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Introduction

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little while ago I had an idea for a bed, sketched it down roughly and started making the pieces for it. I’d selected some Sycamore a friend of mine gave me from his woods, creamy white and beautiful to work with. I enjoyed the work, making each piece using only hand tools and traditional methods. I loved the dance of the making, of revealing the beauty of the wood while not imposing my will on it too forcibly. Gradually, the pieces came together into various sections of the bed. It looked like my sketch, like the image in my head, yet for some reason it failed to satisfy me.

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e bed remains incomplete in my workshop, an adornment to the space, a reminder that not all ideas achieve what we would hope of them.

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is book is a little like that bed; the earlier sections of it now discarded in a

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le on my laptop, the hopes I’d had for them and their place in these pages no longer relevant.

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is book did not become what I expected. It may even have become something I thought I wanted to avoid. Yet in all truth I’m not sure I ever really knew what it would be like, holding to an idea only because it seemed true to an intention.It is an odd thing for a pragmatist like me to say, but the call I had to write this came from a place deeper than my consciousness could understand. As an experienced

Material

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craftsman, I thought I would probably be writing a book about making, so I was surprised by the title that kept forcing its way into my mind. It took me a long time to understand why I wanted to call the book

Material.

When the title

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rst came to me, early in the project, I tried to

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ght it, and as the writing progressed, I kept expecting the name to change; but it refused to do so.I had always taken the material of my making for granted, relating to it in the plural, a choice of inanimate ‘materials’ that were at my disposal. Yet now, the word presented itself to me in the singular, with all the gravitas of something much greater than racks of planks, metal rods or pieces of leather awaiting transformation. It asked me not only what

a

material was but also what was

material;

it forced me to look at my work, and that of all of us who enter into a relationship with the materials we use to make things. It forced me to look at where these materials come from, at the often untold stories of their extraction from the natural world, and at the scars and consequences they leave behind.

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e

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rst thing I had to do once the project became clearer to me was to accept the personal nature of it.

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e material I work with is

material to me,

built on my personal relation-ship with landscape and transformation, and the dignity I wish for myself and the ground I inhabit. As a maker of wooden objects, I cannot get away from the ‘nature’ of the material I work with – that is, the nature contained within it. I write this book from the perspective of a maker but also as a human being, part of the species that has collectively wrought the greatest damage on this planet.

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e maker in me is inseparable from the human, for it is what has

Introduction

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distinguished us from other species. Our capacity to make – to alter and transform the materials we extract from the natural world – is our gift and our curse. I feel both aspects intensely, and this book is my attempt to look more deeply into that duality and make some peace with it.Making is still the core of the book, and the makers I have hung out with while writing it have continually been my guides back to the material, to the earth and to what underlies the making process. My journeys down underground, both physical and metaphorical, through mineshafts and history, started in conversation with those who make objects or process materials.I imagined that I would explore a wide geographic area from which I would harvest stories from various makers, but instead I have been guided more by the landscape of the region where I have lived for the last twenty years, South West England. Writing this book taught me just how much I have taken for granted, how ignorant I have been about what lies right around me and how unedu-cated I really am. Quite a realisation from someone who apparently had the best education one can receive and who may be perceived by others to be ‘well educated’.

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e writing and research actually made me feel quite ignorant and narrow, blind to the truths bleeding from the wounds under my feet.

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e roots underlying the narrative structure of the book grow from the ground of my own relationship with mak-ing, and where I live and what matters to me.

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ese roots bind me to a sense of place, but from here they spread out amongst the roots of others, through the mycelia and