ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the process involved in working with recycled materials. The artist Joseph Beuys once remarked that the process of understanding the world began with materials. Turning from history to recent ethnographic accounts, there is remarkably little documentation about what makers, working in more contemporary contexts, say about their relationship with materials. Mr. Imagination is a Chicago recycling artist, on his throne, which is covered in bottle caps, in his living room. His use of bottle caps illustrates well the process of ordering and patterning to which many recycled materials lend them. An illustration of the involvement of the whole body when making patterns can be seen in the act of knotting. In the Department of Social Anthropology at Manchester University, the author set a practical seminar the task of tying this knot from a diagram, using only the visual information given here.
