Divine Craft
Making a Kinder WorldDivine Craft is experiential, an acting, tangled up in looping threads. As a method of telling story, Divine Craft offers direct acting, bodied enrichment. All engaged subjects become material and crafter, affected by and affecting the *other* in non-linear conversations. As a conversation removed from words, it is removed from definition, adjacent reductionism that object-oriented languages manifest, and is outside of the naturalised hierarchy between levels of linguistic understanding. This makes Divine Craft accessible to and intra-active between various age groups, classes, languages, skill level, as seen in Craftanoon. Physical ability can, but does not necessarily restrict Divine Craft, as it is not purely a learning and perfecting of skill (i.e. someone who does not have fine dexterity may struggle with fine crafts that require precision), though this is one entry point, the aspect of play, collection, and conversation between human and more than human world provide access. People who are paralysed, unable to act upon the world outside of language formats can still interact with Divine Craft through observation and a learning from materials, listening to stories. Those who are sight impaired can hear materials tell their stories through feeling senses, smelling senses, etc. As Divine Craft is a language unrestricted by sensory experience, it makes itself available to everyone through whatever means it can access them.
The main entry points to Divine Craft discussed are:
Craft as a means of connecting and conversing with the material world, meditating between subject/objects and investing soul within our massive abundance of wastage. (Katherine Soucie in Vancouver and London)
Craft as a form of creative experimentation, and systemic refusal, and non-individualist assemblages through play and fantasy, engaging with queer-cyborg, anti-perfectionism, anti-capitalist ideologies. (The Geish movement in London)
Craft as a magnet for community meeting and lubricant/buffer for inter-subculture communication. (Craftanoon in London)
Craft as an agent for international activation, and mass conversation regarding social or ecological issue. (AIDS Memorial Quilt and Crochet Coral Reef, both Global).
These practices vary greatly but share commonality through craft as a way of connecting with the world external to the self. It grounds our bodies, sees them as extending beyond flesh and affecting the material we find ourselves entangled within. Our mind becomes an agent, capable of affective change, rather than an ‘individual’ removed and alienated from our inherent interdependence within a much larger body, incapable of making impact to it because of a) our separable and b) our scale. All these crafts scavenge for materials, whether it be spontaneous growths of reads on Coorong riverbanks, or overflowing bins in Dalsten high street, only taken from abundant, naturally replenishing sources. These crafts also embed the subject/objects (that is person and project) with mutual stories, perceptible souls. The act of finding, listening, and crafting makes things precious to us, and simultaneously makes us precious to those things; it builds mutual relationships between materials that says materiality matters. If I have soul embedded in my brain, extended to my flesh, it extends to objects I touch too, what is my flesh, but an object intricately woven into my *self*. Their souls extend to me, and if we find common language through which to embrace, we will forge more stable systems of living and making together on a damaged planet.
The research presented is only a scratching at explaining an action I find nearly impossible to describe. Divine Craft does not belong to linguistic definitions, but glowing empathies, it is not in objects, or words, but the spaces in between them. Examples I have presented ofDivine Craft in action are limited by my experience; Divine Craftis manifested through so many entry points, by so many agents, I hope to meet more someday. Refinement of research, cross collaboration and extended peer reviews would also aid this discussion, with more opportunities to speak to makers, machines, materials, and places. Regardless, the way we make, see, act matters. As conscious agents we have a response-ability to our beautiful, and damaged planet. Craft can tell better stories, can think outside of capitalist regimes and systems, can materially speak to Gaia, and listen to her plethora of stories.