.  Ask my sister, whose quilter's stash takes up a "bonus room" above a two-car garage.  Ask a woodworker about his tools or a weaver about looms.  But once a craftsperson has gained competency, the creative force is a a pair of hands and her or his material. There's a justifiable and complicated debate about how we know whether a glass vase or a quilt is handicraft or a work of art. I think it would be most useful to put craft on one end of a continuum, art on the other.  Craft must be well made.  There's no point to a piece of weaving that unravels every time its wearer moves.  Nor is there any point to a glass vase that can't find its balance or a bowl that can't contain anything.  On the other hand, art needs to be more than an object.  It needs an idea; it needs to say something about our physical, intellectual, perceptual, psychological world and about its place and our place in that world.  The off-kilter piece of glass might qualify as art, reflecting a world that often seems to be transparent but can't find a centre that will hold.  

Or there's a distinction that's even simpler, and perhaps a bit dishonest:  we don't use art.  We wouldn't take one of Cezanne's paintings down from the wall and cover it with bowls of fruit and goblets of wine as if it a tablecloth.  We use craft.  We wear it, drink out of it, pile oranges in it.  In turn, the clay bowl, the woven fabric, the finished wood invite our hands, bringing us back to our physical, sensing selves

I'll write about craftsman's happiness and time in the coming weeks.