with Laura White
At E5 Bakehouse, London
Wednesday 1st February 2016

Participants – Undergraduate Fine Art students, Goldsmiths College, London.

Thinking and engaging with the processes of bread making to explore what might be learnt through a hands-on experience. What it means to handle stuff – thinking through making and material engagement.

“What is the relation between thinking and making? To this, the theorist and the craftsman would give different answers. It is not that the former only thinks and the latter only makes, but that the one makes through thinking and the other thinks through making.”
– Tim Ingold (Anthropologist)

Project Brief
Thinking and engaging with the process of Bread Making, and exploring what might be learnt through a hands-on experience.

• How physically engaging with a process can offer insight into the final object – bread, and inform intellectual understanding of the subject matter – bread making.
• Handling materials and tools, such as to experience the sensory material of dough – smell, texture and movement, and its material instability.
• To explore our bodies physical and cognitive capacity to learn a skill (bread making) and negotiate different materials and techniques. E.g. Body stature, hand mobility and our physical and neurological properties affecting the way we listen, look and discuss when we learn a practical activity.
• How the environment – material, people, furniture, tools and architecture etc. can influences how we do/make things.
• Explore Knowledge-making as a dynamic process arising directly from the indissoluble relations which exist between the mind, body and environment.
• How might this process yield new insights into how knowledge is generated, such as the social aspect of DIWO (doing it with others) to challenge our experience?
• Learning a skill (bread making) is embedded in broad social inquiry around the body, gender, identity, politics and economics, such as thinking about the bread making industry – who bakes and who consumes.