The Craft and Beauty of “Inefficiency”
Authored by UMIH Intern Hanako Teranishi
Hands-on-Humanities roundtable presentation of Dr. Warren Cariou’s bitumen photographs
Hand craft and creative work are mediums that I distanced myself from when I began university. I learned how to value the words I wrote on a digital document, and I soon forgot about the art classes and crafts I used to enjoy. I began to write everything on a laptop or PC (except for class notes, but they were just that, notes, scrap ideas, in my mind). I forgot about craft for a while until I started writing creatively again. I found joy and solace in words that were born from the world I saw through my fingers and eyes. However, my writing still only existed on a perfectly white page of a word document and in a digital landscape. I had been struggling with what I wanted to do with my writing after being accepted for some submissions and readings. I didn’t want my writing and craft to only exist in the world on the conditions of others. I wanted to make something physical and special, and to exist without the pressure of being “good.”
A Fall 2024 Hands-on Humanities workshop hosted by the University of Manitoba’s Institute for the Humanities and featuring creators Dr. Alison Calder, Dr. Warren Cariou, Dr. Sarah Elvins, Dr. Nicole Goulet, Dr. Len Kuffert, and Dr. Celiese Lypka opened a door for me to reimagine craft and my place within craft. The panelists all discussed different forms of craft, namely paper making, bitumen photography, fabric work, woodworking, and beading, and how their craft and creative processes inform their own professional and daily practices. They discussed how we may learn about the world and our studies through hands-on explorations.
I was particularly influenced by Dr. Calder’s presentation about connections between paper making and her creative writing. In her presentation, she discussed the connection between paper making and poetry as forms of labour and reflected on similarities between these processes. She suggested that a feature of both papermaking and poetry it that they are “inefficient”, and she placed importance on the fact they are not “efficient.” Papermaking is messy, dirty, and time consuming, and it takes up space. It is arguably an overall inefficient process that is seemingly unnecessary when instead we can go buy paper from a store or use our devices to type. Poetry also appears to be “inefficient” in that it is also messy, not direct, long and winding, and demands to take up space in our minds. However, as Dr. Calder pointed out, poetry is also the most efficient way to speak because it relies on “diversion,” “echoing,” and “meandering.” Poetry takes time; it is a conversation between author and reader as they try to understand one another. There is value in not being “efficient.” In our age of immediacy and late-stage capitalism, “efficiency” is demanded of us in exploitative ways. Papermaking, poetry, and craft are ways we can to perhaps step away from these oppressive demands. With our hands, we can be intentional: intentional in how we use our time, the word we choose that tells a story, the colour of the thread we weave with, how we write and what we write on, and where we write on a page. We can be intentional in the journey to a “final” project and in feeling the skills we both gain and learn from.
A final reflection I’ll end with is a reflection on the impossibility of exact reproduction, an idea suggested by Dr. Calder. I think about the impossibility of exact reproduction as a queer and racialized person in a world of mass production. The oppressive feeling of needing to conform and the growing threat of fascism perhaps opens us up to liberating possibilities where we can see ourselves in the world and slowly begin to mark our places in our present and futures. I do not think craft will be the only thing that will save us, but I believe it has the potential to be a tool in getting us there. Let us be intentionally inefficient.