Sustainability, Innovation and Activism

Abstract

I feel the writing of this paper very much brings my life full circle if you like; when I first left school I went to university to study sociology. I didn’t last long and was soon back at home, applying to go to art college, from which I had been dissuaded. I was accepted and have lived a pretty creative life ever since, through one means or another. To research and write this paper has been both a challenge and a privilege. I have had to reflect on and examine my own creativity, the reasons why I make and how I can communicate this to others.

The last few years have seen a change in attitudes towards, and interest in, making; its benefits and the wider societal implications. In this paper I will attempt to link this interest with a deeper investigation into the ethics of making and why it matters.

This paper will examine some concepts and ideas that are easily said and easy to think we understand. This will explore ideas around definitions; definitions of ecology and deep ecology, craft and deep craft. I will also examine links to the feminine through looking at ecological feminism or ecofeminism.

I will begin by discussing some of my own work and current practice as a textile artist researching, by means of a practice-based PhD, issues of sustainability and the meaning of making, and why we must make the move from materialism to materiality.

My own work is about resources; I rethink, reimagine and rework commonly used materials and objects that are used once and discarded. These materials slip, almost unfelt and unnoticed, through our hands – distanced by a veil or a shield of familiarity from their origins – before entering ‘the waste stream’, a poetic term meaning landfill.

This intention of only being used once is therefore interrupted, and indeed disrupted, by a looking again – a rescuing and a gradual re-instatement takes place. I give these materials a new lease of life, placing them into the elevated realm of ‘the handmade’, belying their mass-produced industrial origins. This is a privileged yet disputed place, at the same time revered and yet not valued or fully understood by our culture. I am questioning our right to use these materials for our own purposes in such a disdainful and perfunctory way. How great is that ‘need’, or is it more a convenience? And how does this ‘need’ balance or justify the equation of usefulness to humankind with the ‘using up’ of resources and energy?