Our 3-Month Artisanship — introduces students to process design through Artisan Projects which provide a stable foundation to practice 10 Finger Thinking—learning through practice—that we can all engage the basic elements of designing and building from conception to fabrication to practical application. Participants may take their Project home upon completion or leave it in the Gallery Shop to be sold to benefit Artisan Lab programs and future residents.
10 FINGER THINKING
Our 3-Month program is ideal for those who want a full immersion opportunity to practice ‘making a life with their hands’ but who are not seeking a long-term commitment. With guidance from staff mentors, you will learn through direct experience alongside our 9-Month Residents. Participating in the Artisan Lab community you will discover capacities which you never imagined possible—were there waiting to be discovered.
Artisan Lab believes expanding capacities is best accomplished through direct experience enhanced by collaborating hand-in-glove with others. This colleague empowered active-learning process values physically experiencing ‘knowing how’ over the academic-abstract ‘knowing that’. There are no curriculums, speeches, SAT or IQ tests. No ringing bells to ‘stop this and do that’. From the beginning, you learn ‘your proof is in your pudding’—that your cause creates your effect. While staff mentors will support and encourage you through the program—you must embrace personal responsibility to transform inevitable errors and missteps to success earned through dogged personal investment. You will gain capacity and confidence—the root of 10 Finger Thinking—as you grow through the perennial Artisan’s dance of trial and error. What Richard Sennett describes as the ‘problem finding and problem solving’ making evolves supported and tempered through challenge.
Artisan Lab’s active learning model is evocatively based on the apprentice / journeyman master craftsman model—though it departs the historical gender bias to honor and serve craftswomen and men. There is also the sense that the more competent the master the less she imagines anyone to be capable of mastery. We embrace the hubris of creating a flexible and responsive learning environment fueled by equitable collaboration. We learn from each other practicing patience to increase rather than diminish our attention spans. The prize we are engaged in winning is growing the habit of collaborative cooperation.
Staff Mentors and Residents engage in a fluid confluent practice of questions, suggestions, and help each other visualize and imagine all the ways a thing can be made, sharing experience and prior knowledge gained through their individual experience.
The 3-Month program awakens and builds participant skill and experience through a series of separate but process, tool and material related projects. The overlapping project experiences builds a reservoir of polymathic imagination as well as self and collaborative capacity. Though participants are encouraged to bring their own—all tools, materials, and supplies to complete the projects are provided.