Resisting Resistence.

In materials as well as in us, there are fundamental in-built tendencies which, when identified and understood can be profoundly utilised. At a week long woodworking retreat situated in a 14th century tithe barn I was alerted to this concept in two memorable ways. 

Bill Amberg, a successful leather worker and designer brought along a stack of hides to show us. He explained the uniqueness of this natural product. This material has lived, quite literally, a life before. And memory of this life is fixed, beautifully within it. 

Thick, hard and tough areas of skin can be found across the animal’s back, exposed to the weather. Soft, thin and delicate skin around the underbelly allowed it to breath freely and expand with a full stomach or womb. Areas around arms and legs inherited built-in creases and natural folds offering a pre designated folding direction for any future life the skin may take on. 

For whatever the intended purpose of the material, the opportunity presents itself to find ways to mimic its intrinsic evolution. 

Understanding what advantages are already there and working with them - utilising their advantages, isn’t a new approach. Until the industrial age of straight lines, repetition and uniformity, a different kind of material knowledge was all that was deployed. This was where the real skill lay - in a fundamental tacit knowledge of the world as it was, wise eyes primed on the lookout for such things. 

The tithe barn with its wonky beams and crudely planed surfaces often invites admiration, with an air of condescension for those that built it. “Oh didn’t they do well, with what meagre tools they must have had” and “It’s a wonder it’s still standing!”

This is not the way we should think about the built world before machines forced things to obey our whim.

Along with the possibilities of the modern age was the loss of a relationship with the environment around us that was natural in the most human of ways. Those who built this grand structure were not merely getting by with what they had. Rather, every part of it was sought out and selected with careful consideration and understanding precisely because of its anomalies. 

A beam that appears arched and wonky contains more intrinsic strength that one straightened and ripped with a saw, cutting across meandering grain. It looks this way because they intended it to - a by-product of a different system of value, where intended function and the natural world were brought together in harmony. The material lives on with a continuity between its primary existence and its secondary.

One can’t help but wonder what opportunities and benefits a shift away from an expectance for our relatively recent concept of perfection could bring to ourselves and to the planet. A knowledge  re-harnessed and brought back into mainstream use. A closer and more intimate relationship with the things around us and ultimately a reassigning of value to qualities for too long overlooked.