Craft Work: Making Form in a Broken World

How can human flourishing arise from what the poet Mary Oliver called 'good work/ongoing'? In its attentiveness to the material, form and purpose of distinct, well-made things, craft epitomizes good work. In its disciplined, quiet giving over to the repetitions of tradition, craft is ongoing. Perhaps more than any other practice, craft work reveals the intimacy between a manifest sense of self and the imperative of its common expression. In a world broken into shuttered units, each separated from the other for the purpose of measured comparison and control, Robin Holt argues that craft work can produce the unassigned remainder that refuses being broken up: it generates its own sufficiency and joy.