THE ESSENCE OF CRAFT

After I left university, and the rarified air of academia, I threw myself into the heavily physical world of rebuilding an old house. One of the first skills I learnt was working with stone, initially with mortar, but later the much more satisfying art of dry-stone-walling (without mortar). For a bit of cash I would repair tumbled stone walls, or 'dykes', as the Northumberland farmers called them. On one side is a formless and random mass of rocks, as they would have emerged from the earth. On the other side is a gaping hole in the dyke. By the end the scattered rubble has gone and all the stones are neatly fitted into a tight and incredibly strong structure, the agrarian delineation of the dyke restored.

Usually the wall collapsed because the ground underneath gave way, so first you have to clear the base and establish a firm, level foundation with large flat stones. The wall is built with two outer layers leaning slightly in towards each other, becoming narrower at the top. Every vertical gap must have a single stone on at least one side and be covered by a bridging stone above. The core is filled with loose rubble, stones too small to build with, which lock the outer faces together. There may be a line of wide stones going right through half way up as a further locking of the faces. The top is finished off with rounded 'copes' or coping stones, which have been set aside as suitable during the building.

It is said that the real skill of a stone-waller is to handle each stone only once. It is hard, back-breaking work, bending and lifting the, often heavy, stones into place, so you don't want to do this more than you have to, and of course you are paid for the job, not the hours. So the skill lies in seizing up the next space and the stone required to fill it. With time the body acquires a physical memory of the heft and weight of stone, and as you scan the pile of rubble you can actually 'feel' that stone there in your hands and how it will settle into its space. This is the muscular memory and eye-hand co-ordination that lie at the heart of craft. It can not be acquired intellectually, but only through constant and repeated doing.

But there is more here. The random physicality of the rasping and recalcitrant stone is finally replaced by the perfect, neatly fitting, flush-faced structure. Now each stone could only ever be in that one place – not one of the others would fit there. Individually they are loose and random but interlocked together they create a unified whole. The immense satisfaction of this tightly resolved structure has remained with me ever since as a compelling vision of the creative process and the essence of craft. We all have these same initial 'rocks' to work with, whether they be blobs of paint, words, threads, musical notes or planks of wood. How we fit them together into a perfect structure depends on our craftsmanship.

Since then I have had flashes of recognition of this process when engaged with great art: Dostoyevsky building his argument and drama, Brahms' meticulous musical craft, the multi-layered paintings of Anselm Kiefer, or the perfect poem made from the same words we all use but fitted so precisely that no word could be anywhere else. I feel it now writing this, as I have felt it completing a well-resolved piece of furniture. The satisfaction of creating a powerfully enduring whole from intricately fitted parts, that will not crumble or fade, is the driving force of creativity and the core of craft. There can be no other way – there is no short-cut. It is perfect.

Posted by David Trubridge on 23 August 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Craft, stone