You can’t keep a good maker down

My mother might remember this: as a kid, I once declared that I could handle a stint in jail, because I would spend the time dressing up the place by making decorations out of any old bits and pieces. 
Not a huge leap, as making something out of nothing was already my preferred activity within my own four walls, for hours at a time.

I scored stuff around the house and started fabricating, often without too much of a game plan. I recall a lot of painted papier-mache figurines made of plastic dishwashing liquid bottles, sock puppets from what may or may not have been orphan socks. This is around the first time I heard ‘crepe’ refer to fabric, and not just to ‘paper’, as in, “That was my good black crepe!”

I was — and still am — an opportunistic maker. I am inspired by whatever materials I come across, fabricating a lot of experiments, literally playing with ideas. In my world, that’s not unusual. The other day a friend reflexively picked plastic bits from the alley while we walked. Another friend I met for coffee smiled in triumph as she held up a small battered bit of found metal, an inevitable component of a future encaustic painting.

Makers might dream of spacious studios or top-quality materials and tools to develop their concepts through doing, but a lack of all that won’t keep the making from happening. In fact, restricted space and resources can lead to innovation, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

I was reminded of this during the Eastside Culture Crawl back in November, while visiting Arnt Arntzen‘s steampunky workshop in Strathcona, a must-see stop for any passionate maker. Just a few weeks earlier, Arnt and artist-spouse Valerie Arntzen had just returned from six months in a small pied-a-terre in Amsterdam’s city centre, so surely he wouldn’t have a lot of new examples of his signature reclaimed-wood and metal furniture to show.

Yet there it was: a collection of what this famously humble industrial designer calls models for future furniture, created out of whatever he found around the city and a Leatherman pocket-sized multi-tool. They may have been modest macquettes to him, but to me they are exquisite, concrete proof that you can’t keep a good maker down. Six months away from his workshop may have been hard for this hard-worker but the restriction also pushed him in another new direction, and the writing was on the walls: paintings that combine his passion for industrial design with pattern and abstraction.

Random sample of innovation with scant art materials and no tools but a lot of heart: