Paper short abstract:

This paper describes how crafting miniature objects is a simultaneous process of creating 'wellness' for the people who make objects that range from dolls house furniture to tiny dioramas. Here, I focus on the 'state' of miniature creativity. What does it feel like and what does it do to makers?

Paper long abstract:

It is increasingly acknowledged that engaging in creative pursuits impacts people's lives in ways that may be considered good for their health. However, the mechanisms through which such impact operates are poorly understood. Based on nine months' of ethnographic fieldwork with crafters who make scaled down objects, I explore how makers craft what they describe as reality, in miniature. Keen to move beyond what they see as simplistic explanations from outside observers that crafting miniatures is a mere form 'childish escapism', miniaturists instead report how they very seriously physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually attune to the 'realism' of the full-scale world in order to cast it anew.

This paper describes what this process of 'crafting small, grasping big' feels like, both biologically and socially. As they make, miniature crafters harness observation, imagination, memory, experimentation, humour, emotion, perspective (and more) as they play with scale, material, colour, texture and function. By entering a state of creativity (akin to chaos), makers yield to self-organization under conditions of constraint; recursivity under conditions of release; and fractal patterning under conditions of disorder. It is precisely being in this 'chaotic state', replete with a host of tensions: structure and variety; expectation and surprise; simplicity and complexity; instability and stability; predictability and unpredictability etc. that makers report makes them feel 'high', 'released', 'joyful' and ultimately, 'well'. Far from providing an 'escape', making miniatures opens makers up to a state of creative chaos, in which they feel the complexity of 'reality' and feel 'well' as a result.