"I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." ~ Van Gogh
About Placecraft
Placecraft (EST. APRIL 22, 2014) is practicing the art of creating Home:
Home has a physical place on Earth and a place within our soul. We practice hands-on skills with our heart - so that the work we undertake radiates with beauty, purpose, and joy.
We support permaculture and earthen building projects by providing consultations, workshops, gatherings, and educational material. We encourage the power, wisdom, and creativity the group to bring out the unique gifts in each person and each project.
We provide educational workshops and use the blog for teachable moments, tutorials, stories, poetry, and thoughtful ramblings.
Home has a physical place on Earth and a place within our soul. We practice hands-on skills with our heart - so that the work we undertake radiates with beauty, purpose, and joy.
We support permaculture and earthen building projects by providing consultations, workshops, gatherings, and educational material. We encourage the power, wisdom, and creativity the group to bring out the unique gifts in each person and each project.
We provide educational workshops and use the blog for teachable moments, tutorials, stories, poetry, and thoughtful ramblings.
Chonkush Tusa dePalatine
Lead Alchemist
Every workshop I facilitate, every story I tell, every song I sing is a collaboration.
Each of us learning from each other, never possible alone.
I live uphill from the farmlands in Chimacum, Washington, south of Port Townsend, on 5 acres off the grid on land we call "Palatine". I began studying Permaculture in Forest Grove, Oregon in 2008, specializing in collaborative group projects. I worked with others on a 3.5 acre Permaculture Project "B Street", a small garden "Life & Sol", the Planet Repair Institute, and the Village Building Convergence. I first squished mud between my toes (cold and satisfying) in 2010, and my passion for building -- walls, floors, benches, houses, masonry heaters -- with mud is tempered with a devotion to my garden, a love for singing, writing, arts & traditional crafts such as weaving, the study of evolutionary astrology, and a small variety of healing arts (which has been an equally rich parallel track), within our beautiful Salish Sea home where I landed in 2013.
Through visiting farms, intentional communities, focused community gatherings, and a sprinkling of international travel, I find insights and pathways of collaboration with diverse groups of people and landscapes, bringing stories and other manner of artistic fodder to the constant, creative learning process. Musical medicine follows me, inspires me, and enriches all of our work.
Thank you to everyone, all beings, who work together to create beauty,
and all the many forms of life we depend upon for our work to be possible.
The blog for specifically for my poetry can be found here: Sauerkraut Soul.
The story of my name is here: tinyurl.com/chonkush
Lead Alchemist
Every workshop I facilitate, every story I tell, every song I sing is a collaboration.
Each of us learning from each other, never possible alone.
I live uphill from the farmlands in Chimacum, Washington, south of Port Townsend, on 5 acres off the grid on land we call "Palatine". I began studying Permaculture in Forest Grove, Oregon in 2008, specializing in collaborative group projects. I worked with others on a 3.5 acre Permaculture Project "B Street", a small garden "Life & Sol", the Planet Repair Institute, and the Village Building Convergence. I first squished mud between my toes (cold and satisfying) in 2010, and my passion for building -- walls, floors, benches, houses, masonry heaters -- with mud is tempered with a devotion to my garden, a love for singing, writing, arts & traditional crafts such as weaving, the study of evolutionary astrology, and a small variety of healing arts (which has been an equally rich parallel track), within our beautiful Salish Sea home where I landed in 2013.
Through visiting farms, intentional communities, focused community gatherings, and a sprinkling of international travel, I find insights and pathways of collaboration with diverse groups of people and landscapes, bringing stories and other manner of artistic fodder to the constant, creative learning process. Musical medicine follows me, inspires me, and enriches all of our work.
Thank you to everyone, all beings, who work together to create beauty,
and all the many forms of life we depend upon for our work to be possible.
The blog for specifically for my poetry can be found here: Sauerkraut Soul.
The story of my name is here: tinyurl.com/chonkush
Donations at this time go to acquiring the 473 acre clear-cut next door to my house for restoration.
More about that project by following this link (click here) .
More about that project by following this link (click here) .
History
"Placecraft" as a name actually began in 2012 as a small design/build team which I was a member of. Our focus was straw-clay insulation retrofits in the Portland area in celebration of Light Straw-Clay's then-recent legalization for the state of Oregon. The Placecraft crew worked on one complete project together, made big plans to become a cohesive community retrofit team, and dissolved soon after as well all went out separate ways. I adopted the name after about a year of fallowing.
For those interested in really geeking out with me, when we were choosing our name back then, I had some excitement around everything Placecraft meant to me at the time (9/8/11):
Place: A memory-rich 'space' which is created by the people who use it, in a manner which meet their agreed upon needs as a community. It stands apart from social spaces which are not created by the people who use it in that the very form reflects who they are, and the process of creation ties directly into their particular culture.
Places rely so heavily on a feeling, thoughts, memory... that 'ideas' are arguably 'places', thus offering a shift in thought (how can we run a business and strive for social equality, how can we build without manufactured materials, how do we build community with a change in landscape) is also a creation of place, for an idea to exist.
Craft: A lost art of creating functional things which people can value for their usefulness, durability, and beauty. Crafts are things people can care about. A craftperson is a functional artist. Carpenters, potters, toolmakers... the useful niches in a social ecology that industrial culture has perhaps hurt the most.
Placecrafters: Functional artists who seek to facilitate the creation of places that can be cared about.
A Crafted Place: Implies a Place (which doesn't necessarily have to be structural) that incorporates some physical creation that is hand-made.
Crafting Places: Even if "place" is just another word for a "space" that doesn't mean anything, by crafting places we're suggesting that we're putting more care into making places, rather than just making another 'space'. We're not Spacemakers, we're Placecrafters. Factories can 'make' things, but only humans that care can be craftspeople.
Spacecraft: A way to travel into outer-space, the unknown, the infinite, yet the patterns of the way in which galaxies move are the same in which things operate on a molecular level... Permaculture teaches to design from patterns to details, and we can use our core value of 'learning' to notice patterns in the world (earth & universal) to dictate the way in which we design things.
