Craftsmanship
Guys, what if the world ended?
Not to start this blog post with all doom and gloom, but seriously, what would we do? Imagine all the technology we had come to rely on just one day stopped working? No TV, no internet, no phones. All of it, rendered absolutely useless. How would we cope?
I’m sure after the initial worldwide panic, we would go into survival mode.
But… I don’t know about you guys, but I have no idea how to start a fire. Or how wifi works.
And all this hypotheticals got me thinking…
How do you make a chair?
A book? Clothes? Grow vegetables or butcher livestock for food?
Someone once said, if you were to lay out, on table, all the tools, materials, and equipment needed to make a phone, with no manual, they wouldn’t figure it out even if it took them years.
If you don’t have someone to teach you, then you might as well be hitting a bunch of sticks and stone together for all the good that would do you.
So, I started thinking about all these craftspeople, who understand which wood to use and which saws or chisels to wield to make a chair, or how to make paper and mix up natural ingredients for a glue to bind pages together to make a book, or use a loom to weave clothes. The skills they have grown over the span of years, a craft they have mastered, and the things they can create.
And then my mind strayed to all of the mass production that we have gotten accustomed to. We as society don’t like waiting for things anymore —or don’t know how to wait. We want things to appear instantaneously. Speedline things. Optimisation in order to waste less time. Faster and faster. With the rise of AI, with just a few sentences, whole books and images can be created (I’d much prefer if it could take away the torture of laundry rather than my joy of creating). We’ve lost our appreciation for the slow moving things, tasks that take time.
Craftsmanship takes years to master. It takes time.
I have found that my appreciation for craft has grown. They are steeped in traditional, take years to master, rely on hard work, dedication, and most of all, perseverance. Since beginning to teach myself Mokuhanga, I have caught a glimpse of that life. It is going to take a while before I’m any good at it. And that’s okay.
So, how do you make a chair?
My grandfather was a carpenter. He’d definitely know. But he’s gone. All we have left are the pieces he made and some equipment. But looking at those wooden bowls, layered with different pieces of wood, I can’t help but marvel at them. Even though woodworking is a whole world I am unfamiliar with, I could tell he had skill.
So, how do you make a chair?
No idea. But, I know I want to pay homage to those who know how.
And that is exactly what my Craftsmanship Prints intend to do.
