Ruth Potts: Falling in Love with the Material World: How the joy and intelligence of craft helps us understand limits and sets us free.
Excerpt from New Materialism article
“The New Materialism’: or, how falling in love with the world could help us all live more, with less.
The world’s oldest continuously working mechanical timepiece, the clock at Wells Cathedral was wound by hand every week for 600 years until the last in a long line of ‘Keepers of the Great Clock’ retired in August 2010. Maintaining the clock demanded skill, dedication and a great deal of care. As the centuries passed, it needed each of the keepers to develop a loving relationship with the mechanism, to tend, nurture and cajole it into a long life. It is this quality of relationship that we lose when we lose our connection with the objects we own, and this sense enchantment with the material world we are part of, that lies at the heart of an emerging ‘New Materialism’ that promises a world of better, not more.”
This talk took place at the small is beautiful 2012 festival.
More info:
Ruth Potts – It’s time for a ‘New Materialism’ a world of better, not more
Ruths publishing organisation Bread, Print and Roses
Practical Action, the organisation that puts on the Small is festival
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