weaving Voices 01.04.2025 issuu - Flipbook - Page 46
The low, influential voice of the craftsperson
In the act of weaving together, a central yet silent actor takes centre
stage: the loom. Other elements also become more present in
the space where the work unfolds, such as light, temperature, the
floor, chairs or cushions on which the weavers sit or stand, teacups,
threads, colours, and smells. Practicing handcraft activates the
senses and heightens awareness of the tools involved and the
environment in which the work occurs. These elements, typically
originating from mass production nowadays, were once originally
designed and hand crafted too, in earlier times. The following text,
written by Anni Albers in 1943, emphasises the significance of design,
its evolution, and consequently, the central and transformed roles of
the craftsperson, the designer and the artist.
“If in art work we venture to follow nature by learning from
her rich variety of form, at the other pole of our work, the
developing of tools, we reduce form to its barest essentials.
Usefulness is the dominant principle in tools. They do not
exist, like works of art, for their own sake but are means to
further ends. Even though tools appear to express usefulness
most truly in their form, we also find fitness to purpose in
unobtrusive objects of our environments. So much do we take
them for granted that we are rarely aware of their design.
They vary from the anonymous works of engineering to the
modest things of our daily life - roads and light bulbs, sheets
and milk bottles. In their silent and unassuming existence,
they do not call for much of our attention nor do they demand
too much time to be spent on their care; neither do they
challenge our pride in possessing them.
Although we like some things to be restrained, in others
we ask for an additional quality of provocative beauty.
We strive for beauty by adding qualities like colour,
texture, proportions or ornamentation; yet beauty is not
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an appendage. When it unfolds free of considerations of
usefulness, it surpasses, as art, all the other work we do.
In works of art our characteristic uniformity, obviousness,
and regularity are lost in the search for a synonym: in
terms of form, for an inner relation. It is easy to detect the
human mind behind it, but like nature, it remains in the end
impenetrable.
Concerned with form, the craftsman, designer, or artist
affects through their work the general trend of style for better
or for worse. The craftsman is today outside of the great
process of industrial production; the designer belongs to
it. But whether inside or outside, directly or indirectly, the
craftsman and the artist influences the shaping of things.
That many imaginative minds find in art and crafts a wider
basis for their work than in the more immediately vital
setting of industrial planning, is explained perhaps by the
more narrow specialisation of industry. Unless we propagate
handwork as a political means, like Gandhi, the craftsman
as producer plays only a minor part today. However, as the
one who makes something from beginning to end and has it
actually in hand, he is close enough to the material and to the
process of working it to be sensitive to the influences coming
from these sources. His role today is that of the expounder
of the interplay between them. He may also play the part of
the conscience for the producer at large. It is a low voice, but
one admonishing and directly rightly. For the craftsman, if he
is a good listener, is told what to do by the material, and the
material does not err.
The responsibility of the craftsman or artist may even go
further, to that of attempting to classify the general attitude
toward things that already exist. Since production as a whole
is ordinarily directed today by economic interest, it may
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