Proposal: Maker's Walk: Engraved Sidewalks Recognizing Manufacturing in The Edge
The proposed artwork will consist of text and images engraved into the sidewalks of the Edge neighborhood telling the story of the neighborhood’s long-standing role as a center of manufacturing in Memphis. Memphis, and the Sun Studios area in particular are widely recognized as a center of music. This project aims to draw attention to and honor the wider historic and vibrant contemporary community of crafters, manufacturers and artists that work and have brought their work from this central neighborhood out into the larger world.
My research (and the research of my team-mates) into the neighborhood revealed a rich history of manufacturing in the Edge, including horse-drawn carriages, telegraph machines, bicycles, Wonder-bread, rubber stamps, world-changing records, and now guitars, chairs, quiches, paintings, ceramics, mosaics, and sculptures (to name a few). While initial research showed a graveyard of shuttered businesses, defunct manufacturing plants and vacant industrial spaces, I was heartened to continually discover the emergence of new crafts rising up in the spaces, vibrant new traditions of the hand-made and the artistic.
Some Potential Sidewalk Quotes:
“Craftsmanship isn't like water in an earthen pot, to be taken out by the dipperful until it's empty. No, the more drawn out the more remains.” ― Lloyd Alexander, Taran Wanderer
“Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.” ― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
― Francis of Assisi
“Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.”
― Johannes Brahms
“I've said you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do. To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art. They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they're doing, but more than this—there's a kind of inner peace of mind that isn't contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there's no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman's thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values