Creative Club | Spring Workshops

Now available to book for Penryn-based members:

Structures of Meaning | Making as a process of becoming

Penryn and Streatham campuses

In his work, Tim Ingold (2003) challenges the idea that making is simply about imposing a pre-conceived design or form onto raw materials. Instead, he argues that making is a process of engagement with materials, where the maker learns and adapts through interaction with the world. Adopting a phenomenological stance, Ingold argued that meaning emerges through the act of making, not as something pre-planned or separated from it. For him, making is a form of “correspondence,” where makers and materials evolve together in a mutual process of becoming.

Following Ingold’s suggestion that making is a process of becoming more aware, we embark on a creative journey ourselves. Using natural materials – foraged and received – we will weave ‘bug hotels’ that can be placed in the natural environment. Though some techniques will be suggested, this journey is not about following a blueprint. Rather, it is about developing an intuitive and personal relationship between the self, the materials, and the surrounding environment. In this way, the workshop highlights one’s interaction with matter through making as a way of being in and with the world (Biesta, 2002). Through these meaningful interactions, we might come to understand and create meaning -and ourselves- in different and unexpected ways.