Four 1min documentaries made in response to the New craftsmen “Reasons for being” campaign, The campaign documented the experiences of 10 makers in the time of lockdown early 2020. They were released with the following statement .

If I really think about the situation we are in it seem surprising that we are making work at all, it seems quite illogical when the rest of my waking existence is spent asking questions like; how do I keep my family safe? Where’s the next food delivery coming from? How on earth do we educate our daughter? yet here I am repetitively blowing down a brass tube trying to control how a little bit of yellow fabric moves on the other end. Am I loosing the plot or is there some value in what I am doing over and over and over again? Am I working right now or is this play? I don’t know but when I achieve my goal of controlling the little bit of yellow fabric I am quite pleased with myself and when I show Flo she seems impressed also, so I guess its got some value. This is definitely the right thing to be doing for my sanity.

I make my way back to the house. Lu is upstairs in her studio printing with potatoes and kitchen cutlery? Could the isolation be getting to her too? Her prints are beautiful and they fill me with an energy, Lu’s been printing with our daughter all morning and it occurred to me how well our house is working together in isolation. There is a beautiful symbiosis forming, we teach our daughter how to be an adult and she teaches us how to be a child; or something along those lines. Lu and myself chat over our ideas for a while and decide to collaborate on making a chess set!! I will calve the pieces from a potato and bake them till they are varying shades of black and Lu will print the board on a piece of fabric (with a potato of course), we congratulate our selves on a productive morning and head down stairs to make biscuits with our daughter. She is standing on the chair in the living room watering her seedlings on the windowsill; I take my phone out to film the moment. I try to get the cellophane rainbow on the window in the shot for posterity. The rainbow has become a symbol of hope in these new times. I just hope we can hold on to some of the good bits.

Will, Lu and Flo

Potato chess. Just before lockdown we had the foresight to visit a farm shop just outside of the London to stock up on essentials. We were pretty pleased to get our hands on a 15kg bag of potatoes. We made space on a shelf in the outdoor cupboard, above the barbque and below the flammables. We felt like winners in control of what was to come…for a while at least, then we noticed the wood preservative on the shelf above had rusted through its tin and had dripped over the entire bag; so food became material to us.

Day 1 of our reason for being, made for The New Craftsmen, lockdown 2020 What a wonderful gift is has been to be told to focus on our “reasons for being” in these unreal times. We’ve never had the discipline of writing a diary so to have these short films that document part of our lives in the lockdown is really exiting Personally,

Day 2, Reason for being, life in lockdown We have been so thankful for our shared outdoor space during lockdown , we are out there everyday for play, garden and just rest together on the grass . Next to Wills studio we have some woad growing, it was planted from a cutting we got from friends before lockdown, Traditionally The leaves are used to create a blue dye, you can store the leaves by squeezing the liquid out and forming them into ball before drying them out for another day.

1,2,3 . Were doing a lot of counting in our house, counting the days the weeks the months, Lu even numbered the cheese to be sure we ate the oldest first, and of course the school curriculum keeps us searching for new ways of counting . how big will the numbers get? How long have we been here?