Crafting Communities of CARE

Abstract

This paper presents some of the findings resulting from the AHRC-funded project Co-Producing CARE:

Community Asset-Based Research and Enterprise, which explored how craft processes might build community assets and agencies. It focuses on the second phase of the project: ‘Making Things Together’, which involved groups located in Soho House Museum, Birmingham and in Dublin Castle who collectively crafted items in response to their respective heritage sites, and collaborated with Makernow, the digital fabrication studio (FabLab) at Falmouth University to develop prototypes; on community groups in Falmouth who worked on skills-based meetings and on ethnographic embroidery; on the digital platform ‘Making Things Together’, which attempted to make a digital meeting space for crafters; and on Craftivist Garden #wellMAKING, a craftivist (crafts+ activism) project, which evolved from the AHRC-CDA:’Making and flourishing: crafts practice as a means of building individual and collective health and wellbeing’ and the symposium ‘Beyond the Toolkit: understanding and evaluating crafts praxis for health and wellbeing’, all run in partnership with Arts for Health Cornwall. A central finding is the ways in which co-creative crafting produces a safe space in which participants can connect, communicate, take risks, challenge themselves, work out differences, voice views and become active in new ways.

The CARE model, which essentially pays attention to and values the often difficult but extremely valuable processes of cooperation that emerge when people make things together, is flexible and may be adapted to fit the specificities of different groups and their circumstances. We argue that the messy processes of collaborative making not only parallel but can also materialise the ‘messy’ nature of community with its disjunctions and disruptions. Far from smoothing out difference, we found that the communities of interest that form around creative making find ways of materialising and transposing those differences through the making process itself in different ways. The CARE model, as such, is predicated on the creative tensions and difficulties that emerge when people encounter difference, because we believe that this is where innovation happens; where new discoveries occur, new perspectives and experiences arise and new understandings emerge, all of which drive new initiatives and support new agencies.