After sitting down with stained-glass artist Diana Kemp following a long day of teaching at Stone Manor Studios, I found myself thinking less about finished stained-glass pieces and more about the act of making itself.
The workshop had focused on vivid sunflowers and new techniques for intermediate stained glass makers. Throughout the afternoon, students worked through cutting, grinding, foiling, soldering, and fitting glass together piece by piece. There was concentration in the room, but also excitement, joy, and the quiet satisfaction that comes from learning to make something beautiful by hand.
As Diana and I talked, I was struck not only by her technical understanding of stained glass, but by her philosophy of making. Her approach is rooted in patience, process, humility, and the satisfaction of creating something handmade, something beautiful.
Diana described stained glass as both puzzle-solving and creativity. A piece begins as an idea, then moves through pattern making, selecting glass, cutting, grinding, foiling, soldering, cleaning, and polishing.
“Each piece of glass is touched ten times,” she told me.
That sentence stayed with me because it says something important about craft in general.
Craft reminds us that meaningful work often emerges slowly, with effort. Stained glass asks the maker to become deeply familiar with material, process and consequence. Skip details early on, as Diana explained, and the problems reveal themselves later.
And yet, despite the skill, discipline, interpretation and years of learning involved, craft has often occupied an oddly diminished place within conversations about art.
Even in our conversation, Diana spoke honestly about her own struggle with this question, something many people working in craft-based media quietly wrestle with: whether they are “artists”.
Historically, the art world has often drawn distinctions between “fine art” and “craft,” elevating some forms while diminishing others. And yet those divisions begin to feel fragile when sitting beside someone like Diana, watching the depth of knowledge, technical skill, design thinking and years of practice required to transform raw glass into something structural, expressive and beautiful.
As Diana spoke about her work, it became clear that artistry does not disappear simply because process, tradition or technical skill are involved. She makes design choices. She interprets and adapts. She understands material, structure, colour and composition. She transforms raw material into something that did not exist before.
I think this is one of the often-overlooked powers of craft. Handmade objects carry evidence of human presence. They hold touch, learning, imperfection, decision-making and devotion. They remind us that making matters.
“There is a deep satisfaction in the whole process,” she told me near the end of our conversation. “From coming up with an idea, to planning it, changing it, solving problems, and finally seeing it come together.”
I found myself thinking about the broader art world today, especially at a moment when AI, digital production, and rapidly changing technologies are reshaping how we think about creativity, labour, originality and value.
Perhaps this is exactly why conversations around art and craft matter right now.
Not because one form should stand above another, but because we need broader and more thoughtful conversations about what it means to make something. We need new ways to talk about value, process, skill, and the years of learning that go into creative work.
Perhaps this is why spaces devoted to making feel increasingly important today.
We are connected constantly, and yet often creatively isolated. Workshops create something that algorithms cannot: shared physical experience, conversation, observation and community.
People gather around tables, learn from one another, solve problems together, and slowly gain confidence through making. In a time increasingly shaped by automation and artificial generation, there is something deeply important about people coming together to work carefully with their hands, their materials, and each other.
In Diana Kemp’s work and teaching, I was reminded that making is not frivolous. It is deeply human. Perhaps what matters most is that we continue to create spaces where people feel encouraged to make, learn, experiment, and share what they know with others.
Because in the end, creativity is not only about the finished object. It is about process, conversation, connection, and the deeply human act of transforming materials, ideas, and experiences into something meaningful.
And maybe that is what workshops, studios, and handmade work continue to offer us most powerfully today: not perfection, but presence: “If you had told me when I was twenty years old that I would be making stained glass and teaching it someday, I would never have believed you,” Diana muses. “But now I realize creativity was always there. I just had not discovered it yet.”
