C O N S ID E R IN G .
..
H and-Ear Coordination
e s s a y b y
A k ik o Busch
p a i n t i n g b y
P a u l D a v is
Y F R IE N D K A T IE C LE A V E R
is a jeweler in Vermont. She works in a stu-
dio that is also her shop, so she passes easily
and often from her bench at the back of the
store to the counter and display cases in the
front. But this is not the only transition she
makes. When she is with her customers, she
operates not so much as a metalsmith, but as
something, someone else - perhaps a thera-
pist, a beautician, a bartender, a confidant.
Which is to say, she listens. I’ve witnessed
it myself when her customers come in to
mark a milestone with a ring, a chain, a pair
of earrings. Almost always, these objects
are accessories to a story - a birth, a birth-
day, a wedding, an anniversary. And almost
always, Katie’s customers tell her the story
- how the couple met, how the marriage
came to be. “People tell me their secret,”
she says. And she listens.
We are accustomed to the idea of craft
as an act of expression, but I wonder if we
might also consider it something almost the
opposite - as an act of listening - and
whether the kind of spontaneous and im-
provisational intimacy that listening gener-
ates is a natural part of the craft process.
Craftspeople often talk about the impor-
tance of listening, but it is usually in a meta-
phorical sense - you listen to yourself, to
your hands, to your material, to the unex-
pected. I wonder if this metaphor resonates
so deeply because the physical act of listen-
ing is so innate and important to the process
of making things.
In 2002, Haystack Mountain School of
Crafts hosted a symposium about technol-
ogy and the hand, and Pauline Oliveros
conducted an exercise in listening with
the palms of your hands. As a musician,
Oliveros knows that connection between
the ear that hears and the hand that plucks
the strings or plays the keys, and her curios-
ity about how that connection plays out
with makers seemed natural. Her exercise
consisted of a series of whispers and hand
squeezes, one triggering the other in a se-
quence of kinetic and audio signals passed
among the
66
participants. As she later
wrote, “With more energy in the sound,
there is a fascinating pulsing, both very in-
dividual and collective - a weaving of voic-
es, energy, and reaction time rippling
around the circle.” Engaged with the con-
vergence of sound and touch, Oliveros ex-
plored on a direct, physical level how these
two senses that both register vibration can
be complicit, each intensifying the experi-
ence of the other.
The connection between hearing and
making can be even broader than this. Cera-
mist Romig Streeter tells me that when she
works, she often finds herself listening to a
chorus of Bulgarian women. “It’s like watch-
ing a couple of dragonflies darting about in
the sky,” she says of the music. “One hits the
top note of a sound, then another approaches
it but is just a tiny bit off, a quarter-note
down, maybe. And they race around like
this in the sky. There is something almost
trancelike about listening to it.”
For potter Polly Myhrum, the soundtrack
to work is the flow of classical music on the
radio. “I just can’t listen to any words,” she
says. “Words distract me. The value of a clas-
sical music station is that I’m not choosing
the sound so I can treat it more as background
accompaniment. As soon as someone brings
a CD in and says ‘You
have
to hear this,’ I’ve
lost the flow of sound and hand.”
The flow of sound and hand: Whether
it is a studio filled with a Vivaldi concerto,
a Bulgarian women’s chant, or a customer’s
personal story that leads to a moment of
exchange and empathy, that flow seems a
frequent accomplice to the making process;
in such cases, listening is not a passive act,
but active engagement. Possibly, the
auditory and the tactile have some primal
alliance. In
The Hand
, neurologist Frank
Wilson notes that language and manual
dexterity are collaborative learning experi-
ences for infants; the association between
hearing and making that seems ever-present
in so many studios may be a demonstration
of this broader thought/sound/hand nexus.
If there is something in our primal program-
ming that connects hearing and motor
skills, then it may only be natural to listen
and respond with the hand.
How what is heard travels to the hand is
an elusive process. Maybe it has to do with
Oliveros’ interweaving vibrations. Or may-
be listening and making are parallel enter-
prises: In a story or a piece of music, one
thing leads to another, and a sense of pas-
sage is conveyed; likewise, when a bit of
gold becomes a ring, or a lump of clay a
formed bowl, those are also transitions.
Or maybe, as Wilson argues, there is an
intrinsic coalition between two of our most
basic senses. While this partnership may be
difficult to define, it’s worth acknowledging
how integral it is to the craft process.
+
Akiko Busch is the author
o/Nine Ways to
Cross a River
and
The Uncommon Life of
Common Objects.
084 american craft fcb/marn
