Modern life has slowly robbed us of the ability to craft our own environment. We have become de-skilled, spending our waking-hours in offices staring at screens, buying ready-meals and ready everything. What does it mean when we’re told we need a TV chef to tell us how to boil an egg? Buy, consume, discard. Buy more. Is that the best we can do? Paradoxically, materialism has alienated us from a healthy and active engagement with the real, material world around us.
We have become strangers to skills that once would have been considered basic and taken for granted. And, we have lost an appreciation of how to work with the stuff of life wood, cloth, food, metal, and the skills, satisfaction and intelligence developed by making and doing.
It’s time to celebrate making and doing, passive consuming has become passé. Practitioners’ Parlour is a new series of evening explorations at The School of Life where you will be able to experience at first hand the joy, value and enchantment of a fascinating range of human skills and crafts honed over years. From bicycle building and the modern face of ancient textile skills, to making furniture from discarded materials you will be able to spend a few hours in the company of people who have spent a lifetime evolving special skills. Hear what made them fall in love with their craft, learn about it from the inside and go away with a flavour that will linger and may lead you on to doing something new.
Practioners' Parlour is curated jointly by The School of Life and Bread, Print & Roses: an initiative of Ruth Potts and Molly Conisbee, with Andrew Simms. The first in the series: ‘On the Joy of Bikes and the Craft of Renovation’ will take place next Friday 3 June. For more information and to book tickets click here.
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