“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
~ Annie Dillard
“I identify who I am with my art work. It’s my life, my life’s work! I love the experience.”
~ Nancy Crow
“Everyone needs to have a place that is all theirs. It’s just a place where it’s you. It can be any- thing. It’s your place and you own it.”
~ Toni Morrison
“The modern economy privi- leges pure profit, momentary transactions, and rapid fluidity. Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labor. It is not about quick transac- tions or easy victories. That slow tempo of craftwork, of taking the time you need to do something well, is profoundly stabilizing to individuals.”
~ Richard Sennett
CREATIVE THERAPY
“The hand is the window on to the mind.” ~ Immanuel Kant
by Judith Fertig
varied movements, movements that can be controlled at will. Science has sought to show how these motions, plus the hand’s different ways of gripping and the sense of touch, affect the ways we think.” Sennett expounds at length on this topic in his book, The Craftsman, and teaches sociology at New York University and The London School of Economics and Political Science. He explains that making things by
“O
hand engages the brain in special ways. The furniture maker, the musician, the glassblower or any other person en- gaged mindfully in arts and crafts needs to first “localize,” or look at just what is there—a piece of wood, a musical instrument or melted glass. The second step is to question—“What can I do
f all our limbs,” explains Professor Richard Sennett, “the hands make the most
with this?” The third is to open up—fig- ure out how to create something unique. “To deploy these capabilities, the
brain needs to process visual, aural, tactile and language-symbol informa- tion simultaneously,” says Sennett. Working pleasurably with the hands
also helps to enhance brain chemistry ac- cording to author Kelly Lambert, Ph.D., a psychology professor and lead researcher with the Lambert Behavioral Neurosci- ence Laboratory at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia. Lambert, author of Lifting Depres-
sion: A Neuroscientist’s Approach to Activating Your Brain’s Healing Power, makes the case for hands-on crafts like gardening, cooking and knitting as antidotes to depression. In a “Recon- sidering Crafts” segment on Wisconsin Public Radio, she remarked: “We’re still carrying around a brain that appreciates working in the dirt and planting and hunting and preparing food.” Using both hands to do something
enjoyable, like knitting a scarf, entails engaging in a repetitive motion that pro- duces calming serotonin. Lambert adds that counting stitches distracts us from other worries or concerns, and knitting something that we find pleasing and seeing the process through to comple- tion activates what she refers to as the effort-driven reward circuit in the brain. This further prompts the release of the feel-good brain chemicals dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, she adds.
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