When I was asked to write ‘an article about hand-making and why we still persevere with it’, my first thought was that I’m probably not qualified, given I’ve only been ‘persevering’ in this craft for approximately five minutes.
On the other hand, questions like this – ‘why’ questions – have little to do with technical expertise, which addresses the ‘how’ when the outcome is already known in advance. There’s an attitude amongst some woodworkers that would have us ‘master the craft’, whatever that means, before being allowed to comment on themes like human labour, the nature of the made-world, and the way different modes of human thought allow the world to disclose different senses of itself to us.
One outcome of this attitude is the implication that one cannot think critically about what’s included and excluded by terms like ‘industrial’, ‘technology’, and ‘craft’ until knowing, of all things, how to flatten a
