In the nineteenth-century designers, artists, and art historians became increasingly interested in the history of visual motifs and repertoires of form as a development analogous to how forms in nature would have gradually developed. German architect and architectural historian Gottfried Semper explicitly linked this history to manufacturing processes and as such emphasized the relationship between the maker (a body), material (as found in nature), technology (manufacturing) and culture (meaning making) as what initiated and kept this evolution of forms and motifs going. Semper reasoned back to early forms of civilization in which the braiding of natural fibres had led to the first space dividers (the simple fence as precursor of later walls) in which due to colour differences of the branches and fibres the first visual patterns would have emerged naturally. Semper could not have been aware of all the archaeological knowledge about early forms of making and decorating that exists today. Therefore, in this paper I will make a start re-examining Semper's theory in the light of that knowledge. Inspired by Paul Kockelman, I explicitly want to approach the relationship between body, material, and technology from a notion of both making and the use of instruments as semiotic processes. My concern is not whether Semper was right, but whether his insights, against the context of present-day archaeological, anthropological and art historical knowledge, can be enriched by semiotics to better understand the relationship between maker, making and meaning and through that arrive at a better understanding of the artefact’s agency.