Self Reparation, Guest Post by Stephanie Fuji

Noises in the Quiet’ started in 2021 and completed 2026.

My work was borne of a desire to work with my hands in an almost primal and organic way connecting the emotional and physical me. I am drawn to working with fabrics because the sensory qualities allow me to slow down, contemplate and repair myself. It is literally like putting myself back together and paying attention to the ‘here and now’ and the space I occupy in the world.

Recently, I have been studying art psychotherapy where creativity in a variety of forms is a vehicle for exploring the conscious and unconscious addressing emotional, social and behavioural mental health issues. Of course, my studies have been steeped in theory. I have been reading Shaun McNiff, Joy Schaverien and Stephen. K. Levine about the life and the process of making an image. However, my personal creative journey is evolving in an intensely powerful and, sometimes, painful way where I am finding more clarity and affirmation of my own process of working.

I find there is an internal dialogue happening between thinking and doing that creates a relationship. Working with remnants or offcuts of fabrics, I run them through my fingers tracing by touch to make sense of the shapes and the textures. I am wondering how I want to treat them, will they be printed, stained, ripped? I contemplate how they land in their own space by themselves, but I must also try to give myself permission to weave my own thoughts and emotions into the pieces.

‘Noises in the Quiet’ was made in this way. It began in 2021 as a set of separate, small pieces of linens and cottons of varying weights. Over time, I grew bolder experimenting with each one using a range of techniques such as lino and roller printing, masking off areas, smearing and scraping paints and pouring ink through layers of finer fabrics. The textures and forms that emerged for each small piece became a series of individual ‘noises’ or proclamations of their own identities and, in some cases, the backs of fabrics spoke loudly and took away attention from the front. My quiet stitching responded to the various surfaces in recognition of this. While delicate stitches slipped effortlessly through the ink on softer fabric, much more force was required when stitching on dried paint. The painted string seemed more willing to be guided by my hand but roughly cut red strips of muslin were more anarchic and pursued their own directions. I found myself completely uncertain whether they would have a connection with each other and should I even try to keep them all together. Pushing through such uncertainties over time by repeated revisiting, stitching, unpicking, re-stitching, placing, taking away and re-arranging, the eventual formation of the whole piece of work was a juxtaposition of quiet and noise.

During my process of working, I seem to pass through unnerving states of exposure of myself and confrontations with the work. I feel my fingers and the piece of work communicate deeply with each other - sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively. But, to begin with, I feel vulnerable because I am never sure how the work will develop and I am never sure how much of me I am willing to expose in the piece. I fall deeper into the work until it takes a firm hold to shake me up and push me out into the open.

In another work, made earlier this year, I tried to tackle noticing and confronting my own emotions. I listen to the fabrics unwilling to smooth them out as I let painted threads and strings fall on top of them whatever way they will. My stitches start intensely and chaotically in one place using single and double threads and adding painted yarn. They have the freedom to pass under and over and they often tangle or catch onto other parts of the work. I never untangle threads or strings because, within the vulnerability of making the work, I think strength lies in embracing the imperfections as a natural part of my process of making. I quickly move to work on another part of the piece and as it evolves, we inevitably argue. My stitches become much larger and then smaller again; they look like they are trying to escape from the piece of work itself, trying to outwit me by changing direction and changing size and thickness.

I do not always describe my work as complete, but it ‘arrives’. I usually stare at it for a long while. Has it arrived, have I arrived? I am not always sure. Sometimes I must hide a piece to give it and me some extra space.

There is an empathy for what each other needs but there is also a dynamism in the connection I try to establish between all the elements of the work – the stitches, the fabric, the print or paint, the strings and yarns and the emotional and physical me. We pass through the tussles of the jarring and harmonious feelings and thoughts, through the ruptures and repairs, through the wreckage into a space.

Wherever the piece of work has taken me, I recognise I have been navigating spaces, uncovering hidden boundaries and crossing borders. This journey is very precious.

Stephanie Fujii MA (RCA) is a textile artist and teacher based in London, UK. Previous life experiences include working as an illustrator in the 1990’s, travelling, teaching, living in Japan for five years and having a family. She works with textiles and fibres on themes such as physicality, identity, emotions and environments.

What Is My Dharma in This?

This morning somebody sent me a video from Delhi. A young woman was being forcibly moved by a group of police officers. At one point she was upside down, her legs held up by two people like logs of wood. Her upper body hanging close to the road. Her shirt had ridden up exposing her stomach and navel. Later, one sees her sitting in the road — dazed by what just happened. I was too. She had no control over how her body was being handled, or over what was being exposed. The indignity was crucifying.

The protests in Delhi, led largely by young people and joined by opposition leaders, are centred on the controversy around the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. Protesters are alleging that legitimate voters have been removed from the rolls and that the revision has compromised electoral fairness — demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar. In its defence,  the  Election Commission says the exercise is intended to clean up the rolls by removing duplicate and ineligible entries. The dispute has escalated and spilled onto the streets, where hundreds of protesters have been detained, and large parts of central Delhi have been locked down to prevent demonstrations.

There are reports that say people  were  slapped, kicked, dragged and threatened. One woman said she had been beaten while the police stood by; senior Delhi Police officers said they had rescued her and removed the men. No FIR had been filed against the men at the time of that report. So even the act of looking becomes complicated. Who is doing what? Who is watching? Who is intervening? Who is not?

There is a lot of brutality in the world. In the outer political sphere, certainly, but also much closer to home, within families, marriages, relationships. Brutality seems to have become so integral to life that perhaps we don’t even notice it until something makes us stop.

I remember being a young woman of twenty-two, being brutalised by my husband and not really raising my voice. Today I stand back and I am stunned by that young girl. He tried to kill me and I didn’t go out screaming into the streets. I didn’t lodge a police complaint. I didn’t tell anybody what had happened. I simply locked myself in the other bedroom until he apologised.

Why?

Why were we taught to endure?

This is one of the questions I keep coming back to now, all these years later, sitting in my studio in Goa, looking at what is happening elsewhere and also looking at my own life.

I look at the work I do. The violence that I enact, The violence that I enact is the needle piercing layers of fabric, the tearing and rupturing of cloth — perhaps a way of sublimating some of the violence I have borne.”. Sometimes I tear the cloth  in frustration. I rupture the carefully constructed weave because I am trying to understand what goes into it. I am trying to understand the layers beneath it. I am trying to understand myself. My life. My feelings. My anger, frustration and pain.

I go deeply into my craft, into what I do, how I do it, the decisions I make at this very minuscule level. I can spend enormous amounts of time considering a stitch, a thread, the way one layer sits over another, what happens when I cut through something, what is revealed underneath. Or erasing fragments altogether.

And then I wake up on a Sunday morning to read the news and see videos and snippets people are sharing, talking about what is happening on the ground in Delhi. Young people protesting. Women being manhandled. People being carried away like carcasses. And I am deeply, deeply disturbed by what I see.

What should my role be? Where should my attention go? What is my dharma in this?

A few Facebook notifications prompted me to open the app. These days Facebook first gives you a reel to look at, and the one that came up was Anne Carson talking about noticing, and about how noticing alters judgment. She suggested that if we look at people more closely, perhaps we become less judgmental about them. We begin to see the details, the circumstances, the complexities.

In other  news the student leader Neha Bora, president of the All India Students’ Association, was dragged along the road and pushed into a waiting bus. In a video statement,  she accused policewomen of elbowing protesters, digging their nails into them and pulling at young women’s clothing. Delhi Police say women were treated with dignity. I wasn’t there, and I can’t see what happened on that road.

What does deeper noticing do in such situations?

Do I notice that the policemen may have been given instructions? That they are acting within a larger machinery of power? Does that change my judgment of the individual policeman/woman? It may, but how does it alter the fact that a young woman has been brutalised?

Does noticing make brutality less brutal?

Or does looking closely sometimes make it more difficult to look away?

I remember going to Shaheen Bagh in the winter of 2019-20, when women - many of them Muslim women from the neighbourhood - had begun a continuous sit-in against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens. The women sat there through the bitter Delhi winter, day after day, and Shaheen Bagh became a symbol of resistance across India. I went and sat with them in solidarity, also joining a choir to sing for the women. I remember people telling me I was crazy. My family included. I was in Delhi then, I wanted to add my voice of protest and did. But sitting so far away in Goa, I’m unable to do anything other than watch the brutality being enacted. Furious and frustrated.

The friend who’d accompanied me to Shaheen Bagh tells me she wanted to go to a protest at Jantar Mantar but her osteoporosis won’t take it. It is now a fight for the young ones, she says.

I suppose  it is.

My age and my body will not allow me to do many of the things I may once have done. And yet sitting on the sidelines feels unbearable too. I asked,  in a WhatsApp message, what can one do? One feels so frustrated.  “Armchair support” was the response.

And  that is precisely what troubles me.

I may tear fabric in frustration. I may rupture the carefully constructed weave. But what does that do?

How can art making of any kind really make a difference?

How does one support these young people who have the courage to get together and do what they do?

Having reached the age I have, occupying the space I do as an artist, a craftsman, craftswoman — whatever word one chooses — I wonder what I can actually do.

I feel frustrated. I feel hemmed in. I feel as though my hands are tied and that I want to jump out of this space and do something at so many levels. But instead I feel glued to this chair, tied down by these threads, as though I am going nowhere. These threads are what I know, but can they mean anything in today’s world?

Looking out at a stoic palm tree moving slightly in the gentle breeze, I think about the monsoon that wasn’t really one. Walking along on the beach yesterday, a fisherman spoke about the wells drying up. There will be no water, he said. Much of Goa’s water is provided by wells — where I live is too.

Is this nature’s brutality?

At some level we are responsible for this too, through what we have done to the planet, through climate change, through all the things we have collectively set in motion.

Yesterday another fisherman from Morjim told me, “I am Morjai.” He said, we were not created by God. Our ancestors created us. And so he was lighting lamps and putting them into the river as homage to his ancestors.

Making note of all that goes on around me, is said or suggested, is confusing.  There is so much information.

We have been conditioned in certain ways. We have been taught things socially, culturally, educationally, through our families. We are told where we came from, who created us, what to believe.

But when you think about it, yes,  we were created by our parents. But who created our parents? What was the beginning of this universe?

We don’t really know. The more I understand, the less I know anything.

And I wonder whether all this brutality is about a need to control, when there isn’t really any? To determine what is right and what is wrong, what belongs and what does not. Within families. Within nations. Between nations?

People in my neighbourhood  don’t like those of us who came from Delhi. I have been told to go back. A woman spat at my feet, called me mental, telling me I know nothing about Goa because I was not born and brought up here.

Again, belonging. Who belongs where? Who decides?

Who has the right to say, this is mine and not yours?

Wars have been fought continually over religion, land, identity, power. Two or three people disagree and it becomes a battle of wits, of right, of power.

And there is brutality at every stage. How does an individual respond to this? How have other artists responded?

Does it make an impact on the powers that be?

There is so much documentation now. So much video footage. We can watch brutality almost as it happens. And yet even seeing it does not necessarily bring change.

So what does witnessing mean? What does noticing mean?

When I was in my thirties, I used to get very upset about people eating in their cars and throwing the orange peel and pips onto the street. I remember being aghast at some people in a brand-new car pulling the plastic coverings off the seats and chucking them out of the window of their moving vehicle, onto the road.

Such lack of civic sense would infuriate me, I’d talk about it. One day I get a call from a well meaning but upset acquaintance, telling me that a journalist had written an article called, “Gopika ko gussa kyun aata hai?” Why does Gopika get angry?

The writer’s advice, as I remember it, was that I should contain my anger and make textile art instead of becoming so frustrated by all these things.

And now I wonder.

Is it because we are taught to contain our anger, sublimate it,  that we have arrived where we are today?

Where it is somebody else’s problem. Somebody else’s street. Somebody else’s protest. Somebody else’s child. Somebody else’s water shortage.

Perhaps we have not involved ourselves enough.

But then what does involvement actually mean? Posting something on social media? Going onto  the streets?

Making art? Writing? Sitting quietly and noticing?

Another friend complains that the art community is pathetic because nobody wants to post anything on social media. But there is fear too. People are afraid of what happens when they speak. So silence cannot always simply be called apathy.

I don’t really know what I want to say:  I am trying to understand myself within these circumstances, within this life. Looking ahead. Looking at something happening  far away from me  and feeling offended by it. Looking at my own life and what people have done to me and feeling equally offended by that.

I get numerous messages all day long. Today, there’s one from a bookshop saying, bring the book you are reading and let us swap plots and recommendations. Another is a video of Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at The Hayward Gallery in London. Showing entrail-like forms that speak more about the artist’s view of spirituality than about war or gore.

It’s all so removed from what is going on and what I’m trying to respond to. Everyone basically gets on with their individual lives, focussed on whatever. We are seemingly not united in any sense about anything.

I don’t know if that is good or bad.

Perhaps human beings were never united.

Perhaps this is simply what we are.

And yet, I remain deeply disturbed by the images I saw this morning.

Can I contemplate all these facets of life and absolve myself of what is happening elsewhere? Can I simply become absorbed in my own life, my own family, my own pain, my own stitching? Or is there something more being asked of me — that I am asking of myself?

When the Mahabharata was fought, Vyasa documented the war, and within that epic, Krishna speaks  to Arjuna about dharma, about what one must do when faced with an impossible moral situation.

I keep wondering whether there is any place for that idea in the world we live in now. What is dharma when you are sitting safely in Goa while someone protesting peacefully about their rights is being dragged away in Delhi?

What is dharma when your own body will not allow you to stand on the street in solidarity? What is dharma when what you know how to do is thread a needle and look very closely at how you stitch?

What is the meaning of this life? What have we come here to do?

Perhaps I am asking too many questions. Perhaps this is all I can do today.

I look closely at the fabric. I rupture it. I look beneath the surface. I am trying to understand how it is constructed — what holds it together and what makes it fall apart.

Doing exactly the same thing with the life, within and around me.

Thinking While Making— slowness, and making art in a frantic age

I've been working on a series of shells, going back to how I started with the Washed Ashore project. Sometimes I don't know why I do things — I'm just inspired to — and this was one such thing. I was making a piece called Tread Carefully, built up of numerous shells and stones. As I kept attaching more, it grew ungainly, so I began making pieces independently instead, thinking I'd connect them later — I'd even bought a canvas to stretch them onto, to  join them using Irish crochet — my style. But after two or three pieces, I realised working them independently was creating pieces in their own right.

So today I've picked up a rather large oyster shell — subtle shades of white and off-white, with little bits of pale yellow and grey. I'm using a metal crochet needle, three millimetres to start, though I've now moved to 0.7 millimetres. The thread isn't finely twisted, so it's not a stiff material to work with. I took the finer needle because the thicker one kept bumping against the shell and was difficult to negotiate. I began by crocheting five lines across the base, connecting th through natural holes in the shell. The intention is to work in layers emerging independently from these lines. The first line I started with double crochet, going straight rather than round, to keep this piece independent of the others.

The shell itself is about six inches by three, and it's a landscape in itself — undulating, full of hollows and holes I find useful for pulling my thread through. Multiple smaller shells are glued to it, and I'm fascinated by whatever glue lets shells adhere to each other this way. I love the oyster's texture — these tiny holes that aren't quite holes; I don't know if they're the radula of some other creature trying to get at the flesh inside.

I've gone back to the three-millimetre needle. After two rows of double crochet I'd moved further from the shell than I wanted, and the fine needle was catching on the plies, looking messy. It’s a steel hook with a fine point that had started chipping away bits of the calcium carbonate structure.  I like creative stitching, but I still want it neat. I'm not sure what comes next — I want the crochet to rise and clasp the shell, which means reducing stitches or holding steady. So I'm trying half crochet to tighten and shorten it, then maybe single crochet to help it hug the shell.

I work very intuitively with these pieces — it's hard to plan around a shell. I need holes to hook into, and I need to let the shell dictate the direction. I like this randomness, especially after a month-long, still-unfinished phase of disciplined cross-stitch. Maybe I'm restless and indisciplined, or maybe that's just how the mind works — only so much discipline before it needs release. It's also been a busy couple of weeks, preparing lectures for my mentoring Thursdays, which have been fascinating for me and my students — tracing how different genres of art evolved through social, environmental, and political conditions.

Making me think about the art we make today, in an age of short attention spans, saturated with images, where information is at our fingertips but there's no time to absorb the finer details of anything. That's part of why I write about my process — so that it isn't lost. How is a thing made? What does the making do to the maker?

I notice that textile art is increasingly becoming larger than life, grants and competition briefs also stress pushing boundaries of making, as though its acceptance into the art world requires it to leave behind the domestic, the craft, everything it was once associated with.

I'm not sure I agree, even though I understand the impulse. I appreciate that the machine-made has its place — we live in a post-machine, digital era. Community projects, farming work out to craftsmen — I see the value in this too. But for me, it's always been about being the craftsperson myself.

I first ran into this question when working as a designer, painting saris — literally running around five and a half meters of fabric so the paint wouldn't dry or drip more than I wanted. It was a different kind of skill than fine lines and delicate shading, but skill nonetheless. I once asked a client to raise the price for a sari, and he said, "But why? It can't have taken you more than half an hour." That was a moment of reckoning. I told him: maybe half an hour, but that half hour rests on almost three decades of drawing — since I was five or six — plus a whole studio helping lift the frame, tilt it, mix the dyes. Where does that money go? It doesn't just land in my pocket.

Around the same time, I was working on projects in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, Kashmir, and Andhra Pradesh, with weavers, rug makers, embroiderers, printers, and ikat weavers. I saw their conditions, and I saw the resentment toward designers who walked in and told them what to do — it was intimidating to play God. You had greater value if you could give them business. Since these were government sponsored projects, there were bureaucratic wrangles over who represented the work at Heimtextil, and some projects simply went unpaid. A lot of mismanagement.

The one thing I felt I could do was bring value to handcrafting by becoming a craftsperson myself — an artist bringing this work into the gallery. That was the initial impulse, which has led to much more.

I recognise that the artists working large are, in effect, drawing attention to textiles, and that different approaches are necessary. But that approach runs contrary to what I want my work to say. I want it to speak to the detail: why change the hook, why change the needle, how is the shell responding to my touch, how does it feel against my skin. The shell is uncomfortable to hold, and I hold the hook in an odd way — not the ladylike way that’s established tradition.

I've made another line at the back to pull the fabric in, and I'm struggling again with the three-millimetre green aluminium hook — prising each chain apart, literally jabbing the hook through — thumb and middle finger of my left hand steadying the thread, the hook itself held between thumb, middle, and index finger of my right. Getting the hook into a single crochet is proving difficult, my fingers rub  against the shell's rough, brittle, fragile-but-hard surface. One stitch through — the next equally hard, piercing against my middle finger before it pulls through. I'm skipping a few chains at the back where perfection doesn't matter, just enough to join it legitimately to the last row. Fewer stitches here has tightened the join so it won't show.

I'm now working behind the rows I've already done — three rows of double crochet, two more of double crochet, one of half double crochet — using the small gaps between them to add another line of half double crochet underneath, hoping it will tighten the crochet against the shell at the front. What I'd done before hadn't worked; the crochet had risen past the height of the shell itself.

I'm not really a crochet expert. I learned about ten years ago, when I first moved to Goa. Before that I only embroidered — running stitch, cross stitch, occasionally stem stitch. But Goa shifted my whole landscape, and I didn't know what to do until I started picking up stones and shells from the beach. Then the question became: what do I do with them?

A friend —Venetia, a Goan who owns a restaurant on Candolim-SinquerimBeach — kept handing me plastic bags of shells every time I visited. I'd protest that I'd collected enough; she'd say, "I know you. You'll pick up more." I tried embroidering with the shells first, but it looked strange and unfamiliar — I'd never worked with found objects this way. Crochet was her suggestion.

I taught myself off YouTube, and within a week could make a perfect chain. From there I just experimented — going around the shells, hearing about fractals from someone who'd tried something similar, and the research kept unfolding on its own.

I became curious about crochet's history in Goa — who brought it here, how it arrived. The best answer I've found is that it came through the Jesuits and the nuns who taught it to people here. Crochet's broader history is well documented, so I won't go into that, but for me, crochet has come to mean Goa specifically, and I'm still trying to trace exactly how — though maybe that's a small, futile pursuit given how little time there is and how many things pull at my attention. Not just that, these domestic crafts have never received much attention from academics and a lot of history is lost.

This piece has created something — not quite what I intended. So I have to reinvent what I was doing — another chain row underneath, to grasp the ridges of the shell below. With these pieces, it never goes the way I expect. It's almost as if the shell, needle, and thread are dictating their own story. It is my story, but it feels like they're helping me tell it.

The external world has always been my starting point. Partly through this piece, working these multiple, difficult lines, I asked myself: why make it so hard? And I laughed, thinking — maybe making this difficult gives me some companionship in the difficulty of life itself. Maybe overcoming it gives a sense of triumph, a way of creatively transcending difficulty to make something beautiful. Isn't that what art does?

Which brings me back to the idea of art in the age of Instagram, AI, and digital technology — I'd genuinely like to know what you think it should say. For me, quiet contemplation, with occasional writing, is a space to reflect, to make decisions, to organise my mind around everything I'm doing — including thinking through my lectures, my students, what more I can show them, how else I can help bring out their artist voice etc.

I'm not the kind of teacher who just says "carry on." I push my students — not everyone likes it, but I had teachers who pushed me, and I benefited enormously from what pinched the ego.  That's probably where it comes from, along with the fact that I push myself the same way.

So I'd genuinely like to know: what do you think about art in the digital age? I believe this could be an era where working with the hands gains more ground than ever. I have found that can't really relax without doing something with my hands — maybe it's habit, but I think there's a real neurological link between hand and brain. I remember reading that infants move their hands while suckling, and researchers have found a neurological  connection between mouth and hand that soothes the baby as it suckles.  I suspect there's a similar connection between hand and mind.

I feel that connection acutely doing this kind of crochet — concentrating hard to get the three-millimetre needle into tight single-crochet lines, trying to reach back to where I'd drifted from the shell. My face, contorts with every difficulty — not pretty faces, I’m sure though I have no mirror to confirm it.

I'd thought to work along the top line of the piece, but halfway through realised it had flattened things. So I'm trying the line between the back holes instead, to see if it does something different — working  a single chain.

I'm holding the hook the "ladylike" way now. My friend Venetia once watched me crochet at her restaurant and remarked at how awkwardly I was holding the needle — I told her it was just how I managed the difficult parts. But held between thumb and middle finger, the tension is better, the stitch cleaner. It takes me time to find my way back there.

Some people hold it in an almost fist — all four fingers and thumb wrapped around it — which is what I reach for when I need a surer grip, especially when the needle keeps slipping against the shell's calcium-carbonate surface.

This section hasn't produced anything spectacular, so I'm cutting the thread and moving to another portion, possibly with a colour change. I have a tencel yarn, not quite tightly twisted either, but with a nice sheen. The thread I've used here is a dirty ecru, close to the shell's own colour — the shell itself carries so many hues, it's almost magical. I've finished this end; the loops and edges can wait. Two knots done. Now, cream, beige, or grey for the next stretch — there's a blue-grey somewhere too, if I can find it.

When I think about social media now, I remember being fairly active on it once, enjoying the exchange. But about twenty months ago my mother passed away, at ninety-three, after a long illness. What followed shattered something between my siblings and me, and I went into deep mourning — not just for her, but for the fragmentation of our family, which hadn't started with her death at all, but had been building for years. I withdrew from social media entirely. A few people checked in when they hadn't seen me for a while. I found the distance such a relief that I never really returned, beyond the occasional blog post. I feel that engagement on social media is largely superficial — an economy of image rather than word.

That's part of what makes me think about what art can do instead: bring us back to something more authentic in ourselves. Do we need to scroll a thousand images a day, watch every reel, comment on every story? I don't think so. I think the quality of relationships and of life matters more, and that requires spending time with ourselves — asking who we actually are. I've been reading James Hollis, What Matters Most and An Examined Life, alongside each other — his idea that in the second half of life (where I clearly am now), our task shifts. In the first half, we're largely following what we've been told, taught, shown. At some point the question becomes: is any of this actually me? Does it relate to who I am? Why did my life bring me to this pass? Is this what I want, does it fulfil me?  And that means sitting with the decisions and choices that got you here — why, and what they became.

For me, the way to meet this furiously racing world is to step back and give it time. Embroidery and crochet let me do that — let me feel the needle scrape against shell, hear that faint screech, and connect it to something that lives in my own throat: a screech of non-belonging, of restlessness and insecurity.

Stepping back from a racing world isn’t easy. And when I do step back to think about art itself, I find myself wondering whether spectacle can sustain us indefinitely. I see a great deal of work being made collaboratively and communally now, and while I understand what that makes possible — many voices, participation, exchange — I sometimes find myself missing the intimacy of one person’s sustained engagement with material, and the particular quality that comes from skill developed over time.

I understand what conceptual art opened up for us — Duchamp fundamentally altered the question of where art resides, shifting attention away from the handmade object and towards the idea. That shift was necessary and enormously generative. But I find myself asking a different question now. If an artist conceives something and someone else executes it, what happens to the knowledge that comes through making? What happens to all those decisions that are made only because the material resists, surprises, refuses, or suggests another direction?

And perhaps AI makes that question even more interesting. If machines can increasingly generate images, texts, forms and possibilities for us, perhaps the value of working with our own hands changes rather than diminishes. Perhaps the awkwardness matters. The time matters. The resistance matters. The fact that I have to struggle to get a three-millimetre hook through a tight chain while holding an uncomfortable shell in my hand matters.

I don’t think this means that everyone must make everything themselves, or that one kind of art is more legitimate than another. But for me, the making is inseparable from the thinking. If I hand that part over entirely, I lose something I am actually trying to understand.

And perhaps that is what I keep returning to: in an age when so much can be done for us, what remains particular to the human hand, the human mind, and the encounter between them?

What do you think?