Why handmade work still resonnates.

I spend a ridiculous amount of my life on a computer. I teach digital art and design, I make digital work, I build websites and courses, record podcasts, answer emails, and apparently stare into Canvas for several thousand hours every semester. I genuinely like digital tools too, so this isn’t me preparing to throw my computer into a field and become one with a block of wood.

And yet I keep coming back to making things by hand. Ceramics, printmaking, collage, books, letterpress…pretty much anything that gives me an excuse to cover a table in supplies and make a mess. Buying the letterpress recently has had me thinking about this again because there is really no practical reason I need to print something that way. If I want words on paper, I own several printers capable of accomplishing that considerably faster and with far less swearing, but pulling a print from a press still feels different to me.

There’s pressure involved. Ink behaves differently depending on how much you put down. Paper has a surface and a weight to it. Registration can be slightly off, the ink might catch differently in one area than another, and even within an edition the prints aren’t always absolutely identical. You can see evidence of the process in the finished thing, and I think that’s part of what I respond to.

The same thing happens when I look at ceramics. I like seeing where a finger moved through clay, where a glaze got heavier along an edge, or some tiny bit of wonkiness that tells me an actual person made the thing. Even when something is beautifully crafted, I don’t necessarily want every trace of its making scrubbed out of existence, and I think that’s part of why handmade work feels especially good to me right now.

We spend so much time surrounded by things that are incredibly smooth. Images can be corrected endlessly, type sits exactly where we tell it to, products can be reproduced thousands of times without much variation, and increasingly we can type a sentence into a box and have software spit out an image, a layout, some writing, or an idea before we’ve even finished our coffee.

I use plenty of those tools myself, so I’m not interested in pretending technology is some horrible thing ruining creativity. I’ve been making digital work for decades. What I have noticed, though, is that the more frictionless everything becomes, the more interested I seem to get in processes that push back a little.

Clay does not particularly care what I had planned for it. A printing plate doesn’t care that I had a really lovely idea if I didn’t ink it properly. Paper tears, ink smears, and a collage piece gets glued down slightly crooked and now I either live with it or figure out what the hell I’m doing next. I like that the material gets some say in what happens instead of every decision being completely under my control.

I think there’s something similar happening when we encounter handmade work as viewers or buyers too. You can usually sense that there were a bunch of decisions between the initial idea and the thing sitting in front of you. Someone chose the material, mixed the color, carved the block, pulled the print, trimmed the paper, formed the clay, stitched the binding, or probably muttered a few choice words when something went sideways. Some of that history stays visible in the object.

It’s probably part of why I still have handmade things around my house that I’ve owned for years. I remember who made some of them, where I bought them, or what was happening in my life when I got them. They become these weird little markers of time in a way that most mass-produced objects don’t for me, and lately I’ve wanted more of that in my own work again.

I’ve spent a lot of time making things that live on screens, and I’ll continue doing that because I love that work too. But I also want ink under my fingernails, stacks of prints drying somewhere they are probably in the way, pots and books and collages and whatever other objects I get weirdly obsessed with next. I don’t particularly care whether every one of them is useful or sellable either. I’m increasingly interested in the fact that they existed because somebody, in this case me, spent some time making them.

Maybe that’s part of why handmade work keeps hanging around no matter how sophisticated our tools get. There are choices and adjustments in the finished thing, along with materials behaving like materials and all the stuff that happened between “I think I’m going to make this” and whatever eventually landed on the table. You can still see the person in there somewhere, and I think I’ll probably always be drawn to that.