At the weekend I went to the Power of Making exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. You've got plenty of time to see it: it finishes on January 2 2012.
Guest curator Daniel Charny defines the urge to make things like this: "For many people, making is critical for survival. For others, it is a chosen vocation: a way of thinking, inventing and innovating. And for some it is simply a delight to be able to shape a material and say ‘I made that’. The power of making is that it fulfils each of these human needs and desires."
The last one does it for me: the simple act of creating something that didn't exist before.
Exhibits include a gorilla hand-twisted from wire coat-hangers, a crocheted bear (life size) and a ceramic eye patch - lots of fascinating things to gaze upon...
Ele Carpenter was hosting an Embroidered Digital Commons workshop. She's two-thirds of the way through this project - a year to go! The project's aim is to 'stitch a concise lexicon of/for the digital commons. The term being embroidered, in short phrases, at the V&A was 'vector'. As Ele explains: "The term 'Vector' seems appropriate for an exhibition where the vectors of objects and ideas connect and touch, porting through different sites and zones."
I took over a hoop with the last phrase of the paragraph, which had been written on the fabric by a young boy earlier. He'd only managed to stitch the first two words, so I finished it off for him. Quite a surreal experience, feeling like a museum exhibit myself, as visitors paused to watch us at work. It was a bit of a rush job towards the end...
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