Becoming Attuned to Stone: Skill, Craft, Making

Abstract

This chapter continues with an investigation into the sensory and affective affordances of materialities but concentrates on the sustained, intimate engagements through which artisans and artists come to know, feel and love the stone with which they work. Here, the focus is on how working with stone generates a skilled and sensuous knowing rather than a cognitive, scientific appraisal of lithic qualities. I draw on and extend thinking about practices of skilled work, especially attending to practices of touch, to examine the heightened attunements to materiality that these artisans achieve. In focusing upon those who skilfully work with stone in very different ways—as quarriers, masons, sculptors, lithographers, flint-knappers, performance artists and stone balancers—I further account for stone’s multiple affordances and potentialities and its capacities to generate sensuous and affective experiences.