Making, Knowing and Being Made: Hand-Stitching Beyond Representation

Abstract

This chapter explores a relationship between maker, materials and things being made to outline a place for the tacit knowledge of hand-crafting within the broader field of non-representational thinking. Although geographies of affect take into account the mattering of phenomena more generally, this does neither explain why some material encounters matter more to certain individuals, nor how some people come to be more adept than others at working with them to produce artefacts. Through auto-ethnographic accounts of a hand-stitching practice, Shercliff examines an experience of knowledge-in-practice as a place from which to consider skilled practice as a process of subject formation between the sensations and feelings of lived experience and beyond representation.