What Do We Mean by Making?
Updated: Sep 5
Recently, I read Pablo Helguera's writing, A Dissonant Pedagogy, about artistic knowledge, uncertainty, and what happens when we allow ourselves to not know. It stayed with me.
Pablo writes about uncertainty as a space where learning can happen. I found myself thinking about a different kind of uncertainty: what happens before someone even begins? What happens when a person hears the word making and immediately thinks, I don't do that.
Or the mirror version of the same thing: someone says, we need someone creative like you. It sounds like an invitation, but it can be the same closing move, just handed to someone else. Instead of asking, what do I want to make happen in my world?, both sentences quietly answer, not me.
That led me back to a question I keep returning to: what do we mean by making?
My collaborator for Coastal Conversations, Emily, and I were recently talking about how to invite someone who doesn't think hands-on making is their thing. We began wondering how to reach people who aren't certain about making at all.
I kept thinking about what people hear when we say words like art, studio, or making. Maybe they hear pencils, paintbrushes, sewing machines, clay, a table covered with tools and materials. Maybe they think, I'm not crafty, or simply, that's not for me.
Making can be intimidating. And once you decide you're not a maker, there isn't much reason to walk through the door of a studio.
But what if we've made the word making too small?
Making
When I say making, I don't necessarily mean making an object. Making can be giving an idea some form in the world. Sometimes that form is a drawing, a piece of writing, seaweed pressed onto paper, something sewn together.
But sometimes it's a conversation. An invitation. A question. A gathering. A decision to try something. A relationship that didn't exist before.
Making can be making something happen.
This is one reason I think about my process as Think > Do > Share, rather than Think > Make > Share. Do leaves the door open. You might make something, write something, say something, invite someone, experiment, or simply try, without knowing exactly what you're doing. You just need somewhere for the thought to go.
You write the dream down. You put the seaweed on the table. You rearrange the chairs. You ask the question. You see what happens. Then you have something to respond to.
The doing changes the thinking. The thinking changes the doing. And when you share it, someone else enters the process, and something else can happen.
Beginning without being good
I've been thinking about this alongside shoshin (初心), the Japanese idea of beginner's mind. You don't have to know what you're doing, or have a style or particular skill. You can just begin.
Of course, if you spend a lot of time doing something, you may become good at it. Skill, knowledge, and experience matter. But a wish or a dream may not have a form yet, and that can be scary.
I've noticed this in my own work. People often ask me if I teach this technique or that one. They come looking for instructions, while I'm interested in what they actually want to do.
If they have an idea or a wish but don't know where to start, we figure it out together. I can offer techniques, materials, and ways of approaching a problem. But I don't want to hand someone a formula for how to make, because the way something is made is part of the discovery.
The same material becomes something different in different hands. The same technique can lead somewhere unexpected depending on who it passes through.
Who you are matters. What you notice, what you're curious about, your experiences and questions all become part of how you make.
The technique is not the work. It's one of the things you might use to find your way.
I think what matters here isn't the medium itself, but where your care is attached. If you truly love a material, if you could spend a lifetime with acrylic paint, or clay, or a single instrument, always noticing more, always improving, that is making, fully.
The trouble isn't loving a medium or developing a technique. It is when we become so focused on learning how to do something that we lose sight of what we want to do with it.
Those things can look identical from the outside but feel completely different from within. It's worth asking, every so often, what you're actually caring for.
Finding my way
This is close to how my own practice works. I don't always know the medium or form at the beginning. I start with an idea, follow it somewhere, try something, change direction, and discover what the work needs along the way.
Trying leads to knowing. The experiment reveals how I work.
I love being a beginner. There's a freedom in not knowing yet.
Someone once told me I make things like clouds. The form appears in ways they don't expect. It can shift, transform, or disappear, and I don't always know when or how.
Maybe that's what makes my art.
I don't think I became an artist by learning how to make things correctly. I became an artist by finding my own ways of making things happen.
Art has given me the freedom to enter something without knowing where it will lead. To follow a thought. To try something that might not work. To discover through doing what I couldn't have discovered by thinking first.
Sometimes I discover something about myself along the way.
Making with other people
This is something I've been noticing through Coastal Conversations. The name is intentional. Coastal doesn't mean every conversation has to be about the ocean. It means we're here, together, on this coast, where our everyday lives are happening.
Conversation isn't simply something that happens between people. It makes something. A thought that wasn't there before. A connection, a question, a possibility, sometimes a collaboration, sometimes just a different way of seeing something.
That, too, is making.
But there isn't just one kind of making happening in the room.
Emily is making something. Her knowledge, her experience, and her excitement about seaweed are part of her making. She's sharing something she cares about and bringing people into something she's been dreaming about.
I'm making something too, but differently. I'm interested in bringing people together around an interest and seeing what happens when different ways of thinking and doing meet.
The seaweed gives us something to put on the table. Something to notice and respond to. But the seaweed itself isn't really my making.
What I'm making is the condition for these people, ideas, and interests to come together.
And then there are the participants.
I don't know what their making will be. That's part of the point.
They might press seaweed onto paper, ask a question, share something they know, or make a connection with someone they just met. They might leave with a new idea, or make something that has nothing to do with seaweed at all.
Or they might simply spend an hour paying attention to something they'd never noticed before.
All making is welcome here.
The experience is made by the people who enter it
I make the conditions, and then the people in the room make the experience what it becomes.
This is why the same invitation becomes something different each time. The people are different. What they notice is different. What they bring is different.
The work isn't necessarily something I make myself.
It's what happens between us.
What are we making possible?
I think about this when I think about Dream Lab at Play Full Ground. This is how I make my art here, and, for me, this is how I am an artist.
I want Dream Lab to be a place where an idea can enter the world. Where a dream can become visible. A question can become an experiment. A conversation can become a connection.
A place where someone can arrive without knowing what they're "good at" and still have a reason to begin.
The Dream List is one small example. Someone writes down a question, a curiosity, an unfinished idea.
Dreams take different forms: on the wall and online
That small act changes something. The thought is no longer only inside their head.
Then perhaps someone else encounters it. Perhaps it connects with another dream, or becomes an experiment. Perhaps it goes nowhere.
That's okay too.
The point isn't always to arrive at an object or outcome. Sometimes the point is to begin discovering how you might make something happen, and through that process, discover your own way of making.
Maybe the question is different
Perhaps the question isn't are you a maker? Or are you good at art? Or what can you make with your hands?
Maybe the question is: what do you want to make happen in your world?
A conversation. A relationship. A gathering. A strange experiment. A possibility you don't yet have a name for. A thing, or maybe no thing at all.
The answer might tell you what to make. Or it might lead you somewhere you didn't expect.
You might need to learn a technique, find a material, ask someone for help, or invent your own way.
You might discover that the way you make is part of what you're making.
This is where art becomes, for me, a way of making.
Not simply making things.
But making possibilities. Making connections. Making conditions.
Making something happen.
Instead of that's not for me, maybe it can be:
I don't know where this leads, and I'm willing to be surprised.
Think. Do. Share.
And see what happens.
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