Adjusted Saws: A Space of Material Learning (Jerome Harrington) (part of doing together 25)

Adjusted Saws: A Space of Material Learning7th April 2025This workshop aimed to take participants back to the point at which sawing wood was a highly complex new skill, and one which was a gateway to the creation of potential new objects and things. How might it feel to learn this fundamental act again? There will be frustration, but hopefully a joy simply to cut, and excitement about what could be made.Participants were presented with a series of adjusted saws. These were strange and unfamiliar, and difficult to use. They challenged participants to engage in a process of re-familiarisation and re-learning.Adjusted Saws is the first iteration of a research project investigating Harrington's childhood back garden in Plymouth. As his formative, and perhaps most important space of material learning, Harrington looks at what can be learnt from this informal space of learning and develop ways to share the ‘attitude of making’ that this space engendered.doing together 25doing together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by the Art Research Centre (Bath School of Art, Film and Media) in collaboration with Bath School of Design and the Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries.doing together is a platform to connect staff, students, and the community through making, collaboration and experimentation.Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools.Throughout the symposium, facilitators – alongside participants – test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.