Home I Am Timothy

The things we have around us have all been made by people who are just like us. People who get cold in the winter and warm in the summer. People who have families like we do, they fall in love with other people (one might be in love with you right now); they go to sleep at night time and wake up in the morning.

When they go to work, they make things for us to buy. These things carry a little bit of that person with them throughout their lives, hidden within their materials, just like a song with thoughts and feelings hidden in each line. These thoughts and feelings mark a moment in their lives, the object becoming a record of that time. Each curve and corner representing a decision made by that person to bend and shape. Looking at objects like this, even the most common mass produced product, reveals each object as a collection of these tiny thoughts, decisions and the accompanying actions places the maker within the materials of the object.

The making process physically builds the object but also weaves strands of emotion. Historical threads of success and failure, joy and despair, the sleepless nights filled with thoughts about form, the joining of two materials, these weave an unseen fabric cloaking the object in meaning and values. A totally human element held deep within all man made objects.

Why not consider these anonymous thoughts contained within a mass produced object as you would consider a letter written by a now deceased person, or a doodle left on a postit note drawn by a mind which will never think again. Precious traces of the thoughts, which made up a moment in some ones existence.

In a world where we are showered with machine made objects, it becomes easy to disregard the thought filled relationship that exists between maker and object. We start to see only the relationship that we, the user, have with the object which has become our possession, our object, our tool whose only value is to serve us. Our material culture allows, even encourages, this disconnection of object and maker. But how healthy is this separation between production and use? Like our relationship with food we have lost our understanding of where things come from, our understanding of what things mean, what impact their hidden values have on ourselves and our environment.

If time is taken to consider the origins of the things we buy, the unseen fabric of human decisions, interventions, the problems solved, the success and the failures which allow an object to exist, perhaps we can place a higher, and indeed healthier, emotional value upon our things. This would quell the urge to discard and replace, with obvious environmental benefits but maybe more importantly create a material culture where with ownership comes responsibility, in a society where the notions of responsibility and respect are becoming increasingly devalued.

-- JosephStebbing - 30 Jan 2007