While my parents were visiting us (in a quick, 18-hour blur!) at the beginning of September last year, my mom said something insightful (as she is wont to do) that I’m trying to remember as often as I can now, as I plan an awful lot of upcoming work.
I was going on and on about how perfectly I wanted to synch up my letterpress and book work and how I wanted to perfect certain parts of the work I was already doing, along with adding new techniques and materials to my repertoire. As I went on…and on…my mom simply reminded me that perhaps the thing to remember, as I’m working away, is that the slight imperfections are what makes my work what it is.
Refining colors while printing
There was a great article in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine about working with your hands, indicating that the particular element of tactility and tangible rewards is missing from many people’s work and lives today. That process, the fact that I spend my days making things with my hands, is something I’ve been thinking about an awful lot since. There is an undeniable reward and sense of satisfaction that comes with creating something with your own hands that you can see and feel; it’s that satisfaction that set me on the path I’m on now and I’m always grateful to have so clearly found the way I want to live my life and do my work.
Then, on Monday, I came across an article about the appreciation of imperfection on A List Apart which, while geared toward web designers, often has a variety of insightful and interesting things to say about how a lot of us work and seems to be particularly applicable to handmade work of all kinds.
Punching sewing stations for a woven chain stitch album
This idea of savoring imperfections is something the Japanese call wabi sabi. It doesn’t mean that we settle for less than our best; it means that we acknowledge the aspects of our work that reflect the fact that it is created by human hands. I like to be reminded that I am not, in fact, a machine – as often as possible, please! If you couldn’t see the mark of my hands on my work…well, then I guess we’d be dealing with mass production and we may as well be standing in the aisles of Wal-Mart…and that, my friends, is not the work I want to do.
There is so much around us that can be and is created digitally and mechanically that it can be easy for all of us to be several degrees removed from the actual processes of making anything. As far as I’m concerned, I tend to find a lot of reassurance and optimism looking at the sheer history of what people have created over the course of human life and am consistently amazed at the beauty of the work that was produced by people who not only did everything by hand, but often had no other options.
In the interest of admiring those unique imperfections, rather than finding them to be a source of frustration (and I have done my fair share of that!), I am finding myself with progressively more satisfaction in the lines and forms we can create with just our hands, and I am starting to enjoy the tiny marks I see in my own work in a way I never have before.
Fittingly, Robinson Jeffers’s “Hands”.
As a student of papermaking I had the opportunity to browse some of the selections in the U of I’s vast special collection of historic books. On one piece of German paper from the 16th century, a worker had left his thumbprint on the corner of a page, presumably pressing too hard when lifting the sheet to dry. My teacher told us that every time he looks at that page he puts his thumb in the same spot and feels a connection to the original maker.
Mistakes serve many functions, so long as we’re willing to accept them.