Uncommon Press

A few months ago I watched a remarkable television show: Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press. Maybe you watched it too; because I'm a letterpress printer, I've had a lot of people ask me if I saw it. I did: it was part investigation into the way Gutenberg had earned his reputation as the Father of Letterpress, and part documentary about the recreation by a group of British press enthusiasts of a wooden hand press similar to Gutenberg's.

If you did watch the show, you'd remember that Gutenberg didn't actual invent the press itself, as hand presses had been used for printing woodblocks before his time. No, he is the Father of Letterpress for inventing a process to easily cast individual metal letters for the purposes of printing. It was much more of a jeweller/blacksmithery type of invention, really, and of course it revolutionised information technology as the world knew it.

While I was watching the show I remember thinking that, in my limited experience of Australian letterpress, and in my broader virtual observances of overseas letterpress, there seems to be two kinds of letterpress enthusiasts: those who live for the print, and those who love the machines. I've only known one person who combined elements of both, and he produced beautiful work.

Myself, I'm a print person, someone who loves what the process does rather than the process itself. I'm not particularly interested in the machines, and when something goes wrong with a press I'm working with, I’ll try to fix it intuitively, but if that doesn’t work I’m not afraid to look girlie and call people who are much handier with a spanner and screwdriver than I.

Canberra has a Museum of Printing quite close by in Queanbeyan; it's full of machines of different vintages, and that use different technologies, from iron presses to platen presses to cylinder presses and a working linotype machine. It was set up from the remnants of the Queanbeyan Age newspaper, and the people who run it (all volunteers, many of whom worked on the newspaper) love their machines. They get them working, they maintain them lovingly, and they print off the odd souvenir flyer to show the public what the machines can do. I don’t think there's a lot of print production happening there, and because I don’t worship the machines, I don't go there very often, which is quite remiss of me.

I bet all the QPM volunteers watched the Stephen Fry/Gutenberg show, and marvelled over the building of the wooden press; I bet they don't know, like I didn't, that a similar labour of love was happening just down the highway a bit. In Australia? Where most of our presses have been scrapped? Where it’s impossible to buy new metal type? Where the once quite healthy private press movement is now almost completely non-existent? Really?

Yes, really.

Let’s start with a little bit of printing history, a bit of context. I listed some printing presses above, but you probably don't know what I mean. Forgive me if I make a mistake here, I'm not a print history expert, I've just absorbed a few things in the time I've been involved with letterpress.

So, this is a press very similar to the one used by Gutenberg.



It is a wooden hand press, with most of the parts being wooden, and only some of the moveable parts of it made from metal, because it was very expensive to use metal at the time, as you can imagine. In fact, this press technology was the dominant form of print production for centuries, until the industrial revolution allowed metal casting to be a lot cheaper and large cast shapes were made possible. This allowed people to produce much more durable designs and you start getting presses that looked like this:



These are called iron hand presses. Similar concept to the hand press, in that you lay the type flat and press the paper onto it. Anyway, with all that marvellous industrial production capacity, from this point on press development went gangbusters, like everything else in the modern world, and presses changed shape rapidly over two centuries:









(That one is very similar to Miss Kitty, my beloved press.)



(Snaps to the marvellous Five Roses Press site for most of these images, a marvellous place to learn about letterpress.)

That first, wooden press is called the Common Press, because while there were many variants and slight improvements (and, I’d say, complete wackinesses) to its design over the centuries of its dominance, commonly they were all wooden with metal screws.

I'm pretty certain that, up to now, we haven't had a Common press in Australia, as we were colonised around the time of the Iron Press. Did you know that the First Fleet had a press on board? I read somewhere that there was no-one able to use it, so it festered in a hut for many years before being hauled out and put into use. One day I'll find that fact again and actually write down the details.



I received a hand-addressed letter a month or so ago, in gorgeous penmanship of a kind I haven’t seen in years. I had only seen the sender once in the last fifteen years, and that was only a few months before the letter arrived. He's one of those wonderful eccentric Australian people that set themselves up in the bush and do whatever the hell they want and the rest of the world can be buggered. When you get talking to them, they've had an interesting life, and are usually very well educated. This man, Richard Jermyn, is no exception.

I don't know a lot about Richard Jermyn. I've been told various stories, such as he is an ex-Navy man; he was an architect, so forth. I don't really know what is true and what apocryphal from the various stories. What I do know for certain is that he has a strong interest in letterpress and printing, and used to have a private press in the bush near Bemboka, NSW called the Indian Head Press, named for a nearby peak in the Bega Valley. He lived near my parents, who have a lot of respect for him, and they took me to meet him when I first started showing an interest in type and printing. I lost contact with him; he sold his Bemboka property and moved further south. Apparently he gave a lot of his equipment to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, and only kept the basics, and that’s the last I heard for a long time.

Then earlier this year I taught a bookarts workshop in Bega, and he popped in to say hello. I had a couple of my fine press books with me, and I was delighted when he looked through them seriously, with care and attention to detail, and then looked at me soberly and said 'good pressmanship' with the same sense of approval that the farmer says 'good pig' to Babe at the end of the movie, and I felt so happy I thought I would burst. I have had the pleasure of having my books admired by good people, but when an experienced pressman praises, it really means something.

So, the letter. It was only a computer-generated and photocopied invitation, but the content was very exciting.



Of course I went, how could I not? I took my mother, a local historian who could also appreciate the importance of the occasion. It was a most enchanting experience: driving down the highway to the furthermost eastern corner of the state, turning into a rough narrow dirt road just off the main road to discover a large green Colourbond shed surrounded by the usual scrap and detritus that is common to most farm barns, plus a rugged vegie patch and a rudimentary washing line full of simple clothes: shirts, worker's shorts, socks. Outside the door of the shed was a table set up with wine and nibblies. Not wanting to drink, I asked for something non-alcoholic, and was poured a glass of water from the tap attached to the rainwater tank.

A bit of chat with the others gathered around – mostly friends and press-making collaborators, only one other person having anything to do with printing – and then we were allowed into the 'Tin Tent' to discover a completely different world.

I was expecting... I guess I was expecting the usual printer's set-up, arranged around the inside of a green tin shed. I wasn’t expecting the ambience of hand-cut wooden beams and carefully yet carelessly arranged arrangements of various collections – saws, lathes, timbers, chains, plugs, books, tins. among many, many collated things – up the walls and on a big mezzanine that is obviously a living quarters as well.



It was a living working space, one indistinguishable from another.

Richard had arranged for some local musicians to sit up on the mezzanine level with violin and harpsichord.



They played (exquisitely) from above as we entered and saw, in a cleared space at the far end of the shed, the press that Richard and a group of friends had built by hand.



You see this picture? Look at this:



It was gobsmackingly wonderful to stand and look at this working replica of early printing history. I can’t begin to convey how privileged I felt to be there when it pulled its very first print.

I had borrowed my mother’s digital voice recorder, and managed to record Richard’s opening speech.

I’ll provide a bit of it here, to give you an example of the gobsmackery:

This was started at the beginning of the year; I think the first of January I started to first put plane to wood. I might just go through quickly a bit of the language of the common press, the various parts, and you’ll see on the printed matter that I’ve made a bit of an explanation and some of the background, but basically this press was derived from plans … from a double volume book called The Common Press, which is the documentation of the common press that is in the Smithsonian Institution in America. Without the plans in this book I would not have contemplated it, but I looked at it and thought ‘I’ll have a go at this’. Just shows the things you can do in a moment of rashness.

The original plans called for oak, elm, beech timber, and the big departure has been that this is not European timber, this is all Australian hardwood. This is where Les and other people have come in. So, from the bottom down: the Feet are the hobs of the Tathra Wharf (there’s a story behind every piece), the Cheeks are (pretty ratty, you can see the difficulty of getting big enough timber)… basically wharf timber from North Bega.



These pieces... that’s the Head, and the other big lump down the bottom, that’s the Winter; those two pieces take the whole of the impression. These are dove-tailed into the cheeks, there’s a big dovetail running up in here, top and bottom, and those pieces take the whole pressure of the press, and these are Roads and Traffic Authority guideposts.

[laughs from viewers, someone says: they don’t make guideposts like that anymore!]

You can see a bit of the original timber there, I’ve written the dimensions there: 8 1/4 x 7 3/4 x 24 3/4, and that’s the offcut. So that’s the Winter. And somewhat ironically, the Summer is this little strip here...

If you want more of that verbal tour, you can download the files and hear for yourself. I’ve broken it into chunks, and apologies for some of the incidental noise, especially my iphone beeping at me. I taped until I stopped to have a go myself. None of the chunks are more than six or seven minutes:

Part 1: Richard Jermyn: Acknowledgement of the local Aboriginal peoples (this is about 30 seconds; I didn't mean to separate this out from the rest of the acknowledgements, but I was experimenting with the sound software)

Part 2: Richard Jermyn: thanking all those who were involved

Part 3: Richard Jermyn: Details about the parts of the press and what materials they used.

Part 4: Richard Jermyn: a live recording of pulling the first print

Part 5: Richard Jermyn: more live printing

Part 6: Richard Jermyn: an explanation of the metal screwthread and how it was made

The detail, the terminology, it’s all something you’d expect to see and hear in a museum, but it’s alive and well in a tin shed in Pambula. Amazing. Apparently this press will outlive anything built in European wood, thanks to the hard woody goodness of our Australian timbers.

Look at that woodcut of early printing again. See the inkballs used for printing? Richard had even put together a couple of those, made with wooden handles, horsehair and the remnants of a friend’s leather jacket. They worked really well, and he put a friend on printing duty while he supervised the press working.



On dabbed the ink, the paper (dry, not damp: he didn’t dampen machine-made paper) was inserted onto the guides, the tympan (made from real vellum) lowered onto the frisket and the whole lowered onto the forme (which is the locked-up type). Then he got friends to turn the handle that moved the type under the platen, and pull the lever that lowered the platen onto the type to make an impression. That prints the first page. Then the forme is rolled further along and the second page of the sheet is printed.



When the tympan was lifted to reveal a (fairly roughly) printed page, we all sighed deeply, no one more than Richard himself, who had very bravely and generously waited until we were all assembled to see if his press actually worked. This is what we took turns printing:





Don’t bother counting the typos: we know they are there, but there wasn’t time to change them, because the music was playing, and the wine was being slurped, and we were all taking turns to use the inkballs and turn the handle, and pull the lever – which, incidentally, explained a lot to me about why there weren’t many women in the trade. It’s hard work to pull that lever! I don’t think I could possibly print on that press regularly, although it would be akin to working out on a rowing machine, and probably very good for me.

>Just in case you can’t see the image, the book he used to build the press was called The Common Press: being a record, description & delineation of the early Eighteenth Century Handpress held in the Smithsonian Institution by E. Harris, C. Sisson (London: Merrion Printers, 1978). He used local craftsmen to help with timberworking and the blacksmithing.



He showed me the book after we stopped printing (only because we ran out of paper!) and it is incredibly detailed, with cross-sections, x-rays of inserts, plans and materials. Still, there’s no way I would look at something like that and think ‘I could do that’. I only do that with pictures of things people have printed.

I think everyone came away from the Tin Tent that day feeling privileged and excited. Richard had invited the local media but they didn’t show, and it’s their loss. Richard told me that he has happily spent $10,000 building this press. There is a thread on Briar Press about the possibility of building such a press, and I can’t wait for Richard to receive the praise he deserves for achieving it. He hopes to move it to somewhere more accessible, but in the meantime he will show it by appointment to anyone who is interested. You can read his contact details on the letter at the start of this post, otherwise feel free to email me and I will pass on his details. If you want to see more images of the press and the day's proceedings, go to my flickr set.


Richard Jermyn



[cross-posted at Ampersand Duck the website and Spike, the Meanjin blog]

What's Next?

The video below comes from the US based environmental journal, Orion. In many ways, it is a very immediate response to the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. But it also asks that all-pervading question that we do have to address.

What's next?

And it is a very pertinent question for makers, artists, craftspersons.


What's Next? from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

As a number of the speakers said, understandings and ways forward are best articulated by art, literature, making. In these spaces can we imagine what we haven't yet imagined or made real - some are solutions, some are arguments, some are reasons why things can't just run along the same tired course.

And if we the makers, the artists, are going to contribute what I think we certainly have to, our bit of answering a part of that 'What Next' question in the here and now, what are some of the possibilities we might offer?

Shall we be Luddites? Shall we be ethical? Shall we be the jesters? Shall we tell our neighbours, our families, our children about the emperor's clothes? Shall we engage, finding new pathways through virtual worlds of possibility? Shall we make beauty? Shall we be the solution, not part of the problem?

The touch of words

Every few years I get the chance to set a batch of poetry by hand to print using letterpress. It's a different thing to my usual piecework setting individual lines for titles or colophons. It's also a completely different thing to typing anything on a computer.

Have you ever stopped to think how many words we can write on a daily basis without effort? With computers, word production is almost inexhaustible. Churn out the letters, wipe them out if they're not working, print them out as many times as you like.

Old-fashioned letterpress (as opposed to linotype or monotype) is set letter by letter, side by side, line by line. It is a slower process than handwriting, but they are closely connected in relation to keyboarding. The personal effort made when writing legibly by hand closely connects the writer to the page, to the words, to the intention behind the words. The process is slow enough to allow the writer to consider very carefully the next word, the next line. I don't think computer keyboarding allows this to the same extent, although as I'm not a professional writer I'm not really qualified to make such a generalisation. But look at how much superfluous text is being generated out there, if only in blogosphere!

When I set a poem by hand, I think about these things. I can't think with too much absorption, otherwise I will set the wrong word. It's a bit like driving a car across the Nullabor plain: you can see a truck coming for hours, but if you don't concentrate, you'll still hit the bugger head-on when it finally comes close, even though there's nothing else around for kilometres. You can know the line of text you're setting off by heart, but if your mind wanders, typos creep in. But... the mind always seems to wander.

In Australia, we have very few letterpress resources. There are no foundries anymore, casting fresh metal letters (or none that I know of, please tell me if you know of any); if you're keen enough, you can have fresh type shipped over from the US or the UK, but they sell it by weight, and it's heavy stuff. Consequently a lot of what is here is quite worn.

To set my book of poems (I'm working on a selection by Nan McDonald), I am using what was, when I started, a reasonably full case of Bodoni 12pt roman. Enough to print 14 poems, but only if I set four pages at once, then pull them apart and set the next four pages. My first page printed was a shock. This is a case of type that has been used by students and staff in an arts institution for many years, and at a technical college for years before that. Consequently many of the letters are very worn (giving them a 'thick' look when inked) or chipped. I started to make a box of this worn type as I substituted it for letters in better shape, and keeping it separate as I dissed the type back into the tray. I'm now almost halfway through the printing of the book's text, and each page looks better at the first pull.

Some letters wear faster than others. Anything with a serif on an ascender or descender is in danger: b, d, k, l, p, y. Pointy letters: w, m. Dotty letters: i, j. And the letter r is becoming particularly scarce. Some letters get recycled so often that they become friends. I have a particularly sharp r that I put aside as I diss to use in prominent words in each poem. And yet I have an overflowing compartment of the letter c, most of them new. The problem is, I can't use the new ones because they look strange next to all the worn letters. Luckily the thickness of the paper I'm using (280gsm) allows the different height of the worn type to be accommodated. I'm letting it bite ever so slightly into the paper, without 'show through' on the other side.

I don't want my pages to be perfect. I'm happy with the slightly uneven look I'm achieving, otherwise I might as well just print this book from an inkjet printer. However, when I say 'prominent' words I mean that. As you read a poem, there are times when a words leaps out at you, and in this case it's for all the wrong reasons. You want the type to be invisible in a way, to let the meaning of the words exist independently. If a word is leaping out at you because it's thick, dull and broken, it's unfair to the reader. But the warmth of a handprinted page is delightful, ranging from dark greys to a dense black. It's a small challenge for the spoilt eyes of a modern reader, to whom variety in print quality means the ink heads are a bit clogged, something to be fixed. It is the finite (and rapidly dwindling) number of letters that made me think about the preciousness of words set or written by hand. Poets are, by their nature, careful with words. It is a marvellous experience to get so intimate with a piece of writing. You may think your eyes and your mind caress a word as you read it, but imagine holding that word, piece by piece, and thinking about all its layers and nuances as you ease it into place (albeit upside down and back to front!).

Poets are also fond of alliteration, and patterns within their text. This time bend your brain to the frustration of knowing that you're about to run out of 'r's and 'k's and meeting this line:

Dark its death-shining where the rocks rise black,

Gah! That's when I take my tweezers and pull a few letters out of another set poem, hoping to hell that I don't damage the top of the type with the tweezers as I ease it out.

And then I start setting again, and invariably my mind wanders. These are some of the things I've found myself thinking:

-- Many people think that newspaper compositors in small country towns over the last couple of centuries would have been rough working men. In fact, they were probably the most educated men in the region. They had to be able to spell, set, edit and proof, and print. They were the hub of the community. I've been enjoying dipping into Elizabeth Morrison's Engines of Influence over the past couple of years and finding out things like this.

-- This issue of type running out as you’re setting it probably forced a number of changes to text that writers hadn’t wanted. I’d say there are numerous cases of sly compositors substituting words for others that had more readily available letters in them, especially for newspapers and cheap novels. These days we edit for style, and for economic factors (ie reducing the number of pages or a column length) but before automated typesetting I’m sure a lot of changes were made at the grass-roots level (the kinds of changes sub-editors can do these days out of ignorance! ;))

-- Someone commented to me the other day that the colonial notion of relying on a 'mother country' like we used to with the UK has sort of come full circle with letterpress and other outdated technologies. When Australia was first established, we had to drag printing presses across the world, and type and everything else, and getting replacement bits was time consuming and expensive. (Did you know that the First Fleet contained a printing press, but no-one who knew how to use it, so it sat around Port Jackson for about 20 years?) Then we caught up with technology, and were pretty self-contained. Then we fell behind, because all the fancy new offset stuff was progressing in the US and Europe. So Australians ditched all the old things and fully embraced the new; we are now forerunners in cutting-edge print technology. This is bad news for anyone wanting to resurrect the old stuff (like me, and anyone into photo-etching), because as a nation we've chucked it all, or melted it down into scrap, or turned it into wall plaques. Gah!

-- Imagine being the compositor for Gertrude Stein's books! Or James Joyce! All set by hand! eek! If anyone made a mistake, who would notice! Did the authors notice? Or do you think they would have been delighted with the accidental shift in their phrasing?

-- Leonard Woolf thought setting and dissing type would be good for Virginia's nerves, which is one of the reasons why they started a press. It probably was, for a while, but I noticed when reading both of their biographies that after about 5 years they contracted out the setting to a professional compositor, then printed the set text themselves. Wise man, that Woolf.

-- I'm obviously playing the right music, all the students have taken their ipod earplugs out to listen.

-- Gee this type makes my fingers dirty.

Ahem. Of course, once set, the text can be printed out numerous times, thus making it more accessible than handwritten text, but not as quickly as computer printed text. And digital printing is faster again. But that's the history of typesetting in a nutshell, isn't it? And somehow the slowness of the production, the time taken to make this text appear, is something that works for me. I get to ingest the words, letter by letter. It brings the poems to life.

Whether it does so for the reader at the other end is another story altogether.

Cross-posted at Ampersand Duck and Sarsaparilla

The Last Seamstress

We sat in a café bar in that very Canberra version of a CBD called Civic. We sat at a table that tipped when leant upon, drinking from cups that were uncomfortable to hold. We talked, debated & gossiped through the problems of making, of living ethically, of finding a niche in which to sustain both practice & self.

Consider this I said. Simply as a metaphor for examining the practice of design as it exists. What if we were to view it as a hierarchical process, and take the language of the fashion industry & apply it to objects, to furniture & perhaps indeed the patriarch, architecture? Let me explain.

Haute couture represents the experimental, the outlandish, the breathtaking accomplishment of skill & technological mastery of materials. Displayed on the forms of the impossibly beautiful, they are staged as any curator could wish. Dazzling its audience with chutzpah, these are not clothes to be worn. They are art, directions, the next season’s whims that will appear as vague reference only on the prêt-a-porter racks. In fact many are impossible to wear, even if you are 6’2” & 35 kilos.

Design, I argued has a very strong parallel existence. Studio furniture, as our American cousins call it; the one-off object meticulously made; the site specific installation; the design icon. In these spaces, the agendas of design and form are established, the iconic defined, the desirable fetishised.

Let us move onto prêt-a-porter. In clothing, here we see & acknowledge the echo of haute couture, in cloth & colour selection, cuts & falls, Patsy’s accessorising. And indeed some of the prêt-a-porter ranges can be & are fetishised but the haste of taste’s onward rush to next season will sweep many of the racks clear. In design of objects (& buildings) something rather odd seems to happen. Objects that began as either space or time specific things, can be reproduced, standardised and resold again and again, losing the specificity of their original design impetus, but remaining as icons, icons which you can buy & place in your own personal kingdom of minimalist home-as-gallery.

Then of course, there’s Wal Mart. Endless aisles of poly cotton leisure wear, roughly made garments that most of us wear most of the time. Furniture & objects fare no better, with mega centres full of imitations of its branded prêt-a-porter cousins, or imagined representations of the resort, colonial, Georgian, Victorian, moderne, funky or chunky. Every aberration of the smorgasbord of aesthetic can be bought on hire-purchase with no deposit. (That your non-deposit terms are actually paid for by the workers who made these things, paid for by the unsustainable plundering of resources, paid for by the huge ecological debt we shall leave behind, does not appear in your terms & conditions at the time of purchase)

The curious thing is the slippage that happens with objects, with furniture, where they begin as haute d’object, and over time, become mythologised as manufactured icons, revered as iconic, but having economically devolved to prêt-a-porter. For example, Ludwig Mies van de Rohe & the Barcelona chair. At ridiculous expense and with ridiculous difficulty, two were made for the Spanish Pavilion at the World Trade Fair in 1932. They had one role only - for the King & Queen of Spain to perch upon during their brief appearance opening the pavilion. Modernist thrones. They were upholstered in white leather, and the steel forms now so familiar, were much more strongly curved. They also fell apart. Ludwig, master businessman, was approached by manufacturers interested in reproducing them, and numerous firms attempted to do so, defeated by the technical difficulties of welding steel into a structure that did not fail, until Knoll, using techniques developed during war-time production , arrived at about the eight modification of the form and began to mass manufacture the chair in 1948. The upholstery was now black, & the seating platform sloped more aggressively to the back. Making the chair ridiculously uncomfortable for anyone who is not over 6’4” with disproportionately long legs.

None of which really matters if your aim is to frame & articulate the relevance of monarchy in modern Europe of the 1930s in a particular setting at a particular moment. A modern monarch needs a modern throne. And architects & designers need royal patrons. Ludwig was a very astute businessman (just ask Dr Farnsworth). But when that object is mass produced, mass marketed as an example of a new beast called a design icon, the specificity of its original role must be lost – selling a chair to the middle-classes of America who bear the proud mantle of enemies of despots & defenders of freedom is not going to be terribly successful if its origins as a resting place for royal tuberosities are not quietly forgotten.

Curious & curiouser, is that the chair has become an exemplar of good design. If you mean by good design that it is a visual form that has established longevity in the aesthetic marketplace, and is still saleable to a consumer market at a very good return to the manufacturer & retailer, then obviously it is very very good. But if your understanding of good design encompasses postural health for the user, comfort, ease of egress & longevity of the structure & materials, it fails on all counts. The webbing sags, the cushions collapse, the leather splits, the welds break & its form reduces most of us to ungainly shuffling sideways out of a collapsed seating position which induces discomfort in most people after about fifteen minutes. If your notion of good design expects those issues to be addressed & resolved, then it is very very bad. So what on earth do we think is meant by good design?

But we have to move away from using the terms good & bad – they are too morally loaded. Perhaps careful and careless design is clearer. Much of what sits in the design icon canon I would call careless design.

Ah, she said, but what about the seamstress? Where do we, who have no wish to pursue the chimera of designing for mass manufacture, who do not wish to make baubles of status for the rich, who have no wish to make site specific pastiches of contemporary design, but who instead wish to engage in a considered and thoughtful way with the needs of our communities, to make objects that speak of care, of addressing & resolving need in the most appropriate manner according to budget, according to use & according to our aesthetic – where are we?

Where indeed.

If economies of scale dictate that successful design is saleable design, or an object carries a status of exclusivity to allow the maker to achieve a reasonable return on a design & making process, is there still a place for those of us who do not have these aspirations? C.’s primary concern is about achieving what I would call careful design, about making objects that help the user perform their task in comfort, that pleases them visually, that delights them when touched or used, that will last longer than a couple of years before falling apart, that is about an equitable exchange between maker & user that speaks to them both about their shared humanity. It is about care.

Much of the modern design canon did originate as site-specific objects, designed as haute d’object, which have since been mass manufactured, often with significant compromises to aesthetic or structural solutions of the originals in order to maximise manufacturing ease & profit. They are, as an examined individual object, prêt-a-porter objects, bearing however the status & meaning of haute. And they have become the everyday understandings of that loaded dog – good design.

Yet much of it is not careful design. They tip over or are unstable, they cause discomfort, they may be difficult to clean or maintain, they perform their intended functions poorly, and they are often visually very out of place in the domestic environment. The rise and rise of the minimalist open space domestically much more successfully accommodates the design icon in its gallery-like sterility.

Objects bear cultural meanings, which can be easily manipulated by the market to affect consumer behaviour, and the rise of the design icon in the West after WWII would seem to have come more from successful campaigns by manufacturers such as Knoll or Herman Miller than out of a sudden flowering of design consciousness. Indeed, if people believe good design to be about iconic status, and not about careful design that resolves the issues of use aesthetics, this suggests a very low level of design consciousness.

But perhaps that misses the point as to why people buy these objects. The desire to own a van der Rohe chair or Arad bookshelf, or commissions a high status artist/maker is to engage with the dominant aesthetic & taste regime, and to, as a corollary, bask in the assumed shared status of taste, wealth & knowledge. A pair of Aalto’s Paimio chairs will succinctly transmit one’s wealth & taste much more successfully that a carefully considered and well made set of chairs from a maker in your locality. Assuming one’s only criteria for good design is iconic design.

There is that delicious moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark: III where our hero, Jones, Indiana Jones, must choose the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. Choosing wrongly has been shown to be rather terminal. & Mr Jones, as a good archaeologist would, chooses the simple cup of a carpenter. Historical relativism is alive & well in Hollywood. But let’s play a parlour game of other choices – the fundamentalist Christian choosing a Richard Slee style McMansion cup emblazoned with ‘God Inc – Your Salvation Guaranteed – Insert Credit Card Here’; the princes of the established churches brawling among themselves over the appropriate depiction of a wedded couple & our design Mafiosos picking that rather gorgeous Philippe Stark piece that falls over when filled with liquid.

Appropriate design is, like beauty & humour, in the eyes of the beholder. Meaning & status are certainly codified by social & economic conditioning, but how in our consumerist world, does an object stand up to the stresses of its competing meanings? This has been endlessly dissected, but to what effect? Peer-reviewed journals brim with lucid papers, conferences hum to the nuanced philosophising of object & meaning, corridors of Mr Casaubons echo to the furious tapping of keyboards, but still this curious definition of good design privileges the visual & intellectual. ignoring the careful, the known, the experienced, the vernacular, the bricolage of use.

In a society where the object has become so tied to its economic role, can the seamstress expect to have an audience, a clientele? Should she simply accept the irrelevance, the redundancy of her aspirations in the face of economic rationalism, market forces, the taste masters, and find another avenue for her expressed role of care? Should she join the club & spare us all the inconveniences of her ethics? But what will we have lost when the last seamstress sews no more?

Slow making websites & blogs

Things are moving very slowly here at Slow Making - not entirely intentionally. However, it hasn't been deserted.

One of the key benefits of the web is the ability to be able to engage with a milieu through links - which can lead you to some fantastic places, and raise notions & thoughts & engagements difficult to replicate through other medium.

For makers and designers interested in the idea of Slow Making, peeking into the world of other makers or artists is invaluable. How do other people address the problems of ethically procuring materials? Balancing the contemplative making process with the pressures of making a living? Presenting their work, selling their work ethically? As well as the visual richness of other work, other solutions and other processes.

The web has also thrown up some intriguing possibilities about communication generally. Websites & blogs offer the maker a platform to present their work & their philosophies in a far more direct and unmediated way than the usual means. Rather than marketing slickness, demographic targets and sales results, a maker's blog or website can be about the specific of practice, place and principle.

So - if you are a maker, artist or designer who has their own website or blog that you think reflects a making philosophy within the Slow Making gambit, either email your url or post it in comments. We will put up a list of Slow Making blogs & websites in the right hand sidebar of the blog. And we will check & monitor them to keep out the gremlins as much as possible.

Sourcing Materials

One of the key issues I'd like to see Slow Making discuss is the ethical procurement of materials. This is not simply a matter of going to NGO or governmental sources for a list of environmentally & socially responsible manufacturers or producers. Why? Because there is a plethora of differing standards, and of course, vested interests who have argued for ethical criteria to be compromised by virtue of economic rationalism.
Taking timber products as an example, there exist guidelines from UN bodies, the EU, green groups, industry based bodies, and national, state and local governments. I'll expand on this in another post, but in the last week there has been a disturbing but illuminating case of a timber product manufacturer receiving an ecology award for an endangered species project they have been involved in.
Gunns Tasmania will be familar to most people for their appalling record of forestry management practices in Tasmania. They have failed to gain EU certification for their timber products & have also engaged in political processes with both state and federal governments here in Australia to further their commercial operations. Their relationship with the Trades Hall in their home state is also highly problematic. Recently, they lodged writs against 20 people, claiming that their criticisms of Gunns' activities had had a negative impact upon the company's profile and profit line. This is known as the Gunns 20 case http://www.gunns20.org/ & is simply an attempt by the company to silence anyone who raises concerns about either their forestry or political activities.
At the end of last month, Gunns won an award for environmental management in forestry, involving habitat preservation for the endangered Ptunnarra Brown Butterfly. While it is important to acknowledge that they are doing something other than destroying habitat, it is also extremely important to examine from whom the award came.
The award was given by the Australian Environment Foundation, which was founded in 2005. With a high profile media identity as chair, the Foundation claims to be an evidenced based group - "practical environmentalists". They also have links to a right-wing thinktank, the Institute of Public Affairs and forestry groups. As you can see from this discussion, their claims to impartiality are highly problematic. http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/10/05/a-tinge-of-green-with-a-pungent-astroturfy-smell/
While it may be easy at this point to identify a clear conflict of interest as regards the awarding body & Gunns, it will still allow Gunns to trumpet the award as an indication of their green credentials, and by inference the green credentials of their timber products. For makers who may use these materials, ascertaining the ethical standing of such materials then becomes harder and harder. It will also allow Gunns to negotiate with governments & assessing bodies, claiming that their products should receive environmental credentials that are not at all consistent with their overall practices. Practices that include using herbicides banned in the EU to spray logged areas using aerial cropdusters.
Clearly, we need to vigorously analyse the process of accreditisation for "green products or processes" to ensure that we are not misled by practices such as astro-turfing. This is difficult, & time consuming for individual makers, designers or artists to do, but it is exactly the sort of database that Slow Making can help to build and develop.
Producing a list of ethical materials and suppliers seems to me to be a key role for Slow Making. If you have good, bad or indiffferent examples, let us know, and we can work to producing a truly evidenced-based list.

The Way Forward?

For Slow Making to evolve into something more than an interesting notion, it's going to need input, comment & debate among people who are engaged by the concept. But we are also attempting this without it being geographically specific or based around an existing structure.
The hope, by using the blog format, is to see where debate may take us. Is Slow Making going to be an ethical point of debate, with its manifesto tweeked, or will it evolve into an organisation that may eventually hold exhibitions or shows; become engaged in art & design education; find and promote ethical producers of materials?
To open this process up as much as possible, we're going to experiment with using guest posts here on the blog. If you have an idea, opinion or article of interest, please send it to:

slowmaking@gmail.com

either as an attachment or in the body of the email, & we will post it on the blog. Please bear in mind that this is being done in those moments of not doing something else (so much for slow living), and it may take a couple of days for it to appear on the blog. We will also cut things too long, & edit and repair if necessary. However we won't post items that require too much remedial editing, and of course will reject anything pornographic, bigoted or just plain stupid.

So please start contributing - & we look forward to reading your next post.