Wednesday, March 30, 2011

MORE CERAMICS WITH CONTENT





Yesterday I featured the ceramics of Julie Lovelace, today I am blogging about Carol McNicoll to whom I referred in the previous blog.

To quote her:

“In an age of information technology, making things by hand is a supremely anachronistic occupation. The first world has relegated the unglamorous and unprofitable activity of production to the third world, reserving the cleaner and more lucrative manipulation of information for itself. The capacity for making things has always seemed to me to be a defining human characteristic.

My work, which is made for the most part in slip-cast clay, is always conceived as inhabiting the domestic environment. Slip-casting is an industrial process, I use this partly because of its mimetic capacity, but mainly because the work both operates within and comments on the ceramic tradition as expressed within the domestic context. All my work is functional, I make things that I want people to use.

My current work explores the relationship between two and three dimensional figurative imagery. I am concerned with pattern and in this I have developed an extensive range of new decorative techniques. My work is very much concerned with the relationship between form and decoration. I am interested in the use of pattern to create ambiguity, and try to make objects that entertain while at the same time being slightly unsettling”

CAROL McNICOLL (b. 1943)

Carol McNicoll has an international reputation as a ceramicist. Her work explores the relationship between two and three dimensional figurative imagery, always within the context of functional ceramics. She has always been concerned with pattern, and uses glazes, open stock transfers and her own transfers to create richly patterned surfaces.

Born in Birmingham, Carol McNicoll studied Fine Art at Leeds Polytechnic and ceramics at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2001 she was short-listed for the Jerwood Prize for Ceramics and a major retrospective of her work toured the UK as part of the Craft Council‘s Show5 initiative in 2003-5.

Carol McNicoll is represented by Barrett Marsden Gallery, London.

Her work has currently been on show Contemporary British Ceramics at The Mint Museum, U.S.A


Tuesday, March 29, 2011

CERAMICS WITH CONTENT






Always encouraging to see ceramic work which invites thought and debate... This past weekend I discovered some very exciting work by Johannesburg-based
Julie Lovelace at Gallery at Grand Provence in Franschoek, outside Cape Town. Julie uses the language of ceramics to comment on the parallel absurdities in our society - reminiscent of the work of the British artists Carol McNicholl
. and Grayson Perry - but very poignant in the South African context.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

A CURIOUS WORLD


I might have written about this in an earlier post - there is a new book out about one of South Africa's top ceramists Hylton Nel : A Curious World compiled by Michael Stevenson.

Artist/potter Hylton Nel, who celebrates his 70th birthday in 2011, has developed a distinctive style of work, rich in references to the decorative arts, literature, art history and South African life. His plates, bowls, vases and figurative pieces are idiosyncratically decorated with witty and poignant line drawings and script. His imagery ranges from penises to cats and angels, and his quotes are drawn from poetry and the daily press as well as his observations of the world. This richly illustrated book brings together images of his recent work with extracts from his journals as a young man and photographs of his home and garden on the outskirts of Calitzdorp in the Klein Karoo.

The text of the book is in the form of letters to poet and friend Mavis Orpen, as well as journal entries all of which are poetic and inspiring and form a remarkable complement to the visual images. Browsing through this book is a welcome relief from all the dramas of the current world and a reminder that life can be gentle and exquisite...

Thursday, March 17, 2011

HEAD AND HANDS

A wonderful article in the Financial Times written by British writer and ceramist Edmund de Waal

With these hands

By Edmund de Waal

Published: March 11 2011 18:33 | Last updated: March 11 2011 18:33

Edmund de Waal at his studio in Tulse Hill, south London
Edmund de Waal at his studio in Tulse Hill, south London

When I was a child there was a truism that anyone could make something (a rabbit hutch, say) or mend something (a bicycle) if they had a classical education. It was felt that using intellectual tools – parsing a bit of Latin history, constructing an argument – was training enough for taking on the material world. Learning gave you a steady approach to the tricksiness of the world of things. Lurking behind this belief was an attitude of de haut en bas; condescension towards those working with their hands.

This annoyed me. Partly because I could only stumble through my Latin lessons but mostly because my afternoons were spent in a pottery workshop learning to throw pots. It was clear to me – a white apron over my school uniform as I kneaded the clay to take out the air bubbles and give it the right consistency, pulled the long twisted wire made from rabbit snares, divided it into 4oz balls and sat at my kick wheel in the corner readying myself for my hours of practice – that this was different from classroom learning.

Centring the clay, bringing this small ball into perfect receptivity for throwing, involved a ripple of different movements from hand and wrist, an inclination in the head and neck, a slight tautening in the shoulders. It was a sort of learning that I could not articulate.

All through school I read and I made pots. I read the great British potter Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book (1940) until my copy broke its spine, studying its diagram of the layout for a proper workshop until I could walk round my imagined future workplace. I read William Morris and John Ruskin. In 1980, I left school and went to Japan to visit venerable potters. Back home I became an apprentice and then took myself off to study English at university. Books and pots, head and hand. I was searching for the place where someone, anyone, writes about that epiphany where you see what you have made and it is different from what you had conceived. I was searching for a description of how an object can displace a bit of the world. I was avid. I wanted someone to write a description of Homo faber, the maker of things. I wanted a story of making told without the penumbra of romanticising how hard it is, without nostalgia.

Then in 1988, in my first proper studio at the end of a street of terraced houses on the edge of Sheffield, close to the dereliction of the old steelworks, I read Primo Levi’s The Wrench (1978). It was a strange time to be doing so, as Sheffield razed one factory after another, brick dust choking the road to Attercliffe, the valley where the world’s steel had been made.

I’d read Levi’s If This is a Man (published in English in 1958), his great, Protean retelling of his time in Auschwitz, the anatomising of what survival entails. Like so many I had fallen for his lucidity, his sense of responsibility for his story and his need to tell it in adamantine prose.

But The Wrench was a different kind of book, part travelogue, part essay on what it was to be a maker. It was a series of interlinked stories told over a glass of vodka by Faussone, a fictional rigger of cranes and bridges, to an unnamed chemist, a writer, a listener, like Levi.

Faussone has spent his working life erecting complex structures in inhospitable places – Alaska, Russia, on the banks of a flooding river in India, dependent on others but ultimately alone at the top of some crane beset by wind and rain.

Rigging, he says, “is a job that a person has to work out on his own, with his own head and, even better, with his own hands”. That is why he has contempt for shoddiness, the lack of attention to the specificity of one moment in one place with a material, the way each plate has to fix on to each bracket in a particular way.

For Faussone is someone who has a complex, adult, relationship with materials, who can explain why you get worried by some encounters with an object or a structure – how you develop a bodily response. He works on a bridge in India, and intuits that there is something awry before the bridge develops the vibration that literally shakes it apart. Material is not inert. Yes, responds the chemist Levi, his interlocutor: “Although I had never hammered metal plate. I did have an old acquaintance with copper, marked by love and by hatred, by silent, furious battles, enthusiasm and weariness, victory and defeat, resulting in more and more refined knowledge, as happens also with people if you live with them over a long time and finally can predict their words and movements.”

Here, at last, was a book structured round structure. It was a conversation about how you took one part of learning and took it to another job. This made sense of how deeply connected the hand and the head really are. It articulated for me the way that I would throw a dozen porcelain pots and look at them, affectionately perhaps but also with a dispassionate eye, and plan the next dozen. It understood how I knew when dipping a pot into a bucket of glaze or listening to the sound of the flames when firing my kiln that there is something out of balance.

And, above all, there was a feeling that Levi was not speaking for people who make things. He doesn’t explicate or translate technical terms. In The Wrench, Faussone’s voice is clear and unhurried, paced in response to the real complexities and real pleasures that he encounters. Alongside him is Levi with his “specific challenge: I have a double experience – a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling, on the contrary a writer’s blood in my veins.”

And I remembered this in 2006, when I was given the greatest commission of my life so far – to make something for the Ceramics Galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). When the invitation to make something for the gallery was first mooted, I was sent huge architectural floor plans and elevations. I picked up a red pen and did a ring around the dome. Here, went the scribble, this is where I want to work. It began with the combination of a gesture of a pen and the plans of this austere bit of Edwardian architecture. There are ceramics in the walls and floors in the V&A. Why not in a dome too?

The porcelain vessels are held on a red shelf. I wanted the shelf to be in metal – a proper material like a steel engineering beam rather than a bit of spray-painted medium-density fibreboard (MDF). Partly out of respect for the solidity of the building itself, but mostly because I think you can sense when something is sham. I had started working with placing porcelain in lead-lined boxes and on steel shelves and was intrigued by how well the two materials worked together. These two kinds of density are a provocative combination.

I wanted this red scribble of a shelf to float above the cornice, away from the dome, so that there was this mass of porcelain held in space.

How do you make a gesture in space? So began a huge process of consultation with the curators and then with architects and surveyors. Nothing was off limits, they said, and so we stood and looked up from the entrance hall, through the interstice in the coffered ceiling in the entrance hall off the Cromwell Road to find if you could actually see the cornice in the gallery where the porcelain would be.

We made a section of a maquette and tried out its position in the dome, balancing it from two scaffolding towers. During my first meeting with engineers in my studio, there was a lot of shaking heads. The stresses were too great. A shelf would tip or spin or twist. The dome was too weak. The shelf was too thin. We’d end up with a pile of shards on the floor of the gallery.

This was the first time I’d worked with engineers and I thought that this was the end, the dispatch of the dream. It was only the start. This great puzzle was thought through and worked on and the stresses were modelled and drawings issued for consultation. Could it be made in sections and rigged together so as to be invisible from the ground? We all put on hard hats and climbed spiral staircases and along ladders to see the outside of the dome – a spectral ellipse of plaster and lathe below us. Ten months later, on a blowy early day in summer, we stood in Aspinall’s factory on the coast near Lancaster looking at the finished metal shelf. It was ready to go off to be powder-coated and it was in its raw grey state, a beautiful arc, true to 2mm across the diameter of 12 metres, floating above the dusty factory floor on breeze blocks.

And there I realised that Levi was right: that it is through the hands that you learn the properties of the “grey of steel beams and plates, the actual heroes of his stories”. But that these materials needed a lifetime of thinking around. They are a start for conversation.

A week afterwards, the grey aluminium ring was lacquer red. We saw it being rigged from a scaffold 60ft above the entrance hall: a beautiful red ring held in only four places, floating in the dome. A wild red scribble in space, one that Faussone, the rigger of cranes might have understood.

“We agreed ... on the good things we have in common. On the advantage of being able to test yourself, not depending on others in the test, reflecting yourself in your work. On the pleasure of seeing your creature grow, beam after beam, bolt after bolt, solid, necessary, symmetrical, suited to its purpose; and when it’s finished you look at it and you think that perhaps it will live longer than you, and perhaps it will be of use to someone you don’t know, who doesn’t know you. Maybe, as an old man, you’ll be able to come back and look at it, and it will seem beautiful, and it doesn’t really matter so much that it will seem beautiful only to you, and you can say to yourself, ‘Maybe another man wouldn’t have brought it off.’ ”

The V&A was working to a tough deadline to open its new galleries. We had a week to install before the scaffold had to come out. By day we were placing the 425 porcelain bowls, dishes and jars into this beautiful structure, calibrating each part of the installation so that it echoed true. And at night I was at home trying to calibrate the final chapters of my family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. The publishers had an equally tough deadline.

The making of my written work had started five years earlier, in 2005, when I had begun a journey into the history of my Jewish family from Odessa to Tunbridge Wells through Paris and Vienna, using as a compass a collection of small Japanese carvings (netsuke) I had inherited. It was an attempt to find a voice for something that was unvoiced – the strange hiddenness of my Jewish family background. There were real problems for me in this. Some problems were emotional. How could I even dare to write about this when the experiences of other writers who had endured so much and written with such clarity – Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Jean Améry and Levi himself – were in front of me? Some were practical – the records and traces of my family were buried across Europe. How could I use these inherited stories, anecdotes, memories from my grandmother, my father and uncle, newspaper clippings, photographs and construct a real story, rig a real, complex structure when all I had done before was to make basic shapes?


Before me, alongside me, were Levi’s stories of how you put something together without emotional falsity, how you think about representing structure. I wrote in the preface to The Hare about my anxiety that this family memoir could succumb to the lure of nostalgia, be more than a few stitched-together anecdotes. “Melancholy,” I wrote, “is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return.”

By using these real objects – small and tricky and beautiful – as a structure, telling their story with attention, I had a chance of making a different kind of book. It seemed worth the effort.

Edmund de Waal is the author of ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance’ (Vintage). He is taking part in Radio 3’s The Book that Changed Me’ season from March 14-18. De Waal’s essay on Primo Levis’ ‘The Wrench’ will be broadcast on March 15 at 11pm

...........................................

WOODFIRING JAMBOREE


Millstone Pottery in MacGregor

Wood-firing Workshop

29, 30 April & 1 May 2011

An intimate week-end workshop celebrating this ancient and time-honoured firing method; for ceramicists, potters and other romantics wanting to have work fired in a wood-fired kiln. Specialised attention to all attendees.

Make your pots at a pre-firing teabowl workshop in Cape Town to ensure your efforts are rewarded when firing the kiln.

Workshops and events planned over the week-end include:

· decorating and glazing for wood-firing with Paul de Jongh

· firing of train kiln

· participatory continuous slab building with Hennie Meyer

· powerpoint presentation with Clementina van der Walt

· “Elemental” – a film about Ken Matsuzaki, a Japanese wood-firing potter

· Journey along the McGregor art route

Cost: R2 000 for the workshops, inclusive of food on Friday night, breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday and breakfast and lunch on Sunday. Camping facilities available.

For more information or to book, please contact Nina or Paul on (023) 625 1599 or e-mail: millstone@breede.co.za. See also: www.millstonepottery.co.za

Friday, March 11, 2011

MOODY INTERIORS

My plate with nude in the guest bathroom


My botanical plate is above a Betty Cillers sketch of lilies


My beaker (with the yellow rose) s next to an Edward Roworth oil


My wall vase next to a David Goldblatt photograph
A friend and client Pam Strauss took these shots with her iPhone - atmospheric interiors of her home featuring pieces of my ceramics.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

IN GOOD COMPANY




Two years ago I visited St.Ives which I loved and treated as a sort of 'pilgrimage', mainly intended to visit the famous Leach pottery, run today by Jack Doherty. In addition I discovered many more inspiring aspects to this Cornish fishing village.
Wills Lane Gallery has been selling my work for several years now, and this year, my colleague Hennie Meyer visited St.Ives and took these photographs of my work in the gallery window...and..I was delighted to see my name up alongside some great artists!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

SURPRISE IN DUBLIN


Whilst browsing in a charity shop in Dublin I was astonished to find a plate of mine, made probably some time in the 90's...how did it end up in Dublin? Objects certainly would have a tale to tell...

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

CERAMIC ART LONDON 2011

Susan O'Byrne


Nuala O'Donovan


Maria Wodjat


Tanya Gomez

u
Hennie Meyer, Magdalena Odundo and Clementina van der Walt at CAL 2011

For some reason I can't load more than 5 images onto one blog post so here are some of the highlights of Ceramic Art London 2011. I have put more onto Facebook if you have access to that.
The standard of work was extremely high and it was a great privilege to be featured with top UK and other international potters.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

THREADS OF FEELING




Installation by Annabel Lewis

An extraordinary and moving exhibition is the Threads of Feeling at The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury, London. Do check out the website for images of little pieces of textiles which were the only material link left between the mother and her abandoned child.

Fabric swatches from the 18th century tell stories of mother and babies parting

Threads of Feeling will showcase fabrics never shown before to illustrate the moment of parting as mothers left their babies at the original Foundling Hospital, which continues today as the children’s charity Coram.

In the cases of more than 4,000 babies left between 1741 and 1760, a small object or token, usually a piece of fabric, was kept as an identifying record. The fabric was either provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing by the hospital's nurses. Attached to registration forms and bound up into ledgers, these pieces of fabric form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18th Century.

A selection of the textiles and the stories they tell us about individual babies, their mothers and their lives forms the focus of the Threads of Feeling exhibition. The exhibition will also examine artist William Hogarth’s depictions of the clothes, ribbons, embroidery and fabrics worn in the 18th Century as represented by the textile tokens.

John Styles Research Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to curate the exhibition. John comments: “The process of giving over a baby to the hospital was anonymous. It was a form of adoption, whereby the hospital became the infant’s parent and its previous identity was effaced. The mother’s name was not recorded, but many left personal notes or letters exhorting the hospital to care for their child. Occasionally children were reclaimed. The pieces of fabric in the ledgers were kept, with the expectation that they could be used to identify the child if it was returned to its mother.

The textiles are both beautiful and poignant, embedded in a rich social history. Each swatch reflects the life of a single infant child. But the textiles also tell us about the clothes their mothers wore, because baby clothes were usually made up from worn-out adult clothing. The fabrics reveal how working women struggled to be fashionable in the 18th Century.”

Curator John Styles: http://www.johnstyles.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/


Friday, March 4, 2011

JERWOOD CONTEMPORARY MAKERS

I NEVER REALLY KNEW HER

I have just returned to London from Ireland where I visited the
Jerwood Contemporary Makers Exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery in Kilkenny.

The above piece by Emma Woffenden I found very powerful.

Also most poignant is the text of the catalogue by Jeanette Winterson which follows here:

The
Making
Game
The most satisfying thing a human being can do – and the sexiest – is
to make something.
Life is about relationship – to each other – and to the material world.
Making something is a relationship.
The verb is the clue. We make love, we make babies, we make
dinner, we make sense, we make a difference, we make it up, we
make it new…
True, we sometimes make a mess, but creativity never was a
factory finish.
The wrestle with material isn’t about subduing; it is about making a
third thing that didn’t exist before. The raw material was there, and
you were there, but the relationship that happens between maker
and material allows the finished piece to be what it is. And that
allows a further relationship to develop between the piece and the
viewer or the buyer.
Both relationships are in every way different from mass production
or store bought objects that, however useful, are dead on
arrival. Anyone who makes something finds its life, whether it’s
Michelangelo releasing David from twenty tons of Carrara marble,
or potter Jane Cox spinning me a plate using the power of her
shoulders, the sureness of her hands, the concentration of her mind.
I have a set of silverware made by an eighteenth century
silverworker called Hester Bateman, one of the very few women
working in flatware at that time. When I eat with her spoons, I feel
the work and the satisfaction that went into making them – the
handle and bowl are in equal balance – and I feel a part of time as
it really is – not chopped into little bits, but continuous. She made
this beautiful thing, it’s still here, and I am here too, writing my
books, eating my soup, two women making things across time. I feel
connection, respect, delight. And it is just a spoon…
But the thing about craft, about the making of everyday objects
that we can have around us, about the making of objects that are
beautiful and/or useful, is that our everyday life is enriched.
How is it enriched? To make something is to be both conscious and
concentrated – it is a fully alert state, but not one of anxious hyper-
arousal. We all know the flow we feel when we are absorbed in what
we do. I find that by having a few things around me that have been
made by someone’s hand and eye and imagination working together,
I am prevented from passing through my daily life in a kind of blur.
I have to notice what is in front of me – the table, the vase, the hand-
blocked curtains, the thumb prints in the sculpture, the lettering
block. I have some lamps made by Marianna Kennedy, and what I
switch on is not a bulb on a stem; it is her sense of light.
So I am in relationship to the object and in relationship to the maker.
This allows me to escape from the anonymity and clutter of the
way we live now. Instead of surrounding myself with lots of things
I hardly notice, I have a few things that also seem to notice me. No
doubt this is a fantasy – but…
The life of objects is a strange one.
A maker creates something like a fossil record. She or he is
imprinted in the piece. We know that energy is never lost, only that
it changes its form, and it seems to me that the maker shape-shifts
her/himself into the object. That is why it remains a living thing.
Of course it is possible to design an object that will be made by
others – but that is an extension of the creative relationship, not its
antithesis. It is the ceaseless reproduction of meaningless objects
that kills creativity for all of us, as producers and consumers.
But are producers and consumers who we want to be?
To make is to do. It is an active verb. Creativity is present in every
child ever born. Kids love making things. There are different doses
and dilutions of creativity, and the force is much stronger in some
than in others – but it is there for all of us, and should never have
been separated off from life into art.
I would like to live in a creative continuum that runs from the child’s
drawing on the fridge to Lucien Freud, from the coffee cups made
by a young ceramicist to Grayson Perry’s pots.
We don’t need to agonise over the boundaries between ‘art’
and ‘craft’, any more than we should be separating art and life.
The boundary is between the creative exuberance of being
human, and the monotony of an existence dependent on mass
production – objects, food, values, aspirations.
Making is personal.
Making is shared.
Making is a celebration of who we are.
Jeanette Winterson
16 June to 25 July
Jerwood Space
Jerwood Contemporary MakersThe
Making
Game
The most satisfying thing a human being can do – and the sexiest – is
to make something.
Life is about relationship – to each other – and to the material world.
Making something is a relationship.
The verb is the clue. We make love, we make babies, we make
dinner, we make sense, we make a difference, we make it up, we
make it new…
True, we sometimes make a mess, but creativity never was a
factory finish.
The wrestle with material isn’t about subduing; it is about making a
third thing that didn’t exist before. The raw material was there, and
you were there, but the relationship that happens between maker
and material allows the finished piece to be what it is. And that
allows a further relationship to develop between the piece and the
viewer or the buyer.
Both relationships are in every way different from mass production
or store bought objects that, however useful, are dead on
arrival. Anyone who makes something finds its life, whether it’s
Michelangelo releasing David from twenty tons of Carrara marble,
or potter Jane Cox spinning me a plate using the power of her
shoulders, the sureness of her hands, the concentration of her mind.
I have a set of silverware made by an eighteenth century
silverworker called Hester Bateman, one of the very few women
working in flatware at that time. When I eat with her spoons, I feel
the work and the satisfaction that went into making them – the
handle and bowl are in equal balance – and I feel a part of time as
it really is – not chopped into little bits, but continuous. She made
this beautiful thing, it’s still here, and I am here too, writing my
books, eating my soup, two women making things across time. I feel
connection, respect, delight. And it is just a spoon…
But the thing about craft, about the making of everyday objects
that we can have around us, about the making of objects that are
beautiful and/or useful, is that our everyday life is enriched.
How is it enriched? To make something is to be both conscious and
concentrated – it is a fully alert state, but not one of anxious hyper-
arousal. We all know the flow we feel when we are absorbed in what
we do. I find that by having a few things around me that have been
made by someone’s hand and eye and imagination working together,
I am prevented from passing through my daily life in a kind of blur.
I have to notice what is in front of me – the table, the vase, the hand-
blocked curtains, the thumb prints in the sculpture, the lettering
block. I have some lamps made by Marianna Kennedy, and what I
switch on is not a bulb on a stem; it is her sense of light.
So I am in relationship to the object and in relationship to the maker.
This allows me to escape from the anonymity and clutter of the
way we live now. Instead of surrounding myself with lots of things
I hardly notice, I have a few things that also seem to notice me. No
doubt this is a fantasy – but…
The life of objects is a strange one.
A maker creates something like a fossil record. She or he is
imprinted in the piece. We know that energy is never lost, only that
it changes its form, and it seems to me that the maker shape-shifts
her/himself into the object. That is why it remains a living thing.
Of course it is possible to design an object that will be made by
others – but that is an extension of the creative relationship, not its
antithesis. It is the ceaseless reproduction of meaningless objects
that kills creativity for all of us, as producers and consumers.
But are producers and consumers who we want to be?
To make is to do. It is an active verb. Creativity is present in every
child ever born. Kids love making things. There are different doses
and dilutions of creativity, and the force is much stronger in some
than in others – but it is there for all of us, and should never have
been separated off from life into art.
I would like to live in a creative continuum that runs from the child’s
drawing on the fridge to Lucien Freud, from the coffee cups made
by a young ceramicist to Grayson Perry’s pots.
We don’t need to agonise over the boundaries between ‘art’
and ‘craft’, any more than we should be separating art and life.
The boundary is between the creative exuberance of being
human, and the monotony of an existence dependent on mass
production – objects, food, values, aspirations.
Making is personal.
Making is shared.
Making is a celebration of who we are.