A Handful of Connections #18 31/01/25.

Welcome to this monthly newsletter - A Handful of Connections - that presents to you a handful of links and tidbits. It attempts to connect you to wider conversations in the food-fibre-fashion sectors, yielding an opportunity to reflect deeply on your actions as an earthly citizen.

This is edition eighteen - a handful of links, with some thoughts that connect to other links. It accompanies the other monthly newsletter - Food-Fibre-Fashion - which supplies you with learning resources to guide you in drawing more vibrantly on practicable actions you can take. They're never trend-driven or timely, as reflections need space to percolate, and so can be revisited as and when.

This one looks to construction. The act of physically and abstractly building. To remind of the intersections and active participation required in assembly, and that the antonym is demolish. What are we doing?

1. Under construction. ?

Under Construction was a collaborative architecture project at the Stanley Picker Gallery in 2024, pooling together a sort of retrospective of live-build projects that were guided by architect Takeshi Hayatsu. Throughout the exhibition, an entirely new live build was developed with the 2024-25 cohort of Unit 5 MArch Kingston School of Art students and built by the 121 Collective, itself made up of Hayatsu alumni. The build incorporated different craft techniques and scales to include a temporary rammed earth shrine outside the entrance and a sauna on the Gallery’s riverside terrace.

w.in.c, a women’s film collective created a short documentary focussing on Hayatsu’s “approach to teaching through making, his community centred ethos, and the haptic methodologies of the various builds”.

During a visit to the North West Highlands, on yet another bitingly cold day, I went to the Glencoe Visitor Centre. Over the span of a year, a group of craftspeople had come together to build a turf house replica in the grounds. The hills of the Three Sisters loomed in the background, and with a fake fire and Gaelic audio, it all felt very authentic. The construction was sturdy and beautiful, and I wanted to know these techniques in order to create my own haven, both safe from and embroiled within the elements.

2. The Pachycaudex mellifera. ?

Design researcher Pablo Bolumar Plata and ceramicist Raphael Serres came together to make a stack of cylindrical vases for a hive. Bolumar Plata was already exploring and proposing alternatives to modern [extractive] beekeeping and hive structures through Swarm Shepherd and together these two went frankly quite zany with their idea. They’d played around with shapes and their nearly-finished vessels resembled a plant of the caudex botanical group, so with further research, they questioned how plants and honeybees may interact for beneficial symbiotic relationships.

Basically, because honeybees in the wild will make a home from a hollow log, it made sense that they could choose the hollow stem of a caudex plant, but it’s what the caudex group do that’s most notable here:

The Pachycaudex mellifera is originally a shoreline plant that adapted to dry environments by developing a water reservoir in its thick stem. Over time, its hollow caudex became an ideal receptacle for bee colonies. The species has since then evolved to partially absorb the honey produced by its bee guests, and digest other substances like the wax into a coated single petal. On its top, the plant produces a glucose-based poison to attract honey bee predators. — Pablo Bolumar, MOLD.

The finished design wasn’t quite suitable, but as a beekeeper explained to them, it always depends. There isn’t a typical design, and honeybees if they have a will, then they’ll make it work. This is an utterly fascinating project, and the proposals Bolumar Plata comes up with otherwise are ridiculous, bizarre, exciting… but actually could totally work. Just need to switch the mindsets of conventional beekeepers.

3. Laminaria. ?

I’m unsure when I first came across Erin McQuarrie, but a recent-ish post of a piece from 2024 — Laminaria — was so joyful that I went back through her work. I think because I follow lots of textile artists, and perhaps because of ties to ecology, she comes up a lot. Based in the Scottish Highlands, this artist life stirs up a bit of jealousy. Not in a malicious sense, but a longing. I want that. And I wonder if it’s partly because McQuarrie’s pieces are so tactile, that I want to jump into the scene.

Another post was of an exploratory session with Central Saint Martins students, apt for here in this topic on building, where they wove onto and into and through random objects. The chair project is another. The Laminaria piece is interesting in that it conjures up a vision of organisms whilst being a simple connection of shapes; you’re undecided on what it’s supposed to be. I liked it before I knew its name, but like it more knowing it’s based on seaweed — for the straightforward reason that I’ve worked with Laminaria myself and have the “head” of a piece of Laminaria digitata on my wall.

4. Marble run. ?

Franzworks is a super vibrant maker-content creator on YouTube who shows you how to create DIY projects from materials you’d otherwise throw away or can be found in nature. This marble run came up on my feed and instantly I wanted to make one (but of course, haven’t yet) with all the bits I come across on trips that instead sit on my windowsill and I forget the origin of. I love the playfulness of this. It reminds me of a) how I was thrilled by watching massive marble runs (and of course those penny whirlpool charity things) and b) the videos of cats participating in a domino run.

5. Beauty and incident. ?

The 2019 exhibition at the William Morris Gallery presented three artists: Lola Lely (designer and textile artist), Laura Anderson (sculptor and woodcarver) and Harriet Warden (illustrator and printmaker). They came together to “seek ways in which the designs and traditional processes synonymous with William Morris can find artistic form and relevance in the contemporary and culturally diverse setting of Walthamstow”.

I’d just been writing up a piece on my visit to the WAX Atelier exhibition The Abney Effect — at the studio co-founded by Lola Lely — and so was looking further through her work. I came across the woodblocks for this William Morris residency/exhibition. Now that we’re 5+ years on from the exhibit, I can’t find much information, though textiles and prints tend to communicate their story through their very nature as tactile objects. With adjacent printmaking objects, you learn a little more. Generally, this is where we get a disconnect; when tools are separated from the outcome. Morris’ ideal was to bring enlightenment through art education, and consequently democratic design.

Curiousity does tempt you to look closer, question, and use your senses, though you’re not fully trusting perhaps until you see the method. It’s a balance between transparency (which gives the game away, enlightens) and mystery (which can detach you, democratises). Aleister Crowley’s suggestion that, "There is beauty in every incident of life", may have us examine whether we need to have the full picture, a finished piece, to deem something as beautiful. Can handicrafts tantalise enough, even when works-in-progress, for a shift towards a more populist perspective that craft isn’t niche, but is everywhere?

This edition of A Handful of Connections as part of the Food-Fibre-Fashion publication brings together craft and design practices that considers construction. The action of building something, and the creation of an abstract entity.

The above are physical constructions - large and small - that are exploratory, crafted, considered. They feel somewhat organic, ad-hoc. And yet they’re all rooted in practice and technique, method and materials. It doesn’t make sense, this notion of constructing something from nothing. There’s that saying right, when you want to disprove someone’s argument? But everything is constructed from something. Even if we’re uncertain where the idea or the physical being originated, it still originated.

When constructing a tangible thing — that will or could be somatically sensed — there has to be inference. The creator has conjured up experience and wisdom gained, whether subconsciously or consciously, and imbued it into their thing. What I’m getting at, I think, taking “beauty and incident” as the hypothesis, is that even the simplest of objects have knowledge engrained in them, yet, it’s the ones that reveal their processes to us that are detected as the most authentic. You’ve constructed a story and it seems fake, so what you do to verify is reveal something else, and something else, and something else. You conduct — or construct — a journey.

We’re doing it all the time. Every element of every ecosystem is doing it. Hatching plans, fashioning ideas, establishing boundaries. Nutrients of one = nutrients of another. Though, really, that’s not the case. We humans have forgotten. We started constructing without knowledge, and instead making automatically, without incident. The constructor has stayed integral, and you the viewer are the moving part, to become a construct somewhere else. You become that, and that becomes them, and they become that [you]. It’s just for the viewer to remember that they’re an active participant in the construct; autonomous to a degree, yes, especially if it’s a solo belief, but also democratically involved too. It’s a collaboration of incidences, a meeting of constructs.

Thank you so much for reading through. Hit "reply" or comment, if you have something to say. And if you appreciated the content, why not share with someone who also would.

Stephanie Steele is the founder of Steele Studio, a space that educates everyday folk on the interconnectedness of our food, fibre and fashion systems through community courses and workshops. As an organic food grower and textiles sustainability specialist, she otherwise writes about art, textiles, plants, running and systems design.

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