Over the last year, I’ve stopped making music and begun making things like tables.
Part of the pleasure I get from this kind of work is that it forces me to reckon with the material world; with forces like gravity and friction as well as the history of things and the value of natural resources. Much of the professional work I do has been aided by dematerialization, a process by which the physical world is supplanted or at least augmented by a symbolic world. In my recreational work, I am now tackling reality from the opposite – or, at least, an apposite – direction.
We often use the phrase “to work with one’s hands” but I don’t think that’s quite it. (I’m typing with my hands right now.) Rather, it’s working with the material world that poses some provocative challenges. To build something, no matter how simple, is to investigate how our stores are stocked and wages set. It’s an opportunity to appreciate the discoveries implicit in many of the conveniences we take for granted.
It can be a helpful reminder of the here and now when so much of what we now do is focus on the elsewhere.