ENTWINEMENTS

One throws out threads of ideas and others pick them up add a few more and pass it on. Others mess it up and soon there is a tangle, a ghost of an idea.

When I visited with Pat Freiert she mentioned that she and her husband had taken a course in MINDFUL LIVING. This sounded to me like the mindfulness of the tea creremony (the attactive part to me) or the Zen way of creating decribed in the Unknown Craftsman.
Now Leach, who wrote the introduction to this book has his detractors--Garth Clark is one. His words spoke to me too:

Fine art ceramics is not a panacea and we do need to revalue and encourage the craft pot, provided it can find a contemporary voice.

The crux of the matter
As a Slow Notion, this topic delves into the practical, aesthetic and moral dimensions of the craft process. In the spectrum of production, design refers to the conception and promotion, while making is the middle process that brings design into being. In late capitalism, making becomes ever more invisible. Our factories have gone to China. This has led to anxieties about skill-shortage in the West. Does it matter that we no longer make things? Does it matter how things are made -- whether they are made by hand or who makes them?

This blog dicusses the Droog design philosophy and now the emergence of iCraft. Can prototyping desk top computer displace the craftsperson?

the United States currently has a significant market and technological advantage in these technologies, all of which directly convert computer design files that describe objects as “3D models” into physical objects constructed layer by layer (i.e., assembling particles of work-piece material digitally on each layer and then adding to the work piece one layer at a time). Digital production (or rapid manufacturing) transforms engineering design files directly into functional objects—ideally, fully functional objects.

Pat of South Carolina South Carolina talks about slow weaving.

I'll leave the DYI movement for another entry.