Craftspace

Read some excerpts from the taking time blog below

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This ideal (a shared working life) is rooted in a tradition of craft thinking that is denigrated as ‘Romantic’. But it has a new resonance in the face of the alienating effects of late capitalist work practices, when we are trying to imagine a future without oil. I recently attended a local meeting, which was to consider the role of artists in the Transition Towns Movement. Some people talked about the role of the artist in communicating the problem, through work in schools or through “dramatic interventions”. Well, there has always been a role for the artist as illustrator or fool. Perhaps, though, the Romantic ideal of the crafted existence could help us to model more positive communities. Richard Sennett claims that the urge to be creative and to do things well are innately human, and that the denial of that urge in our working culture is profoundly damaging to our sense of ourselves and to our greater well-being. This suggests a healing role for the crafts in all our lives, in all our communities.

Paul Harper

Slow implies some kind of relativism but it is strangely absolute in its condemnatory mode. Things take as long as they take, slow compared to what? This is how long something takes to do, not longer, not shorter. We don’t have a rulebook of times allowed to give form to objects or events; expectations are conditioned by other parameters of inexperience. Partly because most people in forming the societal paradigm are not producers, they are consumers. Consumption as production; shopping as making.

David Gates