‘What does it mean to make things?’ Reading the Textility of Making by Tim Ingold

In the essay The Textility of Making, Tim Ingold reflects on the relationship between maker and material and how form is obtained. The ideas of famous artists and philosophers are mentioned to illustrate different perfections. One of them is that of German artist Paul Klee, who wrote, “Form is the end, death” and “Form giving is life.” Equally, he said, “Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” Those ideas resonate with contemporary perceptions of art, which believe the artist is capable to create something that has never been seen before, something that, more than a beautiful object, is the manifestation of life itself, deeply connected with its maker. However, Klee ideas go beyond, suggesting that the maker forms a relationship with the forces that bring the form into being. The work merely follows a trajectory that has been already rooted.

Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari then argued that the relationship is between materials and forces. How materials mix with one another, prompted by cosmic forces and variable properties. Ingold then, proposes a model that resonates with Deleuze and Guattari ideas and calls for an ontology that gives relevance to “the processes of formation against the final products and the flows and transformations of materials as against states of matter.” For Ingold, the practitioners, or the maker’s true skill is their ability to fin the grain of the world’s becoming and follow its course while bending it to follow their evolving purpose.

Of particular interest for my own project was the idea that makers follow materials instead of the general perception that materials respond to the maker’s command and bend at their will. According to Ingold, the role of the maker is much more complex than that, for a maker has to work in a world that does not stand still until the job is finished and whit materials that have properties of their own and are not predisposed to follow or embodied the shapes that might be imposed to them.

It is this idea of “following materials” with Deleuze and Guattari insisting that matter is constantly in movement, flux and variation. Materials then, are not passive objects, subservient to human designs. Materials can, according to archaeologist Chris Gosden, give shapes to the forms of thought. Which means, that, according to what we might believe, is not the mind the one that imposes its forms on material objects. Following this idea, if someone was given a piece of clay, the object and the elements that constitute that piece of clay are the subjects in the relationship. Being a subject then, the piece of clay, upon entering in contact with the human hands, will inspire thoughts in the maker and its constitution might direct which should be the ultimate form.

The relationship between mind and material form is going to be constantly flowing.

These concepts made me thing that to dictate what a person should do with a material, (as suggested in my previous posts), might not be the best way to elicit the language through the interaction with clay. For example, if I designed an activity similar to Pictionary, in which students were given a card with a noun on it, and they had to replicate it through making a figure in clay for their team to guess, it would feel very constricted and the material could become a passive figure following the parameters established by myself.

If a student then is given a card which says they have to replicate “a house” with clay, they might create a house following the connotations they might have about what a typical house should look like: a door, a house and a chimney. This might not even be the way they actual house looks like, but merely a simple way to represent the concept and consequently, a mean to win points for the team.

Nevertheless, thinking about this from a broader angle, if the student is given a card which says they have to replicate “a house” with clay, the material might not follow what the student intended to do in the first time; the form and its constitution could mean the student has to adapt themselves in order to mold the clay and create a form with it.

Sources

Ingold Tim, The Textility of Making, Cambridge Journal of Economics 2010, 34, 91–102