Review by Frances Spurrier
Kary starts his book by saying that he wants to help understand the relationship we all have fashioning our lives within the material structure of the planet. The sub-title gives us a reference to craftspeople finding their place within the digital age.
There are chapters that cover Kary’s own life as a woodworker as well as interviews with many ‘makers’ who have spent their lives fashioning materials like stone, clay, fabric. During the course of his researches the author visits and interviews many artisans including a lady called Hilary who devotes herself to making baskets out of willow. Such basketmaking, he points out, was once an essential production for the UK with large overseas markets, but it has now largely been replaced by plastics and relegated to the rank of hobby craft.
This, he says, is not just a matter of supply and demand – or it is – but underlying those imperatives there is another, deeper narrative, which Kary makes use of, following on from ideas he has found in an essay by Ursula Le Guin called ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ in which LeGuin challenged the hunter/warrior theory of mankind’s origins so beloved of museums and history books. That is, that human beings first carved themselves tools and weapons for hunting and fighting and so these are their undeniable foundations. The temptation to say ‘his’ origins is overwhelming. This is the whole point that LeGuin makes.
Kary writes that there are ‘no cave paintings elevating the basket or woven cloth’ yet such materials have been at least as essential to ‘mankind’s’ development as spears and knives, yet have no place in the overarching story.
That is the once-upon-a time. But what induces people to take up the makers’ way of living as opposed to any other, the writer asks? Maybe ‘lifestyle’ choices, the impetus to earn one’s living away from the treadmill of office and shop. Or perhaps a talent discovered in time, a yearning. The need to find a sense of self, to answer the universal question ‘who am I’?
I was not clear when reading in what way the author finds that the digital age affects the result of that enquiry. Perhaps it widens the choices available to the potential craftsman, or maybe narrows them down. A painter, a naturalist, a writer, a scientist, actor or athlete might ask themselves similar questions, just as much as someone who weaves fabric or fashions pots out of clay. As a reader I did not find any focused reasoning in the relations between crafsmanship and planet and wonder if this is even possible to define? The author tells us that students who have made a bench are reminded ‘of a broader sense of their own capacities’ when they walk by. But so might someone who has run a triathlon or finally finished reading War and Peace in French.
In another passage Kary talks about building his own house for his family, a house in the woods out of wood: ‘Home has become more than a place – more than a shelter….Home is a manifestation of my material connection to life. It is the point at which wild land and ingenuity meet.’ That is well and good if you are a craftsman and have the time and the skill to execute such a Yeats-ian idyll. Or to indulge as Thoreau in Walden style living.
No doubt the author’s argument would be in favour of greater education in the crafts and I do not disagree. He notes how the craftsman’s skills are eroded through pressures of time, the need for speed and economic compromise. He moves on to talk about granite, the Devonian landscape of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor – huge tors – ‘the building blocks of giants’ – the human cost of mining tin and other ores from the ground; compares the value we place on diamonds, gold and silver in our search for immortality with wood and bone which will rot away back into the earth.
Tools are an important part of any craftsman’s identity. But here lies a problem in itself. Tools in current use by modern-day artisans are made post-industrially from iron and steel. As Kary admits, ‘my lineage is that of iron and steel, of industrial thinking and sophisticated, technological development’. Nevertheless the promotion of certain tools or items or objects as ‘handmade’, ‘artisan-made’ or ‘handcrafted’ is used as a method of implying superior production and worth, whether there is any truth in the matter or not. I thought this was a very valid point and well worth expanding upon.
I struggled to find an overall point or conclusion in Material, to discover what ultimately the book was trying to say. Kary interviews other makers but then writes the results up in reported speech – presumably to maintain a fluency of style – giving the reader the sense of hearing only the author’s interpretation. Also the division of the chapters under various subjects headings such as mining or boat making made me think that perhaps this work is more suited to a series of essays around the topic, rather than the differing subject matters being forced into a single narrative.
Frances Spurrier is the author of a poetry collection, The Pilgrim’s Trail (Cinnamon Press), and a novel, The Winchester Codex (Troubador Publishing). Her blog can be found here.
Nick Kary, Material (Chelsea Green, 2024). 978-1915294623, 272pp., paperback original.
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