Geographies of Making, Craft and Creativity

Laura Price, Harriet Hawkins, Laura Price, Harriet Hawkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138238749
• eBook ISBN: 9781315296913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book brings together cutting-edge research from leading international scholars to explore the geographies of making and craft. It traces the geographies of making practices from the body, to the workshop and studio, to the wider socio-cultural, economic, political, institutional and historical contexts. In doing so it considers how these geographies of making are in and of themselves part of the making of geographies. As such, contributions examine how making bodies and their intersections with matter come to shape subjects, create communities, evolve knowledge and make worlds.

This book offers a forum to consider future directions for the field of geographies of making, craft and creativity. It will be of great interest to creative and cultural geographers, as well as those studying the arts, culture and sociology.

1 Towards the geographies of making

An introduction

Harriet Hawkins and Laura Price

Sheds, streets, kitchens, gardens, workshops, factories, studios, hair salons, maker spaces, butchers, barbers, cocktail bars, craft guilds, community centres and bodies (human and non-human), such is the diverse patchwork of sites at which making takes place – in this book alone. Making appears to be firmly part of the zeitgeist. It resonates with academic concerns with embodiment, practice and matter and their intersections with our ways of knowing and being in the world (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Bennett, 2012) as well as capturing the imaginations of the public, economists, trend-setters and politicians alike, with fashions for making, crafting and tinkering well documented in a host of popular books (Sennett, 2008; Crawford, 2010; Gauntlett, 2011; Anderson, 2013; Hitch, 2013; Lang, 2013; Heatherwick and Rowe, 2015; Korn 2017). In the UK, television programmes like ‘The Great Sewing Bee’ or ‘The Great Pottery Throw Down’ occupy prime-time viewing slots. While American magazines such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker feature accounts of the maker movement sweeping US rust belt cities and Chinese technopolises alike. Such articles recount a revolution in production occurring via a revaluation of light industrial skills that are practiced in collective ‘maker’ spaces kitted out with everything from welding torches to 3D printers (Morozov, 2014; Fallows, 2016). Glossy lifestyle magazines and colour supplements read on lazy sunny Sundays and during precious downtime in bustling hairdressers around the world frame handicrafts as the latest trend-du-jour for aspirational hipster urban elites. Whilst, for those seeking material and mental solace from busy consumer worlds, the mindful and environmentally aware ethics of the slow movement provides the time, space and aesthetic context within which to revalue the handmade, and practices of repair and restoration. Yet despite the prominence of making in the early decades of the twenty first century, we should heed those warnings issued around the knitting trend, that “despite the cries of the press that ‘knitting is back!’ it in fact never went away” (Dirix, 2014: 92). The contemporary rise in making takes place across a backdrop of long practiced traditions and skills that have for centuries been woven into the fabric of landscapes and lives. Indeed, this complex and rich history informs its popular appeal. Yet as Hall and Jayne’s (2015) study of dressmaking cautions us around these temporalities, contemporary cultures and geographies of dressmaking are, they argue, “distinguishable from their historic, post-war counterpart, and that to simply denote current dressmaking practices as being a mere replication of the ‘make-do-and-mend’ mentality is to overlook that austerity today comes from a very different set of social, economic and political conditions to those that have come before.” However the intermesh of the historical and contemporary plays out, such collective concerns with making represents, we argue, a requirement that we revisit and re-negotiate the spaces and practices of the production of things, and that we interrogate the politics therein.

The visitation and revaluation of the spaces, practices and politics of making carried out in the 12 chapters collected in this volume is shaped by a concern with the geographies of making. To read scholarship on making is to become enmeshed in a diverse weave of threads that unravel from a variety of conceptual skeins. These include economic, political and social research on the creative economy and the historical and cultural discussions of the material, practiced and embodied dimensions of craft practices and vernacular creativities. We could also add to this list a growing sense of scholarship driven by environmental concerns that urge the Western world toward a re-engagement with vital materials and volatile matters in a world under threat. Despite its diversity, this work is linked by a strong sense that to attend to the geographies of making (i.e. where production takes place) is also to comprehend how geographies are themselves brought into being. This is, in short, the central premise that weaves across this collection, that to appreciate the geographies of making is at one and the same time to appreciate the making of geographies. Making emerges from the threads of empirical material and conceptual discussion as an embodied, material, relational and situated practice that spins connections between corporeal practices and formal institutional and political spaces, between governance and policy practices and practices of resistance, and between highly professionalised practices as well as amateur, vernacular and mundane practices. As such, the empirical fabric of these chapters textures our sense of how making shapes places and communities, transforms spaces and politics, and forges environmental relations.

In what follows we want to unfold the intersections of practices of making and the geographies being made. We follow this with a reflection on the methodological challenges of studying the geographies of making. Together these sections offer a synopsis of the volume and the content and intersections of its 12 chapters. We close the volume with a proposition of some new territories for the geographies of making. We reflect on the text’s geographic and conceptual blind spots, and in doing so identify some of the threads we would like to see being picked up within any future agenda for the geographies of making.

Remaking our understandings of making

Making appears to be joining that host of ‘key words’ that are ‘significant, binding words’ like culture and nature which are recognised as hard to define (Williams, 2014: 15). Indeed, it has become something of a truism to preface discussions of making (and similarly craft) with observations concerning its definitional breadth but also its fundamental role in human ‘being’. To ask ‘what do we mean by making?’ is to be greeted with the unfurling of sites and practices. Carr and Gibson (2015: 1) for example recount how “as humans we make bodies, homes, identities and memories every day. As a society we make landscapes, cities, decisions and structures for governing. And in daily work, the stuff that surrounds us is made.” Given the complexities of asking “What do we mean by making?” this book does not directly seek an answer. Rather, gestures are assembled and ideas accumulate through the assonances and dissonances in the empirical and conceptual discussions within the chapters. Stitched together here are craft practices – whether contemporary, hipster or traditional – service labour and light and heavy industrial practices as well as vernacular, everyday making practices. Making negotiates its status as a labour practice, which has a politics like any other, as well as being an embodied sensory practice, a cerebral practice, a labour of love, a mundane practice and a routine practice of human and mechanic automation. There is a demand for an interweaving of the professional and amateur as well as the intersection of the production, consumption and circulation of objects and practices. There is also resistance to sorting making into practices undertaken within public or private worlds, or within urban and rural settings. Instead, making emerges as an agentive force that remakes such spatial distinctions. What evolves are understandings that eschew binary distinctions that work to unsettle spatial and social categories, in the place of a unification through a common focus on the critical force of making’s geographies. To aid in thinking about these geographies we draw on the two strands of interdisciplinary scholarship indicated in the book’s title; an extensive one around creativity, and a smaller more defined field concerned with craft.

Creativity, often thought of as the oil of the twenty-first century, has become a vast and diverse field of scholarship of late (see summary in Hawkins, 2016; Mould 2015). Indeed, creativity has become something of an imperative, full of promise, it has been variously situated as an economic saviour

as a tool of neo-liberal politics and part of the diplomatic arsenal of state-craft practices, as a psychological trait and philosophical concept as well as an embodied, material and social practice that produces both highly specialist cultural goods and is a part of everyday life, holding within it myriad possibilities for making alternative worlds.

(Hawkins, 2016: 1)

Much attention, within and beyond geography has been paid to the sites at which creativity takes place; currently cross-scalar explorations that encompass creative cities, clusters and networks, as well as discussions of making in the home or in the studio (Bain 2004; Edensor et al. 2009; Brace and Jones-Putra, 2010; Harvey et al., 2013; Sjoholm, 2014). Interestingly, within such work there is a growing concern with the nature and form of creative labour, for some akin to the aesthetic and embodied labour of the service economy (Ocejo, 2014b), for others renamed playbour or passion work after the associations of these practices with leisure and pleasure rather than the hard graft of a ‘job’ (Kucklich, 2005; Ardivisson et al., 2010). Of growing importance too is scholarship that explores creativity beyond the economic and political narratives that often foreground professionalised urban practices. This research pays attention to more everyday, community spirited, and mundane practices, often termed vernacular creativities (Burgess, 2006; Edensor et al., 2009). Occurring in overlooked spaces, these everyday practices not only expand what creativity is, but where it takes place, drawing our attention not only beyond the urban, but also to overlooked or marginalised spaces – from sheds, to homes, garages and suburbs.

One of the threads that can be followed throughout such diverse research on creativity is a concern with practice itself, its nature, as well as what such ‘doings’ achieve. This is perhaps most concentrated in that dispersed body of work – from across anthropology, sociology and geography, amongst other locations – that foregrounds the creative process, in contrast to studies of finished things and products. Leading the way conceptually is Ingold’s anthropological discussion Making (2013), and a suite of papers and jointly edited collections that explore making as part of a wider set of creative processes alongside improvisation and growing (Hallam and Ingold, 2008, 2014). Here, making evolves as an interaction of sentient practitioners and active materials in the generation of form. Similarly concerned with addressing ‘bodies that make’ are ethnographic accounts of the production of highly crafted objects and their wider spatialities and socialities. We might think, for example, of Warren’s and Gibson’s (2014) account of the practices and cultures of surfboard making, Dudley’s (2014) ethnography of artisanal guitar making, O’Connor’s (2007) expansive research on glass blowing, or the growing body of work focused on knitting (Mann, 2015; Price, 2015). Such attentiveness to the ‘doings’ of making is both a product of, but also produces, the recovery of the body within and beyond geography, and the accompanying turns to materiality and practice (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Bennett, 2012).

The second strand of work that this volume engages is scholarship on craft. The long and deep vein of literature on craft traditions and craft practices has been joined in the last decade or so by the rapid evolution of craft studies. This was solidified with the launch of the Journal of Modern Craft (2008) and Craft Research (2010), as well as the publication of the Craft Reader (2010). These intersect with the production of landmark texts such as Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft (2007) and The Invention of Craft (2014), together with volumes that explore the place of craft in contemporary art (Buzek, 2011), or that examine increasingly common practices such as yarn bombing (Moore and Prain, 2009). Often overlapping with scholarship on creativity, critical perspectives on craft address the distinct labour, bodily experiences, and social and material knowledge that define craft and that are shaped by, and actively shape relationships, communities and place (Ingold, 2013). As well as very traditional ‘craft’ practices (knitting, patchwork, pottery, woodwork and so on), increasingly the phrase has been evolved to recognise the forms of work being done in industries not usually defined as ‘craft’, such as cocktail making, or hairdressing (Sennett, 2008; Ocejo, 2014a; Holmes, 2015) and even research methods. Interestingly, much contemporary literature on craft has honed its critical edge precisely because craft has become so trendy, within and beyond the academy. Whilst there was long a sense of craft as being maligned, underappreciated, undervalued, or in some way ‘in peril’, this no longer seems to be the case (Adamson, 2007). As Jefferies observes (2011: 224), “craft has become the new cool, the new collectible: a rebellion against high-street branding and mall sameness alike, against the globalisation of labour exploitation and consumer indifference” (Jefferies, 2011: 224). Elizabeth Nathanson (2013: 109) however notes, “supposedly ‘hip’ craft artists distinguish themselves by first acknowledging the associations of crafts with a conservative aesthetic and ‘elderly’ point of view, and then by reinventing these crafts with a knowing and often ironic eye”. Central to many of these debates are concerns with gender. Whilst Richard Sennett’s (2008) urging of attention to ‘craftsmanship’ in contemporary society rather unfortunately failed to address issues of gender, feminist art historians have long explored the relationship between making and diverse identities (Pollock, 1999). Recently, for example, the prominence of hand-made objects such as the pink pussy hat worn at international protest marches in January 2017 has brought into popular discourse discussions around the power of craft and bodies that make.

These two brief sketches serve less to detail these overlapping strands of scholarship, than to stake out the ground across which our discussions of making take place. We are concerned to both stitch together these different threads of the discussions of making practices, but also to allow them to be unpicked, or unravelled in relation to one another. Such that what emerges are understandings of making that sometimes seem incongruent across time and space, but also across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary affiliations. The remainder of this section explores some of the key threads that weave across the chapters that follow. Taking in turn, and somewhat artificially, the geographies of making – sites and mobilities; skilled bodies, materialities and remakings; and then turning to the making of geographies, examining communities and places, as well as politics, subjects and environments. The discussion which follows focuses in on what kinds of questions and priorities emerge from these overlapping threads of discussion.

Unsettling sites of making

Where making takes place matters. Like the wider geographies of creativity, we might reflect upon the multiple, situated contexts of making. Bain (2004: 425), for example, describes arts practice as “embedded within the culturally constructed context of the art world and located within the place-based culture of the studio, the home, the neighbourhood, the community, the city, the nation”. Geographies of creativity have, of late, been undergoing an important territorial reorientation, which demands that we expand our sense of those locations we consider to be sites of making. To take perhaps the clearest example of this reorientation, Gibson et al. (2012: 3) observe:

Researchers have looked for creativity in fairly obvious places (big cities, cities making overt attempts to reinvent themselves through culture, creativity and cosmopolitanism); have found it there; and have theorised about cities, creative industries and urban transformation as if their subsequent models or logic were universally relevant everywhere.

The result of such geographic myopia was a neglect of creativity that was in some way vernacular, mundane, or amateur, but also a neglect of spaces beyond the urban – suburban towns, rural spaces, and ordinary places. As Edensor et al. (2009: 1) put it, “an understanding of vernacular and everyday landscapes of creativity honours the non-economic values and outcomes produced by alternative, marginal and quotidian creative practices”. In response, closer considerations of the ‘where’ of creativity and the what, i.e. the beyond economic, have evolved and taken form in a recovery of the ‘other’ geographies of the creative economy as well as in the attention to vernacular creativities. If the former draw our attention to creative suburbias, the creative economy of small towns and rural places and creative clusters beyond the city, then the latter encourage us to look at the small scal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Towards the geographies of making: An introduction
• 2. Making bodies, making space and making memory in artistic practice
• 3. Moonraking in Slaithwaite: Making lanterns, making place
• 4. Modernity, crafts and guilded practices: Locating the historical geographies of 20th century craft organisations
• 5. Unpicking the material politics of sewing for development: Sex, religion and women’s rights
• 6. Work, value and space: Three key questions of making for the Anthropocene
• 7. The science and the art of making: Bartenders, distillers, barbers, and butchers
• 8. Transient productions; enduring encounters: The crafting of bodies and friendships in the hair salon
• 9. Entangled corporeality in the making of taxidermy
• 10. Knitting the atmosphere: Creative entanglements with climate change
• 11. A sustainable future in the making?: The maker movement, the maker-habitus and sustainability
• 12. Everyday Kintsukuroi: Mending as making
• 13. Re-lighting the Castle Argyle: Making, restoration, and the biography of an immobile thing
• 14. Geographies of making: Matter, transformation and care
• Index