Who Am I - Academic or maker?
I would like to start this week by thanking everyone who subscribed after my first post last week. I have been genuinely touched by some of the lovely comments and insights that followed my words. I can’t wait to keep exploring these ideas with you all. But before we go any further, I thought it might be helpful for you to know a little bit more about me. Who am I and how did I end up here?
When I was growing up, I had the dubious honour of being labelled "brainbox" at school. I had an absolute passion for learning and loved nearly all my school subjects, but achieving high marks made me a target for my peers. In Australia in the 1980s, the label "brainy" was a taunt - a recognition of my otherness, being different to everyone else. Fortunately, my coping mechanism was not to underachieve, but rather to observe. People labelled me as shy, but I think it was more accurate to call me reserved. I found it easier to keep my own counsel and so remained largely removed from the social maelstrom surrounding most of my peers.
When I got to University, I found my tribe. To my great joy, I discovered that there were a whole lot of nerdy people who were just like me. They understood my passion for physics and astronomy. We would nut out the weekly maths tutorials together because they were challenging and fun. I’d always had the internal assurance that I wanted to do a Science degree, but with the company of wonderful like minds, I began to tread this path with greater social confidence.
What a lot of people didn't know about me was that I was also a maker. The stereotypical image of academic types is that they aren't very good with their hands. Popular folklore would have you believe that people who excel at academic pursuits are so centred in their heads that they lack practical skills and common sense. But I had grown up in a household where making things from scratch was the norm. Mum made many of our clothes and was an avid gardener. In between being busy with work as an engineer, Dad tried his hand at restoring old cars and later, tanning and leatherwork. Grandpa was a woodworker and Granny was a knitter. She could also make just about anything in the kitchen. She would even boil a pig’s head to make brawn! In my world, craft and making were a natural part of our life. Over the years, Mum supplied my sister and I with the materials to sew, knit, crochet, macramé, and make clothes (for ourselves and our dolls). At various times we tried candle making, multimedia collages, making creatures out of nuts, and setting various found objects in resin. We experimented with fibre, paint, fabric, glue, beads, paper, found objects, wood, clay, plaster, etc.
People sometimes asked Mum what special things she had done to raise two strongly academic girls, perhaps expecting that the magic came from flash cards or something similar. Nothing could have been further from the truth. We moved a lot as children, almost every year when I was at primary school, so our young lives were filled with constant change. But wherever we were, our home was blessed by three wonderful assets: there was a great deal of love; our house was filled with books; and we made stuff. These are the things that defined my childhood.
As I grew up, my public face was largely the academic side of me. This was the side that society valued, so naturally it was the part of me that I put forward. A lot of my making was done in my quiet, private time. The evidence of it existed in some of the clothes that I wore, but most people were surprised if they happened to find out that I had made part or all of my outfit. They certainly knew very little about the activity itself and how deeply it was embedded in my everyday life.
Circa 1987 wearing a jumper I had knitted
In my final year of high school I fell madly in love with a young man who was a year older than me and had thus left school already. I will never forget the first time I described my study routine to him. He was flabbergasted. It was the time of my final exams and we had been dating for a few months. He assumed that I studied for hours and hours in order to achieve my high marks. In fact, I was usually someone who studied in the morning, leaving the afternoons free for my latest craft activity or reading a good book. I followed this pattern through those final exams at school and all the way through Uni too. The incentive to keep my head down studying in the morning was knowing that in the afternoon I could read or stitch or knit or crochet. What I didn’t know at the time, but understand a lot better now, is that my routine probably helped me to stay better focussed and more relaxed during those periods.
In first year university, I was good friends with an engineering student. (I suspect on his part that the main attraction was my ability to take excellent notes at the 9am physics lectures - which he typically slept through). My sewing machine was a prized possession in my college room. I remember him watching me one evening as I cleaned the inner workings after the thread had become tangled. He was genuinely surprised that I had this practical side to me - and I was surprised that he thought I didn’t! Up to that point, he had totally bought in to the stereotype that a smart young woman studying maths and physics wouldn't have any practical nous.
In another university experience, my maker skills stood me in unexpected good stead for a compulsory Physics unit. Most of our subjects were highly theoretical, even with the standard lab classes that ran alongside them, but in my Honours year we were required to take a fabrication unit in the Physics workshop. The goal was to make a precision gyroscope so that we could understand the possibilities and limitations in designing and building experimental equipment. By now I was the only woman in our cohort and the technicians in the workshop were all men. The senior technician was warm hearted and softly spoken with decades of experience. Perhaps thinking that he might need to give me extra attention, he soon discovered that here I was in my element. I had no experience with metal fabrication, but I did understand making and working with materials. My completed gyroscope was perfectly balanced and it still sits on my desk, a visual reminder (with hindsight) of my academic and maker selves coming together.
My gyroscope is a little tarnished with age, but it still spins beautifully
One of my dearest friends at college was studying to become an art teacher. We forged a friendship that has lasted over 35 years through a mutual respect for each other’s talents and a passion for both making and thinking. On the surface, we could not have been more different. But we shared a love of tea, the same lack of social confidence from high school, and we talked about everything. I spent countless hours in her room watching with fascination as her elegant hands sketched out ideas and constructed intricate art projects. She in turn listened to me wax lyrical about mathematics or the inevitable disasters in chemistry labs. In some senses we are simply different sides of the same coin - both academics and makers. It just so happened that she was leading with her maker side at the time and I was leading with my academic. In a wonderful twist, whilst my maker side has come more to the fore in the past decade, she in turn has followed more and more of her academic interests.
This perceived dichotomy between academic and maker is one of the reasons I am so passionate about The Hands Manifesto. By official training I am a scientist (BSc(Hons) in Physics and a PhD in Geographical Sciences) but I now identify as a hand embroidery teacher by profession. I have worked variously as a research scientist, women in science advocate, and editor of a scientific publication. Alongside all of these, for my entire life, I have been a maker.
We live in a culture that largely demeans hand work when compared with academic work. It’s often seen as the second rate choice for students who aren’t “good enough” to make it along the traditional pathway of school followed by university. Similarly, a retiree who takes up a new hobby in needlework, painting, pottery, or baking is seen as having found something to “fill in their time” rather than doing something meaningful. I believe that by making this division we do a disservice to both craftsmanship and academic learning. Working with our hands is an excellent way to reinforce and improve academic understanding. Similarly, performing hand work requires attention to technical skill, knowledge of materials, and constant problem solving that is deeply intellectually engaging.
I know with every fibre of my being that a life filled with making made me a better student and scientist, and vice versa, my current professional life as a hand embroidery artist is deeply connected to my academic training and experience. I am not an academic or a maker. Like the rest of humankind, I am both.
Comments from a previous platform
Jill: I love what you are doing here Ann-Marie. Those false dichotomies hold so much sway over how we define ourselves. I too was a science student who turned up to uni in clothes I had made myself.
Ann-Marie: Thankyou so much Jill! I'm so looking forward to talking more about this with you :)
Jenny: How exciting it is, Ann-Marie, to find such common ground in your words. You’re not alone in your dualism : cerebral and haptic.
Marilyn: Inspiring reading thank you. I am one of those who took up,hand embroidery when I retired. Far from being ‘something to fill my time’ it is my happy place. I count myself extremely fortunate to live in this time of technology that brings so much right into our home like techniques and designs and very clever people like yourself. Thank you for sharing I’m looking forward to next instalment.
Wendy M: I am still amazed how much our life paths parallel. Though like your friend in university, I too chose to lead with my hands rather than my head. In the costume design world, I was a decent designer, but I was a better cutter, the one who interpreted a designer’s rendering and made the patterns, fit the actor and constructed the costumes. I eventually became very good at running the business of the costume shop. Now I teach counted canvas embroidery. I love the mathematical machinations of canvas stitches and patterns. So, I choose to define my art, my making, my hands, through my brain’s love of math, order, and the counted grid. I look forward to more of your exploration of this subject.
Susan: I feel that one of the reasons our making is not valued by the public, is that, we often don’t value it ourselves in public. How often have you said oh it’s just something that I made. It seems to me that all our lives we are told not to brag and to acknowledge the beauty and the work that we have done is somehow bragging. Taking credit for our academic performance is somehow seen as more acceptable and we don’t point out any errors that we may have made. Taking credit for our making, however, is difficult. How many of us feel the need to point out any errors that we may have made during the making? I know my life would not be complete without my making and yet to others, it seems like a waste of time.
Wendy D: I loved reading your post this week and the comments. I, too, was the 'brainy' one at school, living in a house with books and a mother who encouraged making things. This continued through university, making my own clothes. I choose a specialty in medicine that allowed me to use my hands, and I have always continued to make things. Thanks for sharing and I look forward to more.
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