MAKING
TIM INGOLD
THE MATERIALS OF LIFE
Consciousness, materials, image, object : the diagram
I want to think of making, instead, as a process of growth. This is to place the maker from the outset as a participant in amongst a world of active materials. These materials are what he has to work with, and in the process of making he ‘joins forces’ with them, bringing them together or splitting them apart, synthesising and distilling, in anticipation of what might emerge. The maker's ambitions, in this understanding, are altogether more humble than those implied by the hylomorphic model. Far from standing aloof, imposing his designs on a world that is ready and waiting to receive them, the most he can do is to intervene in worldly processes that arc already going on, and which give rise to the forms of the living world that we see all around us — in plants and animals, in waves of water, snow and sand, in rocks and clouds - adding his own impetus to the forces and energies in play. The difference between a marble statue and a rock formation such as a stalagmite, for example, is not that one has been made and the other not The difference is only this: that at some point in the formative history of this lump of marble, first a quarryman appeared on the scene who, with much force and with die assistance of hammers and wedges, wrested it from the bedrock, after which a sculptor set to work with a chisel in order, as he might put it, to release the form from the stone.
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