Bushcraft

Bushcraft, primitive / survival skills generally refer to ancient wilderness skills like hunting, foraging, fire making, tracking, making stone tools, weapons and more. Skills that all our hunter-gatherer ancestors, doesn't matter where on earth they were located, had to know in order to live. I like to think of it as the core heritage of all humans, that varies across different cultures, based on the different enviornments they lived in and the different challenges they faced.

My interest in bushcraft was sparked back when I was travelling, and in one intentional community I've been in I met a man who hunted, fished and gathered plants for most of his food. He also used a bow drill to make fire. Not all of us in the modern world are fortunate enough to live in such places with that kind of access to wild nature and with laws that allow us to interact with it in such away (myself included). But there's plenty of interesting stuff we can do. Later on I had the chance of taking a monthly course where we learned the basics of the different skills, and also to work on them on my own.

My art is very much inspired by the primitive and archaic, exploring the relationship between man and technology, and so having some experience in these things enriches my imagination, and in many of my drawings you can see primitives with spears covered in animal furs and hides, and pieces of meat or stone projectiles scattered around.

I'm no expert, just a hobbyist, but I found that as you practice these primitive skills, you are filled with a deep sense of wonder, and when you go outside instead of seeing just a bunch of green stuff, you start to tell one plant from another, you see all the different materials around you and better know what can be done with them.
You look at animal tracks and hear bird calls and get a glimpse into a whole new world. You feel more at home outdoors.
T It is difficult to describe in words the primal joy I felt the first time I succeeded making fire with a bow/hand drill.

Below you can see some of the stuff I did with a brief explanations of them.

Friction Fire

How do you start a fire without a match or a lighter? There are many methods.
Friction fire is a way of making fire by grinding two pieces of wood at the right speed to generate enough heat that will create an ember. It then has to be moved carefully into a tinder bundle - easily flamable material like straw or pine needles, and given oxigen until it's starts flaming.
In the videos below I do two friction fire methods, the hand drill - which require less materials - just a straight dry stalk and a flat wood board ('hearthboard'), but a lot of endurance and prior hand conditioning.
The second method is the bow drill, which is easier, but requires more, a bow, a string, a hearthboard, a drill and a wooden piece to hold it from the top.

Starting fire with a hand drill

Starting fire with a bow drill

Flintknapping

Flint is the type of sharp rock that humans have been using in the ancient past to make the first tools. Flintknapping is what you call the art of turning the that stone into the desired tool: arrow head, spearhead, handaxe, knife blade and more. It is done by reducing material from the stone with a round hammer stone or a copper billet in more modern times. It is surely not easy and demands a lot of prethought, understanding of how to hit at the correct angles etc. The same can be done with obsidian. My work isn't the best and I still never mounted any of it on an actual arrow or other tool, but that's what I got to so far.

Weaving

I'm afraid I don't have much to say about this craft, since I only made a few stuff from pine needles (small baskets, I guess?) They need to be of a type that is long enough and soaked in water so they become very flexible.

Foraging

There are lot of wild plant foods that we can eat, and some are far more nutrient-dense than the our agricultural staples. Compare for example stinging nettle to spinach. Obviously you need to identify them properly and know whether you can eat them. One wild food that I had the chance to gather and process a few times is acorns.

Acorn is the nut of the oak. Many Native American tribes in the area of what's now California used to consume it as a staple. it is very bitter due to the tannins it contains, and cannot be consumed without adequate processing. In order to use it as a sort of flour, it needs to be soaked in cold water for at least a week to remove the tannins (hot water works in few hours but doesn’t get the consistency). I foraged acorns from the ground at the end of summer, dried them, removed the shells, crushed them into a powder with a mortar and pestle and soaked them. Eventually I used them to make pancakes. Was it tasty? – not really. Was it really fun and meaningful to do all that? – absolutely.