Perhaps this is what is wrong with our country in part - the loss of a manufacturing emphasis in schools. Unless they choose to go to an art or trade school children are no longer taught to make things. Home economics as it was called is now called "technology" and is mostly computer based and taught along with health. Cooking and sewing must be learned at home if at all.
The resurgence of the "maker movement" in everything from felting wool to brewing beer seems to defy this, but also speaks to hunger for "making" as if it were a need. And it is. Our brains need to engage kinesthetically using hand eye coordination to do more than study, read, watch TV and manipulate phones. What happens to a brain when it engages in the process of manipulating materials is the building of new neural pathways. One of the doctors at the conference stated something that I already knew: seniors with memory loss do better when they are given something to do especially if it is something that revives old skills - embodied skills.
As a review one of the psychologists noted the tension between all of these binaries, which seem apparent in the discussion of weaving: explicit versus implicit knowledge, academics and craftspeople, economic gain versus sustainability, art versus craft. But I loved the response of a weaver in the audience who said, "The loom holds tension in the warp so that all these variations in the weft can exist." Meaning that the tension between binaries is the stuff of life. To use another weaving metaphor ,Dr. Ko, historian at Barnard College, noted that binaries can exist without hierarchies being created, which exclude people if we are able to "shuttle" between art and craft, profit and sustainability etc...
I loved what another very old weaver said as a closing statement for the whole event:
"When I was weaving in the 60's it was becoming an academic discipline in colleges, but that all stopped because computers came in and things became so mechanized. I am excited to see weaving re-emerging with language and scholarship that acknowledges the many importances it has in
life."
The resurgence of the "maker movement" in everything from felting wool to brewing beer seems to defy this, but also speaks to hunger for "making" as if it were a need. And it is. Our brains need to engage kinesthetically using hand eye coordination to do more than study, read, watch TV and manipulate phones. What happens to a brain when it engages in the process of manipulating materials is the building of new neural pathways. One of the doctors at the conference stated something that I already knew: seniors with memory loss do better when they are given something to do especially if it is something that revives old skills - embodied skills.
As a review one of the psychologists noted the tension between all of these binaries, which seem apparent in the discussion of weaving: explicit versus implicit knowledge, academics and craftspeople, economic gain versus sustainability, art versus craft. But I loved the response of a weaver in the audience who said, "The loom holds tension in the warp so that all these variations in the weft can exist." Meaning that the tension between binaries is the stuff of life. To use another weaving metaphor ,Dr. Ko, historian at Barnard College, noted that binaries can exist without hierarchies being created, which exclude people if we are able to "shuttle" between art and craft, profit and sustainability etc...
I loved what another very old weaver said as a closing statement for the whole event:
"When I was weaving in the 60's it was becoming an academic discipline in colleges, but that all stopped because computers came in and things became so mechanized. I am excited to see weaving re-emerging with language and scholarship that acknowledges the many importances it has in
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