"We may consider making things a process of knowing from inside where we correspond with the world, willing to be taught by it."

Tim Ingold

Craftsmanship

How can a craftsperson maintain curiosity, motivation, and excitement while working with the same material for years? How do they develop sensitivities and skills using their hands as their primary tools? How can we "grow into knowledge" rather than having it handed down to us? What does it mean to craft something? How can we notice, find, and cultivate our own way of creating?

Mastery: Learning by Doing

Through repetition of the same practice, while remaining curious about the various ways each part of the process can be done, students noticed how it is possible to become their own teachers, critics, and motivators, like skilled masters.

Honoring Different Ways of Making

During the process of practicing different skills, students were encouraged to recognize and appreciate the uniqueness of each individual's approach to making. This understanding fosters a culture where ways of making can be shared, borrowed, transformed, and cultivated through reflective participation.

Project

Limiting materials to newsprint paper and tools to hands, students explored how their attentive presence, along with reflective participatory engagement with paper, can activate endless possibilities of working with this familiar material. Students were encouraged to slow down and develop skills such as ripping, folding, rolling, and crumpling paper, all while attentively using their hands and listening to the material they were working with. These learned skills were then applied to create their final artwork. Glue and tape were used only in the last session, where students assembled the parts they had mainly crafted in previous sessions to shape their sculptures.

In the final session, the studio was transformed into a gallery, providing students with the opportunity to experience their artwork as part of an exhibition. Discussions centered around how to prepare for looking at artworks, keeping senses sharp, looking for details in each piece, and staying curious about the artists’ ideas and skills.

This project was an invitation for Moberly students to combine stop-motion filmmaking with a collage methodology focused on questioning and curiosity – to see archives as part of a living present. Historical absences informed the use of text, sound, textiles and everyday found materials, giving life to the dissonance of lived stories impacted by systems of displacement.

Archival images from historic neighborhoods (Chinatown, Hogan's Alley, South Vancouver) provide an anchor for each film. Questions around urban space (public vs. private), planning, transportation, relations to land, labor, and non-human life surfaced as themes throughout the creative process, around which students drew strong, intuitive connections between development and displacement. Using sound as a sensory and narrative prompt, each class was asked to map and share what they imagine equitable public space to feel like– and to consider deeply, playfully, and critically: what makes a ‘home’, beyond the settler imaginary.