I thought I'd post a commissioned work I made recently for a surfing friend - partly because it brought me a lot of joy and partly to show how versatile crochet can be. This piece was designed around an ocean theme - I tried to capture the sand, surf and the bright underwater treasures of coral. Commissioned pieces are really fun - I like playing around with a theme and trying to work out how I could capture it with yarn.
Designed originally as a button-up neck scarf for the chilly coastal winds, this piece quickly moved upwards to my friend's head as a wide head band - where, quite honestly, it looked even better. I really enjoy the design process of tailor-made items, especially where it's for someone I know. Matching a piece to a theme and also to a person is a skill that takes a combination of logical thought, intuition, and creativity. I had initially planned to add bottle-tops and "ocean junk" to make the piece a commentary on both marine beauty and ecological degradation, but the piece felt finished before the junk made it in so I decided to curb my activist bent. It was enough to make a piece that was a tribute to the beauty of the ocean in itself. Speaking of tributes to the ocean, the friend who commissioned this piece has taken some beautiful underwater photos which you can find here.
A day or two after my last post, I discovered an excerpt from the writings of John Ruskin which summarised eloquently something of my own feeling about the work of creating:
"I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment - was the carver happy while he went about it? It may be the hardest work possible, and the harder because so much pleasure was taken in it; but it must have been happy too, or it will not be living." (p61-2)
The quote above comes from Ruskin's "The Seven Lamps of Architecture". Ruskin was an English art, architectural and social critic whose later inspired for William Morris, instigator of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Arts and Crafts Movement reacted against machine forms and overly-ornate decoration, developing instead an aesthetic of simple, functional beauty in art, architecture and furniture design.
In a section entitled "'The Lamp of Life': Hand and heart for work of art", Ruskin goes on to say:
"...all the short, and cheap, and easy ways of doing that whose difficulty is its honour - are just so many new obstacles in our already encumbered road. They will not make us happier or wiser - they will neither extend the pride of judgment nor the privilege of enjoyment. They will only make us shallower in our understandings, colder in our hearts and feebler in our wits. And most justly. For we are not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts." (p63)
That does seem to me to be a pretty tough call. And one that it's easy enough to shoot holes in by pointing out that in our society, it's only the privileged who have the luxury of choosing the work we find most dignified, the work we can pour our hearts into. But I would suggest that the quest for cheapness and imitation is fuelled by the privileged, anyhow - the rich imitating the richer - and factory labourers producing imitation wood and stone surfaces are victims of a society in which the agenda has been set for them. That society has lost its connection to real things.
I can't say I follow Ruskin entirely - it isn't clear to me why he condemns wrought iron but lauds tile mosaics, for example. I imagine he is a man of his time, and wonder whether people may look back on my own preference for "natural" over "synthetic" fibre as a quaint anachronism. But I think we need to rethink our production agenda, and that part of that rethinking needs to be weighed against the dignity of the work we expect people to perform.
It is no surprise that the inherent "dignity" of a given form of work takes second place to getting bread on the table. But I hope that one day that dignity may be available to all, not only in "art" or the "high" professions; that we may feed, clothe and shelter ourselves through such dignified and difficult work. Then the love of the artisan will be found in the bread, the table, and the shirt on the back of she who eats.
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Ruskin, John 1849. "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" in W. G. Collingwood (ed), 1907. The Ruskin Reader, 49-69. Ballantyne Press: London.
I thought I'd post a commissioned work I made recently for a surfing friend - partly because it brought me a lot of joy and partly to show how versatile crochet can be. This piece was designed around an ocean theme - I tried to capture the sand, surf and the bright underwater treasures of coral. Commissioned pieces are really fun - I like playing around with a theme and trying to work out how I could capture it with yarn.
