The Activity of Making: tools that shape a craft person

This is an inquiry of craft, understood as manual gestural skills. The hypothesis is that craft activity organizes and focuses the actions of a researcher into a specific understanding of the world. It argues, from the position of a maker in action, that engagement in a physical material is connected to conceptual thinking, similar to a theory or scientific method.
Blacksmithing techniques will be performed, video recorded and described through text and image for their character of being combined processes of motor activity and material responses. Tools occupy a central position in the relationship between a maker, and a material and in the research they are forged by hand, and then used to forge additional tools. The maker is not just shaping, but is shaped, by the material and the tools used, allowing a circular reflection on the craft.