The Radical Act of Slowing Down

EDITORIAL | ISSUE SIX | MAHI Ā-RINGA / CRAFT

Written by Tashi Donnelly she/her | @tashi_rd | Editor

Haere mai, welcome to Debate Magazine, where we’re celebrating the wonderful handmade world of mahi ā-ringa craft. I have about 800 words, and not nearly enough time to cover the infinite, magical, sprawling world of hand-made crafts. Let’s start with now, shall we? It started during the lockdowns; suddenly, everyone was making sourdough bread and picking up knitting. It felt like the right thing to do. Being stuck at home, forced to spend even more time staring at screens, made us yearn for something tangible, something to keep us busy. 

In the West, especially, textile arts such as rug-making, embroidery, and knitting have been overlooked and disregarded as ‘women’s work’. Not taken seriously by the high arts community, these crafts and the women who’ve practised them have not been recognised for their immense skill and creativity. In her book, The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker explores how, from the Middle Ages through to the nineteenth century, needlework was central to constructing the ‘ideal woman’ as patient, moral, and devoted to home life. 

While needlework was often used to reinforce these gender roles, Parker argues it also gave women a space for creativity, self-expression, and community. She challenges the idea that embroidery is somehow lesser than painting or sculpture, showing how the divide between ‘high art’ and ‘craft’ was shaped by patriarchal ideas about whose labour is considered valuable. Rather than seeing embroidery as trivial or decorative, Parker frames it as both an artistic practice and a reflection of women’s social position throughout history. But let’s go back even further,  because I believe craft is not peripheral to human history; it is one of its foundations.

In her book, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years, Elizabeth Wayland Barber argues that textile production was one of the most important technologies in human history, as transformative as stone tools. She discusses cordage, thread, weaving, and how perishable technologies disappear from the archaeological record, leading historians to underestimate their importance. But you only have to think about it for a few seconds to realise that, before we could attach stones to sticks, we had to invent strings to tie them. Before we could sail oceans, we had to weave ropes and sails. Before we could carry children, food, and supplies long distances, we had to weave baskets and slings. Before we could catch fish, we had to make rods, lines, and nets. 

Over the course of human history, trillions upon trillions of hours have been spent experimenting and perfecting techniques that allowed us to evolve, connect, and care for one another. Techniques that required complex mathematical know-how, pattern recognition, and hand-eye coordination. Skills that allowed us to make the first computers. My favourite example is the ‘core rope memory’ used in the Apollo Mission guidance computers. Wires were literally woven through or around magnetic cores to encode data as physical patterns. This kind of precision hand-weaving was done by textile workers, often women, whose skills in loom work translated directly into the production of reliable, high-density computer memory. All craft roads lead back to maths, as they say.

We’ve seen progress in the recognition of textile arts over the years, and in Aotearoa, we are fortunate to live alongside the rich weaving and textile traditions of Pacific cultures, and the enduring practices of toi Māori. I hope that craft arts continue to inspire and receive their due recognition. 

Craft hobbies are a welcome antidote to doom-scrolling; we saw that in the pandemic. But before you start a new craft, remember that there are no short-cuts. It’s worth remembering that every craft sits inside a much longer story, one shaped by cultural histories, environmental impact, and generations of skill and labour. The ‘time-saving’ techniques we’re often drawn to can end up being a kind of fool’s gold: they promise efficiency, but often flatten the very depth that gives craft its value. 

In the age of AI slop, late-stage capitalism, fast fashion, and ever-shortening attention spans, there’s something quietly radical about slowing down to make something by hand. Not because it is new, or trendy, but because it remembers something we’ve almost forgotten: that making has always been how we’ve understood the world.