Art & Alchemy: North Carolina Repair Professionals

Abstract

Art & AlchemyNorth Carolina Repair Professionals Katy Clune (bio) and Julia Gartrell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Marshallberg Computer Repair, Marshallberg. All photographs by Katy Clune unless otherwise noted. [End Page 40] drive through any town, anywhere, and among the essential food stores and gas stations there are repair shops. "There will always be a need for somebody to repair broken stuff," said ceramics restorer Lenore Guston. "Because we're humans, we're breaking stuff all the time." Over the last year and a half, with the support of an Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, we set out to discover the current state of repair industries in North Carolina. Often when something is fixed the repair itself is invisible—the chip is polished away, the paint perfectly matched. We wanted to know about the stewards of our belongings, the folks who know how to reverse our mistakes and erase the imprint of time passing. This set of twenty interviews, conducted between September 2020 and July 2021, opens the workshop door and steps behind the customer counter to reveal the artistry, satisfaction, and expressions of care behind repair. Our collaboration and interest in this project grew out of our shared refusal of throwaway consumer culture and admiration of traditional craft methods. We met in 2016 at The Scrap Exchange, a creative reuse center in Durham, North Carolina, that diverts tons of waste from the landfill by accepting, sorting, and reselling. Julia is a sculptor whose work explores how our cultural relationship to material objects has changed since the rise of global manufacturing. In 2019, she launched the Radical Repair Workshop in a revamped vintage camper trailer. This gallery-meets-workshop is a mobile public art project that teaches simple repair skills and invites the public to donate their broken objects. "The goal, despite having the word repair in the title, is not necessarily to bring things back to their working order," Julia told me when I interviewed her about the project in January 2020. "It's designed to explore how sentimental objects can turn towards sculpture." Today, when it is often cheaper to replace an item than to fix it, specialty skills and loving care for belongings work together to resist the waste of capitalism. And, it turns out, it's an immensely satisfying way to earn a living, though it is challenging and sometimes lonely. Any nostalgia or romantic ideals we may have had before our fieldwork began were quickly wiped away, hastened by the challenges posed by the pandemic. As a folklorist, I am trained [End Page 41] to have meaningful conversations across divides, but our face masks and outdoor interview protocols made political differences newly visible—and sometimes insurmountable. (There were candidates we could not include because of their lack of COVID-19 precautions.) Despite the difficulties of cold-calling and setting up visits, meeting these generous strangers, and digging around their envy-inducing workshops, was an unexpected pandemic lifeline for both of us. Click for larger view View full resolution Wood cutting templates hang in the workshop of Y & J Furniture, Durham. Call it naivety, but Julia and I did not expect that it would be challenging to find interview candidates who were not white men over fifty. Many of these "handymen" fell into their fields during the Vietnam War era, often by chance, but found enough success to develop and sustain a niche business. Repair work is difficult—the pay is usually only enough to get by, store owners can be wary of training staff (who may one day become the competition), and it can be hard to find community, especially if you are a woman or a person of color. We made special effort to include voices from many backgrounds in this collection, but readily acknowledge their absences. We also could not have predicted the wider relevance the subject of repair would hold for our country in 2020 and 2021. Among so many other things, the pandemic exposed our need to be more self-reliant, and laid bare how much about our country needs fixing. President Biden's campaign slogan "Build Back Better" addressed this...