Crafting for a craft

24 May 2010 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

I mentioned the wife’s participation in Yarn School a few posts back. Since then she’s been spending a lot of time spinning yarn.

She takes pride in her yarn for the yarn’s sake, without necessarily thinking ahead to what she might make out of it. In fact she often doesn’t like me asking her what she’ll make out of it. That’s not the point. The process of taking fiber to yarn is thrilling enough in and of itself.

She is crafting for a craft, something I only realized last week. The same thing happens in other media as well when a guy thinks about it though. A ceramic artist can make tiles for someone laying tile or creating a mosaic, for instance.

It’s a new thought — I like new thoughts — and I don’t entirely know what to make of yet, but I like having the knowledge regardless.

Filed under Art for art's sake, Craft, Fiber, Handmade

Architectural clay

25 March 2010 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

Matt over at Slipcast pointed out these splendid clay houses fabricated by the musgum people of northern Cameroon.

Via Design Boom.

Filed under Architecture, Ceramics, Handmade

Beer as indicator of quality over quantity

20 March 2010 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

Another interesting piece from The Curator, written by Brian Watkins, talking about one of my favorite subjects, quality versus quantity. Excerpting from his post Good Work and Beer Culture:

    Beer has always been popular in our country, but always in different ways. It’s an old story to discuss the recent dominance of microbreweries over macrobreweries. The shift that we’ve seen in the last few years has gone even further. Now, even microbreweries are giving way to smaller craft breweries, and because of this trend, never in the history of our country has beer been more of an artisanal practice. This is quite an occasion.

    Quite an occasion, because this example provides us with an excellent gauge for how our culture now approaches work. We can all see consumers trying to shift from quantity to quality. Toyota’s CEO recently said that their failure in manufacturing was because they had become more concerned with profit margin than with creating a quality product — ironic, since the highest quality products are starting to take in the most profit. We are becoming (we hope) more intelligent consumers who buy less crap and look for more efficient products.

How astonishingly refreshing that the CEO of a giant company would admit that they were more concerned with profit than their product — and express a (hopefully honest) desire to do something to change that. We’ve all known this was the common corporate modus operandi for years now. Watkins goes on to quote Dorothy Sayers talking about work (in the context of WWII, but very applicable to modern day):

    The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work — our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure — and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people. We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it good?” . . . not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: “What goes into the beer?”

Filed under Basis for designing well, Craft, Disposable culture, Handmade, Modern culture

Intentional Observation: Working retail

3 December 2009 by pcNielsen 3 Comments

These are a few observations so far from the part-time retail job I took a couple months ago at Kohl’s.

Wastefulness: Kohl’s gives stewardship of our environment a lot of attention. They recycle cardboard, paper and plastic, lights are on timers or motion sensors and a number of stores run on solar power (all of which is not just good stewardship, but smart business). However, as a highly trained professional [box unloader] I get to see first hand how ridiculously some of the merch is packaged by the manufacturers for shipping to the stores.

Some of the objects I so professionally unbox — though not most in my opinion — warrant very careful packing. Damage during shipping is not good business. There are a select few of the items I so professionally unpack that are wrapped in plastic, inserted into styrofoam, taped together, put in a box and then put in another box represent what I’ve come to see as an endemic wastefulness in American culture (Granted, some of these things maybe packaged in China.).

What I can’t figure out is why a manufacturer would do this. A company would be more profitable (which of course is the end-all in our corporate cultures) if they didn’t purchase superfluous packaging and then pay wages to the person who’s packing up the products. I don’t understand; any company worth its salt will have researched just how many packing peanuts or layers of bubble wrap are required to protect their products during shipping. So maybe I’m wrong about these objects being excessively wrapped and taped and styrofoamed.

But I don’t think so.

Management: Management and coworkers make all the difference, and Dilbert is much too close to the truth in so many of our workplaces. I already knew this and so did you, but it’s worth repeating. So many people I know work retail jobs they are not very happy with, mainly because of the attitudes and ignorance of their managers and coworkers. The people I work with happen to be very easy to get along with and quite helpful, to customers and other employees. Proverbs chapter 17 reminds us that “Better is a dry morsel and quietness with it than a house full of feasting with strife.”

Consumerism: The retail world screams materialism, consumerism to me. It’s somewhat ironic in my mind that I’m working retail at all, as an aspiring artist who plugs all things handmade.

In and of itself, mass production — and big box retailers which seem to have grown out of the assembly line — isn’t evil. Finding ways to work more efficiently is, I think, virtuous. So much of the industrial and technological revolutions, though, end up as integral parts of our daily lives before any of us stop to think about how they will change us as individuals and as a culture. Any potential consequences be damned in favor of progress (whatever that really is) and the almighty dollar!

Buy-in: As a bit of a side note, I’ve been surprised that nothing has allowed me to really buy into Kohl’s as an employee. I suppose this isn’t something a lot of people working part-time retail jobs expect at their workplace, but I’m learning that I’m the kind of guy who wants to be involved mentally, not just as a grunt.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the grunt work. It’s actually nice to be on my feet a little after a few years behind a desk for eight hours a day. But I’d like a deeper reason to be involved with the company, and so far it hasn’t presented itself.

Filed under Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Handmade, Intentional observation, Modern culture, Personal reflection

Anonymity in handmade

9 November 2009 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

An observation from Julie Rozman’s Design-Realized blog, The Anonymous Pot:

    After eating from handmade pots two or three times a day for the last five months and drinking handmade far more frequently; after beginning to consider making some functional work to add to the cupboards; after using a friend’s collection of handmade pots; in handling and re-handling literally hundreds of pots while helping glaze, wad, and load them into a kiln: I realized my appreciation for the anonymous pot.

    It’s just a good, beautiful object. Doesn’t matter who made it, just that somebody did. Doesn’t have to shout the name of the maker. Maybe better if it doesn’t. So the functional object is the foundation for a composition. If it’s a composition that stands alone, so much the better. (Possible? Very architectural question, that.)

My thought in response: It’s more important for the artist to take pride in his or her craft than to desire credit.

Filed under Ceramics, Handmade, Sculpture

Native American pottery shards

14 October 2009 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

My parents are still moving into their downtown apartment — right next to the one we’re presently occupying — and last night, amidst a drawerful of seemingly unrelated objects, I noticed the vintage Tang jar in the photo below.

Tang jar

The jar is full of pottery shards my dad picked up near a rest area round about 1966. He was traveling with friends in the Pueblo, Colorado area.

Pottery shards

Pieces range from about 3/16 to 3/8 of an inch in thickness. The black and red shards are very smooth, probably terra sigged and burnished to a shine while the lighter colored ones with decoration bear a quite dry surface.

Filed under Ceramics, Found objects, Handmade

Dangerous things you should let your children do

18 September 2009 by pcNielsen 2 Comments

Just for fun this Friday:

Via The Educated Imagination

Filed under Handmade, Imagination, Modern culture

Laboring on Labor Day weekend

8 September 2009 by pcNielsen 2 Comments

This is what I labored on this past weekend.

Photo0053

I had hopes of finishing at least one sculpture. Hopes were postponed when my brother called to tell me about some wooden boxes at the Salvation Army. The boxes are from a heater company in Central City, Nebraska. I’m assuming these are the scratch and dent models; the Army was given 300 of them and charged customers like me $2 a pop. Can’t buy the lumber for that.

This is a modular storage system — I screwed four boxes together to create 6 2×2 units — for my wife‘s yarn. Some modification was required, although that was fairly easy. Puttying and painting took up most of my weekend. I’m kinda worn out, but I guess that’s what labor does to a guy. The front edges may be redone in the future, and I’ll add backs to them at some point as well, but they function for the time being. I couldn’t just buy the boxes and not work on the project right away though; they took up too much space in the studio.

The white cabinet in the middle I made, mostly from salvaged wood, including the doors, salvaged from a remodel job round-about 2004. Her stash quickly outgrew it.

Filed under Fiber, Furniture, Handmade, Salvage

Why is art not considered “real” work?

4 September 2009 by pcNielsen 2 Comments

This may be something I’ve talked about (or at least alluded to) before on the blog, but I don’t remember for certain so I’m bringing it up again. Earlier in the week I asked this question in the Facebook forum: “Why are the arts and crafts not considered real work?” The responses went like this.

  • I don’t know. Maybe through some false, Puritanical idea that work should be cheerless drudgery? That if you’re enjoying it too much, it’s not really “work”?
  • I think it depends on whom you’re talking to. Great societies need art as well as industry and politics (Actually, do we really need politics?). I, for one, would love to quilt or knit, but I’ll apparently have to wait for Heaven to succeed at those arts.
  • Arts and Crafts aren’t considered “work” because people can do them as hobbies or in their spare time and don’t realize that (perhaps) there is a great amount of craftsmanship and skill in what you do than in (perhaps) what I do, when I’m not punching a clock. The correct answer is, “Paul, we’d all love to do what we love to do but have to punch a clock and it’s more fun to mock you than to say, ‘I’m jealous.’” I’m not jealous of your vocation but I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to do what I loved either.
  • Probably for a similar reason that being a “homemaker & mother” is not considered “real work” — because it doesn’t bring in the bread.

Through the course of these responses, I began to wonder if part of this cultural sentiment might also result from the underlying and powerfully subconscious underpinnings of our mass producing consumerist culture. The value of handmade has, perhaps, been relegated to the status of hobby because such objects don’t make significant contributions to national statistics. They don’t pay homage to the god of the economy. They don’t create enough of the right kind of jobs.

The value of imagination, beauty, leisure, philosophy and so forth also fall short of the god of efficiency’s standards, all of which often tie into the arts. These things take time out of an otherwise productive life and are generally frowned upon by American society.

Those are the beginnings of my thoughts anyway, and I’d be interested in hearing more from readers.

Filed under Art, Beauty, Disposable culture, Handmade, Imagination, Mass production, Modern culture, Personal reflection

Value of college degree overrated

21 August 2009 by pcNielsen 5 Comments

When I met an old childhood acquaintance in a store a few weeks ago who is on her way to college this weekend I implored her not to graduate. Real life, so to speak, responsibility simply sucks. Stay in school I told her!

Indeed, my own college experience was such that I’ve always wanted to go back. Real life isn’t all that bad, except for the constant bills in the mailbox. And the aging, although the wisdom that comes with age is almost worth the body falling apart bit. But my years at the university were good times, and that without ever once getting drunk or high.

However, I’ve wondered about the value of my degree in the past five years or so. Is college really all that? The impression me and my fellow high school students were given back in the early 90s was that it is all that. If you’re gonna be a somebody you gotta go to a four-year school.

I don’t really believe that anymore, and neither does John Stossel.

I didn’t go to college just so I could earn more money than a high school grad, which seems to be the focus of this video. I trained my eye on the university because I really wanted to be an architect, and there was no way to become an architect if you didn’t have degree. Of course, I changed my major two years in, but that’s another story for another time.

From time to time I wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t attended the university. A two-year school seems like a good option. In fact, people I knew at Southeast Community College were getting a better education than I was in graphic design, and I could studied ceramics there as well. I’ve also thought of owning rentals. A lot of people don’t have the right temperament to do this well (including our landlord down in Arkansas from four years back), but I believe I do, and it seemed like a way to make a good living. And maybe I’d be building furniture.

Other than pointing out our cultural blindness with respect to four-year degrees, I like how Stossel’s spot affirms the value of working with your hands, something The Aesthetic Elevator is all about.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

— I Thess 4:11

Filed under Architecture, Handmade, MFA, Modern culture, Personal reflection

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