Collaborative Making: Storytelling, Saving Skills and Preserving Memories

The purpose of this paper is to understand how collaborative making is used as not only a means of production, but an exercise in storytelling. Through dialogue between craftspeople, skills are developed, shared, and maintained. Craft practice is communicated, and memories are preserved. This paper explores how, through a case study of producing an artefact from start to finish, collaborative making leads to creating more than just an object, but also a connection between all involved. ‘Watch’ is part of a wider doctoral study in which nine artefacts were made from collected stories of lost love and then through encounters with several craftspeople. The paper considers the relationships between crafts-people and how we work together to develop hybrid skills by utilising traditional practice to create new ways of crafting.