Carolyn Genders: ‘Do I Know Before I Start?’

This article would have been impossible to write if I had not had the privilege of spending time with Carolyn Genders, visiting her studio and witnessing the act of her making. Making with Carolyn illustrates the idea of a master of their craft – the sheer amount of knowledge that is both consciously technical and intuitively executed. Seeing the ability of a committed practitioner to draw upon many years of doing, thinking, making, as well as equal amounts of undoing, remaking and rethinking.

“The world is full of intellectual makers – without the knowledge of materiality.” This phrase, one of the first we exchanged, encapsulates the rigour which Carolyn brings to her work.

Carolyn embodies haptic knowledge. The pieces she