What is hand made and what does it mean? Will muses on this overused term and explores its intricacies
So what does the law state on hand made?
Unsurprisingly it is a very grey area…………
Obviously some use of machinery, I mean what is machinery? A sewing machine is accepted for hand made clothes, a potter's wheel. Maybe use of electricity – a glass furnace, soldering iron, forge. The list goes on.
Maybe it’s a provenance – each craft or product having its own limits and assessments.
Maybe it’s the actual maker's own view of what is acceptable and, if so, it is the maker's own view of what is not acceptable. Maybe it’s the transparency and truth about the process.
As a glassblower, essentially tools and techniques have not changed for a long time – but our furnaces are now controlled by high tech systems which keep the temperature constant, technology has improved insulation and the tools we use are vastly superior in materials and construction to anything from long ago.
Maybe it's about the aim. Am I aiming to make unique pieces, am I aiming to exactly reproduce the design until I have made a certain number?
In my mind unique means uni – one piece. It is not identical to any other piece of glass – similar maybe. It can be identified on its own, nobody else has the same thing. As individual as we are as people.
But is this important? I don’t think so. I absolutely love some of the glass I have which is mould blown or machine made.
Excuse the pun – it is about transparency, provenance, truth. Just say it as it is. If it is made by a machine it will have some amazing qualities, because of the times we live in the quality should be good, the materials should be without flaw, and it should be relatively cheap. The cost is in the design and “tooling up” for production, and very little in the actual production and the initial costs are offset and split by the many hundreds, thousands or multiples of. This is mass production. And mass production can be great.
It depends on what you are buying. I would rather have a mass produced car or computer or phone – they have no value in “uniqueness” and there is safety in quality control and the development and sophistication that industry can bring to industrial design.
And then there is the grey area…….
Industry using "hand-made" as a selling asset. Hiding mass production behind a veneer of choice, to pretend your purchase is unique or customised to your personal taste.
If we look at cars, years ago people customised their cars themselves, now when you buy a car you are offered your own “custom” options to make the car unique – unlikely given that you are probably among the thousands choosing the same options.
It comes back to unique – one of one. A product can not be unique if it could be replicated. If it can be repeated.
If you make something be it a meal or paint a painting, or blow a bit of glass – if no one can produce the identical thing it is unique. If a machine can be programmed with a set of options and produce an object, ad infinitum, the same – even if it doesn’t – it is not unique.
I am not saying that hand-made is better, just that we need to understand and appreciate what it is.
Industrial Design is using this concept as a selling point and that undermines what hand made should be.
I make lots of tumblers and various people look at them and say “but they aren’t the same height” “or the same width” No they are hand-made, completely hand-made, there will be and are variations – even the design means they can not be the same – but people presume that I am not skilled enough to make them identical, because somewhere they have seen tumblers – identical in height, weight, diameter, the thickness and clarity of the glass, even the number of coloured dots on them, etc. But, even if I say so myself, I’m pretty good at making tumblers by hand – but each one will be unique because I am making them. As a craftsman I can safely try to make them identical because I know I never will.
If you are a multi-millionaire and you commissioned me to make a set of tumblers for you, with no price ceiling – I would have to set a price and then make you as many tumblers as I could for that price, then you the customer can pick the 6 you want and drive a JCB over the rest.
Each of us has our own very personal idea of perfection, the flaws are what make us perfect in each others eyes. So it should be with our favourite things.
I firmly believe that the creating of something is only part of the piece. The provenance and love and esteem that a product gains from use gives it a patina of “art”
We all have our favourites, be it a wooden spoon or mug or jumper, very few of these things appear in our possession as favourites, they gain this status because we like them, we enjoy using them or wearing them – they become comfortable and give us reassurance, they might have memories. Whatever it is, we are sad when they wear out or break – we miss them and they are almost always irreplaceable.
This concept of using descriptors to enhance value is becoming so widespread that it is almost meaningless. In reality it still has the ability to sway our choices. But what and how is hand crafted beer? Home-made food? Locally sourced – is that a mile, 10 miles 50 nor UK. For instance if you are ordering fish and it says locally sourced….. Hand reared, hand pressed, hand carved, hand stitched, and so it goes on. Made in Britain can now mean made anywhere but just boxed here. The provenance is muddied.
Most things we buy, we like the reassurance of a properly run business – abiding by all the health and safety rules that do keep us safe, robust quality control and of course buying exactly what it says on the tin. We feel comfortable with machine quality- we expect it and its even ‘better” if we think that somewhere, somehow a hand has been involved in the production. We like being able to send it back if it does not meet our expectations, and even better if we can do all this anonymously from the comfort of our own computer screens without actually having to explain ourselves. The convenience, quality and comfort come with cost and expectations.
Hand-made can be good, very good, but it is not the moral high ground it is being made out to be. Hand made does not necessarily make a product better. Design, form and function. Most hand-made jugs do not pour well – in fact quite a lot of machine made jugs have the same problem. But it is unlikely that the same jug can pour custard or milk without one of them dripping.