„The Hand Is our First Tool” – An Interview with Isabelle Handley

We were visiting ESAAA  – the École Supérieure d’Art Annecy Alpes – as part of an Erasmus+ study trip, making our way through the school’s interconnected spaces: a striking concrete building perched at the edge of Lake Annecy, surrounded by mountains and forest, classified as a twentieth-century heritage site. The school hosts around two hundred students in Art and Design programmes, and the building itself reflects its pedagogical philosophy – open, layered, designed for synergy between disciplines.

We had already passed through the library, the fablab and the graphic studio,  then we pushed open a heavy door and stepped into something harder to categorise. It was the plateau volume – the volume workshop – and it was unlike anything we had seen before. The space felt simultaneously like a carpentry workshop, a sculptor’s studio, a forge and a small laboratory. Tools covered the walls, sawdust mixed with the smell of something damp and earthy. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that cabinetmaking and biomaterials and metalwork were all happening in the same space, at the same time.

That’s where we met Isabelle Handley. She noticed us and stopped – asked if we had questions. After a brief walk through the studio we did. In fact, we had many.

The interview below is an edited version of that conversation, conducted during an Erasmus+ mobility  ESAAA.

I was born in England, but my mother is French, so I grew up between two cultures. I went to art school in France – the ENSAD in Paris, one of the most prestigious in the country, it was an incredible experience and I learned a lot, but it was very centered on what to make and why and not enough, for me, on how.  I was frustrated – the technical knowledge felt thin, I needed more. So during my last year at ENSAD I also followed a leatherwear construction course at ESIV La Fabrique, a purely technical school. We were trained to design and make leather bags, essentially for the luxury industry. With my two diplomas in hand I left Paris for London where I started to set up a leather goods design studio, but my personal life took over and I found myself moving to the Alps in France. What could I make here ? I observed the landscape and the culture to understand what kind of material was traditionally used in this part of the world and so I went back to school again and did a three-year diploma in woodworking with the Compagnons du Devoir, a French guild that train to become highly skilled craftsmen and women in a large variety of professions. I have to say at this point that, where I was frustrated with the lack of technical knowledge at ENSAD, on the other hand during my technical training I was frustrated with the lack of theoretical, critical and creative knowledge. I didn’t seem to find a place where you can have both!

It was at this point in my professional reflections that I came across a job offer at ESAAA (Annecy art school). They were looking for someone to run a wood/metal/ceramics workshop. I decided to try. As I came from a teaching family, it felt natural, it felt like home and I stayed there ever since.

I connect conceptual thinking with craft and teaching – that’s what I love doing, and here I can bring all of those aspects together. ESAAA describes itself as a place where you accept not knowing in advance what might emerge – that resonates with how I work. I teach wood turning, among other things, including how to sharpen your own tools. People generally don’t know how to do that anymore, and I think that’s significant. We teach materials, we teach how to make things – but we also teach practical care. There’s an obsession with „making” right now – and with wellbeing, with slowing down. But caring for your tools, your workshop, the things you work with – that requires a different kind of attention. One person isn’t willing to give when everything around them is treated as disposable.

Our workshop embodies this spirit well: collaborative tinkering, skill exchange, openness to possibility. It’s not separate from the rest of the school; it’s woven into everything.

ESAAA has two main programmes – Art and Design – and a research-level DSRA (Diplôme Supérieur de Recherche en Art) programme. In our workshop students from different programmes encounter each other naturally by sharing space – that doesn’t exist in most schools.

The first year at ESAAA is a common ground – propaedeutics – shared between Art and Design students. The emphasis from the start is on fabricating things, alone and together, testing ideas, making mistakes freely. Students don’t look for the right answer here; they learn to invent their own responses. That’s the culture I work within, and it shapes everything.

Social design – as a label – isn’t really how we talk about it here. Sometimes things happen more organically. Someone made a radio programme with local farmers talking about cattle massage techniques and animal husbandry in their own words. Someone else designed sculptural feeding structures for goats on a nearby farm. A diploma project on cattle. What strikes me most, though, is what happens after. Students form collectives during their studies – and they keep going. Residencies, workshops for children, cooperative structures. The school becomes a starting point, not an endpoint. They enjoy working together. That’s rarer than it sounds.

In French culture – particularly in the art world – technical knowledge has been systematically devalued in favour of so called intellect. The idea that thinking and making are separate activities, that one is elevated and the other merely servile, is deeply embedded. When I started out twenty years ago, the environment was male-dominated, intellectually insular, and what I can only describe as lazy – a laziness that seeped directly into the work being produced. 

I think this has something to do with capitalism, honestly… When you stop caring about materials – where they come from, what they cost in human and ecological terms – you lose the thread of what the world is actually made of. Ivan Illich, Austrian-born philosopher best known for his critique of modern institutions and their tendency to undermine human autonomy, wrote about this. He talked about the bicycle as an example of a tool that enhances human life, as opposed to the car, which colonises the environment around it. That distinction – between tools that extend us and systems that replace us – is something I think about very often.

ESAAA’s own description of itself talks about a pensée en acte – a thinking in action – attentive to ecological, social and political stakes. That’s not decoration; it’s what the technician-teachers here actually practise.

We start with the very basics. When first-year students arrive, I show them a table full of tools and ask: what was the first tool humans ever used? The answer is:  our hands and our body. And then a stone, picked up to crack open a walnut – an extension of the arm. That’s the moment I want them to feel. From that stone, we move through the history of making, through hand tools, through electricity, through large machines where the body is gradually pushed further and further away from the material we’re manipulating.

That’s a pedagogical arc, but it’s also a kind of mourning. When you use a hand saw, your whole body is involved – your smell, your touch, your weight. When a machine does the cutting, the senses are progressively removed. Students need to experience both ends of that spectrum to understand what they’re choosing and what they’re giving up.

Partly it’s practical – twenty years ago, that’s what was available and affordable, but then it’s become a philosophy. I think of it as an equivalent to gleaning mushrooms in the forest or fruit on the trees. Using what you find locally, around houses and companies, treating waste as a resource. There’s a wonderful Agnès Varda film about gleaning (The Gleaners and I , 2000) – people finding use and meaning in what others have discarded. Our students do that instinctively – they’re material scouts, they see a skip and they see possibility.

We also have a garden at school, which I started, because a garden is an animated tool. Our Biolab also allows people to experiment with materials made from plants and mushrooms – that culture of hacking and repurposing is central to what we do. The word „technology” doesn’t sit well with me. I prefer technique. It’s closer to our preoccupations. Techniques are methods of making things, technology is an applied assembly of technical knowledge aimed for industrial production and where our body isn’t involved.

ESAAA has a formal residency programme for artists in exile – since 2020, through the Marquisats site, the school has been hosting artists displaced by conflict in Gaza, Congo, Hongkong. During the war in Ukraine, we had a Belarusian artist in residence who worked with glass. He taught us his technique; I imparted it to students. That’s how knowledge circulates and spreads – it floats between people when the conditions are right. We’ve also hosted intensive felting workshops — three days of working with wool and natural fibres, where people from completely different disciplines end up at the same table, hands in the same water. The best ones feel more like friendship than work.

I’m also part of a national network I set up around ten years ago that connects technicians across French art schools – a kind of umbrella organisation, for sharing knowledge and addressing shared problems. When I started it, I received hundreds of messages from people in similar roles, and what emerged was a troubling picture: many technical workers in academia are often treated as invisible. High-profile academics who don’t know how to make things use technicians without acknowledging their knowledge or their conditions. It’s a reproduction of the same social hierarchy we claim to be critiquing.

It’s fragile. Over the past few years art schools have been closing in different regions, especially the poorer ones. They depend on local authorities who don’t always see their value, so they cut funding. Art schools have to prove their worth all the time to stay in the game.

Annecy is a fairly conservative town where most people tend to prefer more traditional art, it’s hard work weaving contemporary art into the local cultural network, but it is also very fulfilling.

What is the future? Part of the answer is community. ESAAA has around two hundred students. The collectives they form here go on to do real things in the world. There’s something generative about that. I sometimes think we need a new generation – Generation A, as if starting the alphabet again – a small revolution built on working together rather than competing. Also the Bauhaus is still useful here as a reference – not as nostalgia, but as a model: a community of craftspeople and artists connecting disciplines under one roof, making things, building something together. Utopia is unreachable by definition – but the act of making is very real and shapes the world around us. Creating environments that allow people to learn to walk together is itself useful.

I’ll put it this way: freedom is making things by hand. But we’ve been sold the opposite story for decades. So we need to rebuild it, learn it again, and teach it – carefully, slowly, with the right tools.

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Interview: Katarzyna Janota & Maja Starakiewicz
Editing: Katarzyna Janota