If I say sun, would you say moon? If I say girl, would you say boy?
I’d been enjoying an article in one of my favourite magazines, a reflective piece about the practical gifts crafted for the author by a loving aunt.
It was good writing – the kind you don’t notice because it’s all about the story.
Until the last line.
‘These physical things are made by loving hands, and, in this, they are antidotes to the sterility of our digital world.’
I was so disappointed with that line – casually dismissing the digital world as ‘sterile’ simply because of the beauty of handcrafted things.
If handmade is good, digital is bad?
There is such loss of nuance in jumping to binary conclusions. Of believing that if one is good, the other has to be bad.
If you say sun, I say instead of reaching for the moon, let’s explore the universe around them.
There’s a universe of creativity within the digital world – there are portfolios from amazing artists on a whole host of sites from Behance to 500px.
Art is made by hand, heart and head in the digital space as much as a potter’s space.
It’s not the warm world of the physical or the sterile digital world.
There’s a world of space between those binary distinctions. We just have to prise them apart with our curiosity.
