Everything is Handmade.

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Early this morning I listened to a recently aired episode of This American Life called "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory." Mike Daisey, a storyteller by trade, travels to Shenzhen, China to learn about the people who make Apple products at the FoxConn factory-- a massive facility that makes a range of electronic products. Mr. Daisey ends up exploring additional factories that make much of we consume here in U.S.

I was blown away by this particular line, despite the fact that it was a notion that grounded my graduate thesis work: "Everything is handmade." He said that after the experience of seeing so many different products being assembled, by hand, in a range of different factories in Shenzhen. He compared this against how we talk about a longing for the handmade here in the U.S. But the truth is-- everything IS handmade. That phone you are holding: a person, or group of people, worked together using their hands to build it. It is true-- despite how sanitized, untouched, and mechanized you may think its production was.

My thesis work focused on handwork, but knitting in particular. It examined the notions of love and magic that are embodied in the handmade, particularly in work of mothers and grandmothers (a baby blanket, a hat, a scarf.)   I wanted to demystify those objects because I felt the notion of the embodied handwork, the magic, was part of the bifurcation of craft and art, but also that it devalued the work of art created by women. I began to explore machine knitted items from China, spending hours at Target scanning through scarves and hats to find a trace of the humans who actually made them.

It turns out you can find the hand in a mechanically made scarf. When anything is knitted, it has both a beginning and an end to the yarn. These ends are loose strings that dangle from the knitted object upon its finish and must be woven into the stitches. If you were to just cut them off, the piece would likely unravel.  The winding back into the stitch of the loose ends prevents its destruction. And the thing is, you can not do this with a machine. But the other thing is that everyone does it a little differently. Some wind vertically, some horizontally, some zigzag about in a free-form way. So there it was. The hand is present. And you can find the mark of it in the way the loose ends are wound into the piece. Someone made that scarf and you can learn just a little bit about them if you look carefully.

Here is a video I produced during this time. Everything is made by someone.