Why Make?

As Freelands Foundation launches its latest open grants funding round this summer 2026 with the Learning Through Making fund, Artistic Director Dr Henry Ward traces making, from its origins to its primary importance at this current moment.

Long before the emergence of formal systems of knowledge, human beings learned about the world through the manipulation of materials, the construction of tools and the transformation of their environment. The capacity to make is not merely practical; it is a defining feature of human intelligence. Through making, we do not simply express ideas that already exist. We generate knowledge, test possibilities and discover forms that could not have been anticipated in advance. Making is a fundamental human activity.

At stake is a philosophical question concerning the relationship between thought and action. The modern tendency has been to treat thinking and making as distinct activities: first the mind conceives, then the hand executes. But this is increasingly challenged by research across anthropology, cognitive science and philosophy.

The concept of the 'thinking hand' rejects the separation of cognition from embodiment, arguing instead that perception, movement, touch and manual engagement are integral to the formation of thought itself. Knowledge is not located exclusively in the brain; it emerges through interactions between the mind and the body.

This perspective finds expression in David Goodhart’s 2020 book, 'Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century'. Goodhart argues that contemporary societies have come to privilege abstract cognitive achievement above practical forms of expertise and empathy. Educational systems have largely mirrored this hierarchy, rewarding academic attainment while often undervaluing the intelligence embedded in craft, making and skilled practices. Such assumptions appear increasingly untenable. As artificial intelligence expands its capacity to perform many forms of analytical and informational labour, questions emerge about which distinctly human capabilities will become most valuable. The answer cannot lie solely in the cultivation of cognitive skills that machines are increasingly able to emulate. It must also involve capacities rooted in creativity, engagement with materials and embodied understanding. 

Making is one such capacity. 

The anthropologist Tim Ingold offers a particularly influential critique of conventional assumptions about making. Traditionally, making has been understood as the execution of a pre-existing concept: an idea is conceived internally and subsequently realised in material form.

Ingold proposes a different idea. For him, making is not the implementation of thought but a mode of thinking in its own right. Forms emerge through engagement with materials rather than being imposed upon them. The maker responds to the material, to resistance, possibility, accident and constraints, discovering outcomes through a process of interaction and iteration. From this perspective, making is not secondary to cognition; it is one of cognition’s primary modes. 

The educational implications are profound. If thinking occurs through engagement with materials, then learning cannot be reduced to the acquisition of abstract knowledge alone. Physical activity, manual craft and material experimentation become central to intellectual development rather than peripheral to it. Making is not simply a vehicle for demonstrating understanding. It is a means through which understanding is produced.

Making is a form of thinking. 

This argument points towards the importance of ‘material literacy’ – the capacity to think with and through materials.  Just as literacy and numeracy provide essential frameworks for interpreting the world, material literacy involves understanding the properties, opportunities and limitations of physical media; developing sensitivity to texture, weight, resistance and transformation; and recognising how knowledge emerges through direct engagement with matter. Through encounters with clay, wood, textiles, paper, paint and other materials, learners experience uncertainty and discovery. They learn that understanding is often generated through experimentation rather than prediction.

New ideas frequently arise not despite the constraints of materials but because of them. 

Yet material literacy is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Despite its foundational role in human development, making occupies an increasingly marginal position within contemporary educational discourse, and more broadly in our everyday lives.

The 2025 government-commissioned Curriculum and Assessment Review, Building a World-Class Curriculum for All, 2025, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, spans 197 pages. Remarkably, neither the word 'make' nor 'making' appears in any substantive educational context, aside from the incidental, and seemingly ironic, description of teachers as 'curriculum makers'. This omission is revealing. Throughout the report, the language of making is deployed metaphorically: curricula are woven together, ideas are modelled, structures are architected, even its title suggests building. Yet there is little acknowledgement that these metaphors derive their power from making practices. The material, tactile and constructive dimensions of learning remain largely invisible. Such an absence raises important questions about which forms of knowledge contemporary education values and which forms it neglects. 

The curriculum review reflects a broader historical trend characterised by the gradual erosion of spaces for making within educational institutions. Workshops and specialist making spaces have all but disappeared, studio provision have shrunk, school’s budgets for art material have been reduced, and specialist technical expertise has been largely depleted. Simultaneously, digital technologies have transformed how we communicate, work and learn. While these technologies have brought extraordinary opportunities, they have also contributed to a culture in which screen-based activities and virtual engagement increasingly displaces direct material experience.

The late sculptor, and teacher, Phyllida Barlow spoke of the importance of direct engagement with materials. Offering the provocation to Yorkshire Sculpture International (YSI) in 2019, that whilst many people have access to phones with photography and video applications “not many people have access to a lump of clay”

The Covid-19 pandemic illuminated both the strengths and limitations of this transition towards the virtual. Digital technologies became indispensable, enabling continuity of work, education and social connection under unprecedented conditions. Yet the pandemic also revealed a widespread desire to reconnect with the physical world. Faced with isolation and uncertainty, many people turned instinctively towards craft, towards making. A government survey conducted in 2021, found that 49% of adults had participated in creative making activities at home during the pandemic. Demand for craft materials surged, with Etsy reporting a 146% increase in searches for creative supplies.

This growth in participation in home-based creative activities suggested that making fulfils needs that extend beyond leisure or self-expression. It can offer agency in conditions of uncertainty, tangible evidence of action in moments of disruption, and meaningful engagement with a world that can be physically shaped rather than merely observed.

This should not come as a surprise. Making is not an optional enrichment activity appended to human life; it is one of the primary ways through which human beings understand and inhabit the world. It cultivates imagination, resilience, creativity and problem-solving, but its significance extends beyond the development of transferable skills. Making enables forms of inquiry, discovery and knowledge production that cannot be achieved through abstraction alone. It is a mode of learning, a mode of thinking and, fundamentally, a mode of being human. 

At Freelands Foundation, our commitment to visual arts education continues to be grounded in this understanding. We believe that making possesses intrinsic educational value because it generates knowledge that cannot emerge through other means. Learning is not always a process of applying established ideas to the world; often it involves discovering ideas through engagement with the world itself.

Through Freelands Foundation's Learning Through Making  fund, we seek to support experimental educational practices that place exploration through materials at their centre. We are particularly interested in projects that embrace uncertainty, curiosity and exploration, recognising that meaningful learning often occurs not when outcomes are predetermined but when they emerge through the act of making itself. At this current moment when educational discourse increasingly privileges the abstract, reaffirming the cognitive and cultural value of making has become not only desirable but necessary. 

Apply for the Freealands Foundation open grant by 11 September 2026. 

Dr Henry Ward is the Artistic Director of Freelands Foundation. A painter, writer and educator, he has worked as a teacher in schools, art schools and universities and alternative programmes. He was the Head of Education at Southbank Centre and deputy head teacher at Welling School, a specialist visual art secondary school in south-east London. At Welling School, he established The alTURNERtive Prize, an annual exhibition of outstanding work made by 15–18-year-olds, and founded Æ, a periodical exploring art and education ideas produced in partnership with students.

He has been an advisor for the Crafts Council and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin. As an artist, he exhibits internationally, has been shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize on four occasions and was selected for the inaugural Football Art Prize, in 2022.

He undertook his PhD in Teaching as an Artistic Practice in 2013, with Middlesex University. He is widely published and lectures on approaches to art education internationally. 

• Francis, B. (2025). Building a World-Class Curriculum for All.
• Goodhart, D. (2020). Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. London: Allen Lane.
• Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
• Morse, K. F., Fine, P. A. and Friedlander, K. J. (2021). Creativity and leisure during COVID-19: Examining the relationship between leisure activities, motivations, and psychological well-being. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.
• Pallasmaa, J. (2009). The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. Chichester: Wiley.