The Timeless Appeal of Working with Natural Materials
Using materials that have a natural past seems to anchor me to a sense of familiarity, whether the wood that has been growing and creating rings for years, the leather that once wrapped around an animal or the clay that was plucked from the earth. They have an existence before I even set hands on them. There’s a texture, grain, smell and quirks of each that can’t be completely copied in a synthetic version. Using them, I feel like I’m having a conversation with nature. I listen as the wood lets me know how it resists or accepts the pressure I put on it, how it smells as it is being cut or when it’s dampened. It’s a gentle give and take and I feel I have to respect that, which in turn gives me a sense of something primal.
Working with natural materials shows you that everything has a feel. Oak splits if you push against the grain, maple shaves smooth. The same leather can stretch in one place and not in another. Some clay bodies will explode in the oven while others will ring like a bell when you knock them. All these reactions are governed by principles that have held since the Earth was formed. You begin to recognize them, to predict how a chunk of wood will react to a gouge, a skin to a tanning solution. After a while you hardly think about it anymore. You just know.
That’s part of the sustainability of it all. When you’re working with responsibly harvested wood or vegetable-tanned leather or clay that you dig yourself, you’re part of a process where you’re creating instead of using up. If I’m working with wood, I can reuse my shavings. I can take little pieces of wood and use them for inlays. If I’m working with leather, I can use little pieces of leather for patches or straps. If I’m working with clay, I can reclaim my scraps and reuse them. So there’s very little waste, if you’re imaginative and patient. It’s the same with everything. Make something, then take care of it and use it. In a throwaway society, making something that isn’t intended to be thrown away is important.
Furthermore, there’s a multisensory immediacy that sticks with the creator. Cedar smells like cedar, clay smells like dirt, leather smells like leather. There’s the way the bark of a tree feels, the way that the new leather feels, the way that the leather feels after the finish has gone into it. There’s the sound of the plane cutting across the end of the grain, the sound of the slapping of clay on the wedging table, the sound of the leather being sewn. That kind of sensory experience is not something that a photograph or video shows you.
When the craftsman works in the natural medium, they are a part of a tradition which predates their own life, and will outlive them. The oak the fire crackles and spits upon tonight was once a tree someone might have lived under. The clay spinning on the potter’s wheel has been worn and weathered by rivers as ancient as any word. There is a security in this: the security that what one does today is part of an unbroken line of human endeavour. It is not a retreat into the past, but an involvement in something greater than oneself; a making of one’s own little mark within it, and in that act coming to feel more a part of it all.
