Handmind is heartwork

Some recent collages and where they came from

Hey y’all,

I’m back from California and the bluebonnets are popping here in Texas. I wanted to share with you a little pre-spring bouquet of lifted type collages.

I made these a few weeks ago after texting with my friend Alan Jacobs. Alan and I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the glory of making things by hand.

During the early days of the pandemic, Alan wrote a piece called “Handmind in Covidtude” that quoted a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home:

It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. 

I joked with Alan that I consider it the HandHeartMind, when all are in a line, and he texted back “Handmind is Heartwork.” I immediately thought that should be on a poster, so I made it. (Two is a pattern: I previously turned his post “And then what” into a poster.)