Entangling with Materials: Crafting as a Way of Repairing Our Relationship with the Environment

Crafting facilitates direct contact between humans, materials, and the material’s environment. Embracing crafting with materials as a method can develop caring relationships with materials and can procure a sense of responsibility towards the environment. In this chapter, I discuss how crafting with materials can become a way to cultivate a personal relationship with the world and the environment, and how it can possibly generate behavioural change. This discussion is carried out by studying interactions with wool in the context of felting. By discussing the properties of raw wool and experiences with processed wool, I suggest seeing the human–world relationship as a dialogue that takes place through engaging with materials and the environment that the material comes from. The human–material relationship that emerges from crafting processes shows that everything is in continuous movement, and we need to find harmony among these changes to participate in the world in non-exploitative ways. By undertaking human–material coupling via crafting, humans can conjoin the ecology of making with the ecology of materials to repair their relationship with the world.