Meet the Makers: Crafting from the Landscape

For centuries, craftspeople have looked to the landscape around them for the materials they need. Wood, willow and stone might seem simple, everyday materials, but in skilled hands they can be transformed into objects that are practical, beautiful and built to last.

At our Made by Hand event on 26-27 September, visitors will have the opportunity to meet craftspeople keeping these skills alive, see traditional techniques being practised and discover just how much knowledge goes into working with natural materials.

In the first of our Meet the Makers series, we meet three craftspeople whose work begins with materials from the landscape: basketmaker Linda Mills, traditional trug maker Dave Lister, and flint knapper Grant Williams.

 

Linda Mills – Basketmaking

For Linda Mills of Linda’s Willow, what began with a taster day eventually became a full-time career.

Linda’s introduction to basketmaking came when she attended a course at West Dean College and learned to make willow platters. Having enjoyed the experience, she bought some willow and continued making them herself.

That first experience soon developed into something much bigger. Linda attended several three-day and one-day courses with four different tutors, each allowing her to learn something new about working with willow. Just as importantly, she continued practising what she had learned at home. After five years, her growing enthusiasm for the craft had produced quite a collection.

As Linda recalls, her husband eventually told her that ‘if I was going to carry on I had to go and sell some.’ Her first event as a maker was actually here at the Weald & Downland Living Museum, when she attended our Christmas Market in 2009. Despite particularly bad weather, Linda was not deterred.

Four years later, in 2013, she gave up her previous work to become a full-time basketmaker. That same year, she also began teaching. Today, Linda runs her own business, producing and selling willow baskets and sculptures as well as teaching and demonstrating the craft. Passing these traditional skills on to others is an important part of what she does. ‘I teach in various places too and demonstrate,’ she explains, ‘as it is important to pass on skills.’

Part of willow’s appeal for Linda is the material itself. Different varieties can be combined to produce individual pieces, while willow also offers the sustainability and longevity that Linda values in her finished work. Asked what made her pursue basketmaking, Linda points simply to her ‘love of working with the material and mixing the varieties to make individual pieces’.

From those first willow platters to becoming a professional maker known for her work in the local area, Linda’s story demonstrates how learning, practice and a love for a natural material can develop into a lifelong craft. 

 

Dave Lister – Traditional Trug Making

Wood is at the heart of the work of our second maker, Dave Lister of Green Woodworks.

Dave practises several traditional rural crafts, including trug making, wattle hurdle making and thatching-spar making. His interest began with rural crafts more generally and his access to sweet chestnut. Traditionally used to make the frames of trugs, sweet chestnut provided Dave with an opportunity to take the skills he already had in working with wood and apply them to basket construction.

After attending a two-day trug-making workshop, Dave continued practising at home. He eventually decided to invest the time, tools and materials necessary to become a trug maker. A traditional trug may appear relatively simple when finished, but producing one by hand requires an understanding of both the material and the tools used to shape it.

For Dave, that process is one of the great attractions of the craft. ‘Producing a quality product from a few simple materials, wood in particular and using simple hand tools is very rewarding,’ he says. Today, Dave describes his trug making as more of a hobby than a business, but he continues to enjoy attending wood fairs and summer shows, meeting visitors and demonstrating how his trugs are made.

Rather than simply seeing the finished object, visitors can meet the person who made it and discover the raw materials, tools and techniques behind it. Dave does not formally teach trug making, believing that the full traditional training required to produce workshop-standard trugs should come through an apprenticeship with a trug-making workshop. He is, however, very happy to demonstrate the process and explain the skills involved.

His approach to craft can perhaps best be summed up in his own words: ‘I think making something from start to finish is a great way to learn about yourself. Be constructive not destructive is the key for me.’ It is a simple philosophy that fits the nature of the craft: taking a natural material, learning how it behaves and using hand tools and traditional knowledge to turn it into something useful. 

 

Grant Williams – Flint Knapping

Our final maker takes us much further back into the story of people making things from the materials around them. Grant Williams is a flint knapper (a maker of stone tools) with more than 25 years of experience in teaching and reconstructive archaeology.

Grant first became interested in flint knapping when he was young, after seeing images of prehistoric objects in early British Museum publications. He then began examining stone tools, or ‘lithics’, in the Downland landscape and experimenting with ways of recreating what he had seen. That experimentation revealed something important. ‘I tried to copy what I saw and soon realised our ancestors weren’t as primitive as we may first imagine,’ Grant explains.

Far from being a simple process, flint knapping requires considerable skill and understanding. Indeed, its complexity is one of the reasons Grant has remained fascinated by it. Whenever he feels he is beginning to master the craft, he finds another technology or type of tool in a museum that gives him a new challenge. ‘After years of practice, I’m still finding tools and techniques I want to master,’ he says, ‘which keeps me interested in an artform that directly connects us with our past.’

Today, Grant uses flint knapping for teaching and demonstrations, but his practical skills also form part of archaeological research. Through reconstructing prehistoric technologies, he can test academic theories and develop a better understanding of how people in the past worked. Grant has a degree in geology and has undertaken a wide range of independent archaeological research projects. His work has even taken him to New Zealand, where he met makers of traditional Māori stone tools and explored questions surrounding geology, provenance and technology.

He has also explored and taught a variety of prehistoric technologies and constructed reproductions of shelters, roundhouses and other prehistoric structures for schools and museums. For Grant, practical craft and archaeological research belong together. Making something in the way people may have done hundreds or thousands of years ago can reveal things that studying the finished object alone cannot.

His work is a reminder that heritage craft isn’t simply about preserving beautiful objects. It can also help us understand the people who came before us; their ingenuity, their knowledge of the landscape and their remarkable ability to turn natural materials into the tools and objects they needed. 

 

Discover Craft Made by Hand

Willow, sweet chestnut and flint are very different materials, but Linda, Dave and Grant share something important. Each begins with a material found in the natural world and uses knowledge, practice and their own hands to transform it.

Their crafts also demonstrate that traditional skills are not simply things of the past. They continue because people choose to practise them, demonstrate them and, importantly, pass their knowledge on.

At our Made by Hand weekend, you can meet craftspeople like Linda, Dave and Grant, discover the materials they work with and see the skills behind their craft for yourself.