What I Mean When I Call Myself a 'Maker'

I have often thought about how to define myself and the work that I do, though of course, definitions are fluid, always acquiring new textures and meanings. Of late, I have been using the language of 'maker' (in conjucntion with 'designer'). I have been thinking this through with Sarojini, who writes about making in the context of young people in Delhi and their "world-making practices". The term makermis expansive, it is appealing, and it is also in vogue.

A print made by Sarojini at the V&A East

The newly opened V&A East museum in London is dedicated to making practices. Its permanent gallery, called ‘Why We Make’, explores creativity in all its forms. Across two floors, more than 500 objects from the V&A’s collection are displayed, spanning art, architecture, design, performance, and fashion. The display is arranged by theme, with topics including identity, wellbeing, social justice and environmental action.

For the past several months, I have been diving into my archives of prints to reflect on and document my processes of making. These are prints and patterns that exist on my hard-drive as well as across various mediums: fabric, photographs, sketches, notes. I have been slowly bringing these together, forming a pattern book of sorts. The image below is a photograph of a pattern book at the V&A East.

Travelling sourcebooks of the Needlework Development scheme, 1934-1961. Photographed at the V&A East

Founded in Scotland, the Needlework Development Scheme was a collaborative initiative that brought together arts education and the textile industry. Thread producers J&P Coats originally sponsored the scheme to improve skills and training in embroidery techniques. Initially the scheme targeted British training colleges, but it later reached wider networks of hobbyists and self-taught makers. Teaching packs included samples of embroidered textiles from around the world for inspiration, paired with how-to instruction guides. I love this sourcebook so much: look at the details of the text, the embroidery, and the quiet care that holds it all together. There is intention and attention, and to me, that is what making feels like from the inside, and why I find myself drawn to the term 'maker'.

I have been sitting with this word for a while now. Maker. It is simple and it is expansive. A maker is someone who brings things into being, through hands, through thought, through the slow accumulation of material and meaning over time. I notice when I look at art, jewellery, textiles, I find myself thinking about processes. I am curious about who made what I am appreciating, how they made it, and their skills, their craft, and their making.

The scholar Tim Ingold writes: "processes of making appear swallowed up in objects made; processes of seeing in images seen” (2013, p. 7). Ingold argues that both material culture and visual culture studies tend to focus on finished objects, what was made, at the expense of the processes through which things come into being. This means decoupling creativity from innovation, or reading it backwards from its results, but rather understanding creativity as an improvisation, as a world always in the making.

What I make is hard to describe in a single sentence, which is perhaps why the word appeals to me. I make prints. I make patterns. I make textiles that carry stories I have gathered across years of looking and travelling and living. I make collections that are also, in some way, a record of how I see the world. I am a maker, in that I see making as an act of assembling, gathering what you have, materials, objects, memories, your eyes, your inheritance, and you make something that did not exist before.

For now at least, this is a word that I identify with. I do have more to say about makers and making, designers and design, and definitions and processes, but I shall save those thoughts for a later post.

References

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.