WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF ADVICE YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN, THAT YOU’D PASS ALONG TO FELLOW ARTISANS AND MAKERS IN THE WORLD OF CRAFT?
I cannot answer this question because I’m not an artisan all over the world, so the type of advice that I receive would not necessarily provide benefit for people that are living a life that’s very very different to mine. The best advice I’ve ever been given, however, is sometimes you need to let go to get a better hold. This is something I was told many many years ago and that I keep practising. And I have passed it on to an awful lot of people to whom I think it could be relevant because maybe their lives are similar to mine or maybe this saying can have resonance for that but it’s definitely not necessarily for artisans or crafts people.
WHY IS CRAFT IMPORTANT TO YOU?
So I don’t consider myself a crafts person. I have a huge admiration for those who are, and I use my hands, I’m good at crochet, I love to sew, I love to draw – but I certainly wouldn’t consider myself in the realm of being a crafts person or an artisan. For me, those people are to be revered. They are the holders of ancient skills and traditions, and I wouldn’t consider myself in that league, although I still work the same threads to a certain extent that my grandmother used to work when she taught me how to knit and crochet, my mother is a great knitter. And I speak a lot about craft in my book, Loved Clothes Last, the importance of crafts, how crafts represents its area, the folklore of that area, and the people that live in that area, so craft really is not just history, but the evolution of our manual intelligence.
Maybe I can elaborate a little bit about this manual intelligent concept, because it’s something I very much believe in. I do believe that as people, we probably learnt how to make and used our hands before we became fully verbal, and certainly before we learnt how to write, or we discovered writing, or we invented writing. The concept of a manual intelligence, this desire to make and to innovate via making, I believe is truly instinctive in us humans, and craft derives from that. So, although we can see craft as art and applied art, we also carry potentially that gene, that wanting to make. That’s the one that I feel inside of me. Wanting to use my hands, wanting to feel fabric being made from my fingers.
