The Handmade & The Homemade

so excited about the handmade and homemade art movement. I'm so excited that I'm concerned about writing a coherent blog entry about it. I feel like I've experienced a lot of it first hand already in some ways because there's a lot of hand-making going on in Sackville, and people seem to take a lot of pride in those aspects of time and labour in their work, even if they might not call it art or put it in an art context. I'm thinking of knitted garments, socks turned into cozies for mason jars carrying tea, embroidery and felting, zine-making and book-making, and the re-purposing of items broken or otherwise, including the alteration, mending and even making of clothing. I think the only thing I've made that I might classify as handmade art is something I call my Scarf of Life. I started it in grade 11 or 12 I think and I just worked on it whenever I felt like it, using mostly incomplete or leftover amounts of yarn, and the rule was that I had to keep knitting no matter what happened to mess it up—if I dropped a stitch or there was a crazy knot I couldn't unravel anything, I had to just keep going, which is why it was called the scarf of life—because that's what life is like. I experimented a lot with different knitting patterns on the scarf as well; it was were I first tried ribbing, and using two strands of yarn at once. I changed yarn whenever I ran out or got tired of one colour.

There is an intimacy and humanity with handmade art that is not always there (or is not always meant to be there) with other kinds of art, and for me that contributes a lot to it's beauty and my experience of it. I adore the community aspect of it—I think that's one of the most beautiful things about it. I mean, art can often be so alienating, and many times it has to be because it is meant as a challenge. Handmade art, I feel, refuses to alienate its audience by way of challenging their isolation—challenging the sterile culture of earphones in ears and quickly typed messages and technology coming out of our yingyang, and everything having to be fast and easy. Encountering handmade anything, and handmade art even moreso is like being on a cold bus after a day of not interacting much with anyone, and having an elderly lady sit down next to you, touch you warmly on the shoulder and start asking about your life.