Senior Project Advisor
Thomas Hummel
Document Type
Project
Publication Date
Spring 2025
Keywords
collaboration, interdisciplinary, daily, practice, process, method, gradual, erasure, blackout poetry, poetry, creative writing, dictionary, anthology, photocopies, inspiration, exploration, preservation, translation, paper, art, strata, temporal, rules, guidelines, commitment, curation, craft, pedagogy, artmaking, poetics, form, epistolary
Abstract
We Are Always Making is a collaborative exploration of interdisciplinary practice. It prioritizes process, commitment, and creativity. It asks and answers how. Guided by a set of rules to cultivate generative environments toward making, the core of the project is a process-oriented instruction manual called “The Making Place.” As an endlessly reproducible guide to creation across and between and through disciplines, its aim is to empower people to become makers, to encourage action unencumbered by self-inflicted limits of time and inspiration. To embody its practices, We Are Always Making employed “The Making Place” to create a collaborative anthology of epistolary erasures: “Pierce, perforate, drill through, dress.” Fifty-nine collaborators participated in the anthology, making erasures with tools and methods of their choosing. As a further enactment of its commitment to daily practice, We Are Always Making also features a preservation and translation of future. “I am what is around me” documents the gradual evolution of photocopies of photocopies of a singular, blank sheet of paper. Where does making come from? What is inspiration? How do we make something out of what feels like nothing? What does it mean to make together? The truth is: we are always making. And the answers to these questions are up to us.
Department
Honors
Recommended Citation
Smith, Guinevere, "We Are Always Making" (2025). WWU Honors College Senior Projects. 1000.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwu_honors/1000
Type
Text
Rights
Copying of this document in whole or in part is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this document for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without the author’s written permission.
Language
English
Format
application/pdf