Subtitled - A Scientist's Search for Meaning through Making, I don't know what I thought this book would be like when Hubby thrust it towards me in the Library, as a possible book to read on holiday. As it turned out, I chose not to take it with me, something about it made me think it wasn't a good fit for holiday reading. So I've only started reading it on my return. It is quite an easy approachable read, so I've zipped through it. It's not quite what I expected it to be. But quite what I expected I don't know, but it's probably covered by the words - more of a philosophically deep enquiry into the creative process of making objects. Whilst it touches on this in the concluding paragraphs of a chapter, I could have done with more reflections. It seemed frequently to get caught up in the inadequacies of being a novice at a skill, and learning from one's mistakes. All of which is fair enough. It took me a little while to adjust to this being what this book actually is.
Anna Ploszajski is a material scientist, and during the book you do get glimpses into her own personal and family history, and how it is relates to specific materials. She sort of stumbled into material science and the Institute of Making. And literally grapples in trying to understand and actually utilise the properties of materials with her own hands, which all the information in her head cannot really help her with the actual dexterity of the doing.
"Even though the process of softening both plastic and glass with heat and shaping them by hand were similar, the lack of material personality of plastic was enough to leave me artistically stumped. Is the neutrality of plastic, though, not a characteristic of sorts? ......Perhaps all materials embody inherent characters, some more strongly than others, gifted by a combination of how they look, feel, smell. Sound and move. It might be the skill of the craftsperson is to notice and tap into these inherent material personalities, to make the best of them when they transform materials into objects.'*
Each chapter takes a particular material starting with glass, then plastic, steel, brass ,clay sugar,wool, wood, paper, and ending with stone. Some of these materials humanity has had a long and very fruitful relationship with. She explains a bit about the qualities of the material and how this is related to it's structure on a microscopic level. So we learn what makes glass transparent, so fragile, and yet so useful, for instance. But Ploszajski is also wanting to get more hands on with these materials and move her experience from the theoretical towards the practical and experiential. So she meets up with various crafts people, attends workshops and receives one on one teaching, which demonstrates to her how when you are dealing with a material on a practical level, knowing why on a theoretical level it's behaving or responding in this particular way, isn't really that useful when your working with it. There is often a hands on technique to be learnt,, a skill, that an experienced crafts person acquires and knows, that controls or gets around a weakness or turns a problematic quality in a material to creative advantage. This can really only be taught hands on, and that is what the handing down of a legacy of centuries of skilled craftsmanship and experiment is.
' We appear to have started into philosophical questions unanswerable by material science - is an object still and object if it's not made of anything? philosophers of the materialism camp would say that even ideas are material in nature, since they cannot exist without the physical human brain. Idealists would argue the opposite, that material objects are merely collections of ideas, which require the mind in order to exist. ....I wonder whether the physical act of making with materials can be harnessed to influence or change our emotional state.'*
I read all the explanations that material science has for why glass is so pliable when heated, which I thought I'd grasped, in the moment of reading it. Though I find I've retained very little if it in my memory bank. But then I am a hands on learner primarily. I get the jist of the theory, that these qualities are often to do with the nature of the molecular gaps in a materials structure or chemical reactions, but holding the precise details tends to elude me. I enjoyed reading the book, even though, for me, it never quite set me fully alight with insightful revelations.
CARROT REVIEW - 4/8
* Extracts from Handmade by Anna Ploszajski, Published by Bloomsbury Sigma 2021.
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