NEAR THE start of Sara Baume’s wonderful new book, handiwork, there is a quote from The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett.
“The workshop is the craftsman’s home. Traditionally this was literally so. In the Middle Ages craftsmen slept, ate, and raised their children in the places where they worked.”
Much the same could be said of the Cork writer and artist, whose home is her place of work. As handiwork, recently published by Tramp Press, reveals, each room has taken on the duty of becoming a particular kind of studio/workplace dedicated to a specific task in the processes of creating and making. “This house,” she writes, “has diligently ordered itself around my daily practices.”
“We moved here about four years ago,” Sara tells me during our Monday afternoon interview. “Previously we lived in a mouldy, below standard, crap house, but after my first book [Spill Simmer Falter Wither] did OK we were able to move. We still rent, but we have room to write and store things, and the house has become part of all the things we do.
“I don’t have a separate studio, I just make use of it all. Actions have located themselves in certain places that then become these workstations. I have a room for writing I work in in the morning. Craftwork is a reward for later, and I sew in front of the TV to relax in the evening.”
‘Handcrafts are having a moment’
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Mixing memoir with reflections on the practice and idea of craftwork, and fascinating discussions on ornithology, handiwork is Sara’s first work of non-fiction. It is delivered through a short series of paragraphs, sometimes just a few lines. Yet through brevity there is rich detail, a sense of the poetic, and concise directness - like the best of any craftwork tradition.
In this time of the coronavirus lockdown, social distancing, and self isolation, the book feels very apt, reflecting on how - whether we are hobbyist, amatuer, or professional - through imagination and dedication, we can be creative people from within our own homes.
'As I get older I find that what brings me back to art is working with my hands and physically engaging with materials'
“This book is very much of the moment,” Sara reflects, “with so many people forced to shrink their actions within their own house, and just get on with it. That’s what handiwork is about. It’s also that handcrafts are having a moment, with a lot of people quilting and knitting, even baking. Even before the coronavirus restrictions, people were turning to these things as a break from always being in front of a screen.”
Creative practice is by nature a solitary one, and Sara admits that, through a mixture of work and location, the requirement for social distancing has not come as too heavy a burden.
“My partner and I mostly work from home, and living in a very isolated location outside of Skibbereen, makes it easier, so we’re very lucky in that respect,” she says, “but when I have to go into town, that’s when it’s weird, with guards around and yellow tape marking things off and bullet proof glass screens.”
‘I have this weird insistence…’
In its own way, handiwork has parallels with Sara’s previous book, A Line Made By Walking, where the story of a neurotic, frustrated, artist, was shot through with reflections on the work of Dutch conceptualist, Bas Jan Ader.
“When I was writing A Line Made By Walking, I was reflecting on a period when I was a lost, disillusioned, art student,” says Sara. “A lot of the artworks referenced in that were conceptual. Handiwork comes at the same subject, but in a different way, as it’s about the work of hands and what you can make with your hands.
“A big factor in the book is the Arts and Crafts Movement and William Morris. When I was in art school it was all modernism and post-modernism and post-post-modernism, but as I get older I find that what brings me back to art is working with my hands and physically engaging with materials, like what I used to do as a child and watching Mary Fitzgerald’s Make and Do on television. I have this weird insistence to do that, a raw need to pass time in that way, and I’m looking at what motivates that in handiwork.”
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The fascination with eccentric Dutch artists continues, with the attention this time on Willem van Genk, an Outsider Artist, who created extraordinary pop-art style paintings and make model trolleybuses from “tin, card, plastic, foil, string, glue - and...collage the outermost layer with advertisements snipped out of magazines,” as Sara writes.
'It was when I went to college that Dad and I bonded, as the pieces I was making were very sculptural, and he would weld pieces together for me'
“I came across Van Genk at an exhibition of Outsider Art I saw in Amsterdam in 2018,” she says. “I hadn’t intended him to be part of the book, but I was fascinated by his work and him making all these things while locked away in his apartment in The Hague. He longed for academic acceptance and recognition, but never got it, and he just got stranger and stranger as he went on. When his apartment was emptied out after he died there were layers of excrement on the floor! I didn’t bother putting that part in the book!”
A different kind of creative
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Detail from the cover image of handiwork.
Yet, for many, the most abiding theme of handiwork will be Sara’s reflections on her grandfather, who loved making model horse drawn carriages, and particularly of her father, a creative man as well, who designed and built heavy machinery. “His most tremendous construction,” Sara writes, “was a thirty-tonne rock crusher almost three-hundred feet long.”
“I never intended to write about my Dad,” Sara admits, “but it was about a year, two years, after he died, that’s how long it took me to miss him. I know that sounds like a terrible thing to say, but Dad was always the kind of person who was in the background, and I’d say a lot of people’s experiences of their dads are like that. Whenever I phoned home it was Mum I talked to. We also clashed a lot - during my teens I was vegetarian, and new age, and Dad was very old school, but it was when I went to college that we bonded, as the pieces I was making were very kinetic and sculptural, and he would weld pieces together for me, and help me find materials.
“When he died I was writing, I wasn’t working so much on art. That’s why it didn’t hit me straight away, but when I began making things again, he was there with me, I knew all the questions I would ask him. He too was creative and made things, but not for the sake of ornament.”
Handiwork is available to order via https://www.kennys.ie/tramp-press-pre-order/handiwork.htm.
