Sculpture and Making Things

Found this info on Robin Wood's Woodcraft. The following is from his post.

Dr Alan Reece of Pearson Engineering warns that “de-industrialisation” is causing national decay and the loss of skills in physical science. He blames the concentration of political power in the City, amid men who “know little about anything but money and, as we have painfully learned, little about that either.”

Well before the banking crisis, it seemed to me that there is little health in a society where the pinnacles of achievement are seen to be smooth talking, celebrity, gimmicky marketing, formulaic admin and moving money around in imaginary packets. I would go further and say the next layer, service and leisure providers and “caring” professions, while good and essential, are still not enough. Not for everyone: not for a society as a whole.

To feel good about your work, as an individual and a society, to be both emotionally satisfied and economically safe, you have to make stuff. Put things together, improve them, sell them to admiring customers. Ask any caveman rolling his first wheel; ask any small child trotting home from school with an eggbox model. Then ask the same child ten years later how satisfied he or she is with what passes for physical creativity in the modern risk-averse classroom: the desktop-published folder of design and technology, chronicling a project never actually made; the “food-tech” folder with cutout pictures of flans and lists of cooking temperatures, which somehow never led to an actual pizza.
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