The craft work is reinventing itself in our time and the manners preach a desire to consume differently, with a supplement of soul and sensoriality. Palliative to industrial mass production, the Hand made puts Man in the center of everything.
The craftsman conveys an emotion through his material and makes live an experience through his object. It is an object made with the heart, a piece created with integrity, generosity and humanity. These are authentic productions that aim to bring us together as human beings, to provoke meetings and to communicate. The hand of man becomes his tool and the gesture gives shape.
The result inevitably contains some unforeseen. The defect, the error, the irregularity and the unfinished aspect are therefore part of the creation process. Witness a trace on the material, with a gesture of the craftsman, these objects tell true stories full of poetry.
Weaving, caning, sewing, embroidery, painting, modeling, cabinet making are all about raw and natural materials. Many craftsmen or designers rework: ceramics, wood, glass, straw, clay, metal, or plaster. The craze for fine arts and technical training makes its comeback to new generations in search of meaning and creativity.
But, the hand made can also be a seamless marriage between digital and manual work. The success of the Etsy online sales site, which offers handmade & custom-made products and the growing popularity and affordability of 3D printers, show that new ways of manufacturing are emerging thanks to the sharing of resources and knowledge . Today, an incredible number of blogs, vlogs, DIY tutorials … abound on the Internet. Art and design know how to mix digital and human hands, such as artist Anton Alvarez, Lisa Gachet for Make my Lemonade and designers Wang & Sorderstrom. New Makers are also able to program a robot, a machine, knit a sweater or produce an object.
A lof of concept stores have been created to promote unique objects made by craftsmen with particular expertiseor wishing to highlight their local heritage. Workshops are created to share their knowledge, manufactures reopen, reviving ancestral productions now updated. Lifestyle and fashion totally embrace these modes of manufacturing enhancing the heritage and the « DIY ».
The handmade by transforming the raw material, creates a unique object, giving it importance, rarity and value, to do something else and reinvents the world around us in a sensitive way.
