MA Critical Craft Studies Practicum Projects
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Item Stepping Up to Loss: Crafting Feelings through Encounters with Crafted Memorials(2024-03-09) Rena, TomThis paper investigates the role of crafted memorial objects created to address personal loss. They differ from formal, large-scale objects of commemoration or personal possessions of the deceased due to their chosen materials and handmade qualities. Scholarship concerning memorials generally takes an art historical or material studies approach or involves analysis in the context of social practice. Existing craft discourse about memorial objects often centers the object-making process rather than the act of encountering the finished work. I utilize the concepts of emplacement and attunement to refocus attention from object to encounter by recounting my affective states through ethnographic engagement with the work of three artists: a roadside memorial, memory seed bombs, and a funeral wreath made from hair. Multisensory encounters with crafted memorials, situated in their particular environments, have the power to invoke constant shifts in affect and create a different perspectives on grief, absence, and presence. Reframing crafted memorials as stepping stones instead of endpoints offers the potential for rich insights into not only how objects convey information but what their role is in tending to loss.Item Interwoven Mesh of Re-existence: Craft Knowledges in Puerto Rico(2022) López, MaruThis essay is rooted in place specifically in Puerto Rico. From the distance of 15 years of living outside of the archipelago, I attempt to understand how the precarity brought by multiple crises has created a moment when spaces and relations have sprung to help people survive and thrive. I reflect on the work of four Puerto Rican artists, Jorge González Santos, Javier Orfón, Zaida Goveo Balmaseda and Lulu Varona. These artists are exploring craft knowledges through which they engage and learn about the land and its history while creating a mesh of relations that expand the notions of Puerto Rican identity. Through a close look at their practices, I analyze the dialogue between the state-led projects of modernization of the 1950s and the present situation. This dialogue allows exploration of the connections between craft, crises, colonialism, and ideas of Puerto Rican identity. In the essay I move in a nonlinear way, sharing memories and sensory experiences. These are intertwined with oral interviews and historical context that present the ways these artists critically engage with ideas of the land, social relations, and history. As they explore textiles, ceramics, and straw they create networks that contribute to building systems that allow them to envision change. I define these processes as decolonial. Decoloniality is a messy, nonlinear, ongoing process through which different perspectives emerge and coexist. Furthermore, it entails a multiplicity of knowledges and a plurality of being that are essential for the creative thinking necessary for imagining possible futures for Puerto Ricans.Item Learning to Dye in the Anthropocene: Environmentalism in Natural Dyeing in the United States from the 1960s to Today(2022) Guthrie, Laurin ColleenThis paper examines how issues of environmentalism are addressed in writing about natural dyeing from the 1960s and 1970s to today. Using a critical lens of environmental art and art activism proposed by scholar T.J. Demos, the writing of contemporary natural dyers Sasha Duerr and Dede Styles are examined alongside the historic literature to understand how approaches to natural dyeing have shifted in response to the environmental concerns which characterize the Anthropocene.Item Spoons in Exchange: Carving Intimacies(2022) Hawes, Kate;With the role of the internet becoming increasingly important to craft learning and craft community-making, my research on spoon swapping in a spoon-carving community points to how social relationships impact craft learning and the sustaining of a craft practice. More emphasis should be placed on craft learning in present day popular craft movements. My paper shows how spoon carvers learn from each other in hon-hierarchical structures like copying each other’s spoons in spoon swaps, carving online, and in social craft gatherings.Item "The Steadiness of a Demolition Expert:" Craft Skill in 1960s Eye Makeup(2022) Lorentz, Kae AnneThis paper examines the relationship between makeup and craft, reframing makeup as a craft praxis and the body as a craft object, using the case study of the “cut crease” technique of eye makeup application popularized in the 1960s. In doing so, I examine how-to content from the mid-20th century in order to show that the 1960s were an inflection point in the history of makeup due to a reconfiguring of boundaries between “professional” and “amateur” skillsets and a broadening of the vocabulary used to describe makeup techniques among non-professionals. The final portion of this paper is an in-depth firsthand description of a series of three different makeup applications featuring different permutations of the cut crease technique using instructions, tools, and products analogous to ones available to middle-class American consumers in the 1960s. This illustrates the skills and specialized knowledge required to create such a look as well as the limitations of the how-to content of the era.Item In the Fray: Black Women and Craft, 1850 - 1910(2021) Goodman, MellaneeIn the Fray: Black Women and Craft, 1850- 1910, examines the lives of Black craftswomen from enslavement and beyond emancipation, suggesting that these women have been historically invisible within and outside of the craft canon. By examining craft through the lens of skilled craftswomen, this research centers on Black women who lived between 1850 and 1910, looking specifically at the change from craftswomen being enslaved to craftswomen being free women entering into institutionalized education. By taking the upper South, including the Southern Appalachian Mountains, as a geographical area of reference, this paper puts forth an analysis that refutes existing work that suggested that this area was without a Black craft history. Additionally, this approach highlights change over time in the upper South while resting on the context of Black life during this tumultuous period of American history.Item Sensing the Studio: The Role of Embodied Knowledge in Understanding Visual Representations of Craft Studios(2021) Powers, Heather K.This twenty-year comparative visual and sensory ethnographic analysis of fiber studio photographs from the archive of 'American Craft Council Magazine' (2000-2020) foregrounded my embodied knowledge as a craftsperson. By defining “studio photography” as photographs of craftspeople, materials, space and actions, I then identified a spectrum of studio photographs from a wide discipline of textile processes and spaces. In many photographs, through memory and imagination, I was able to perceive the feel, sound and smell of materials and tools. By situating myself in experiential terms, I explored my body-mind interactions with body positions, materials, techniques, and the time they require. In this analysis it became essential to articulate both implicit and embodied knowledge. Using interdisciplinary methods that included embodied sensations and memories expanded my ability to analyze images using various forms of knowledge not always associated with visual analysis. This demonstrates how researchers and craftspeople can extend their methods beyond propositional knowledge to include an array of alternative knowledge evoked through a spectrum of photographs.Item The State of Repair: Chatter Marks Journal Issue 3, Guest Editor for the Anchorage Museum(2021) Meissner, AmyIssue 3 of the journal Chatter Marks, “The State of Repair,” published by the Anchorage Museum and edited by Amy Meissner, is a polyphonic and intergenerational collection of narratives revealing the craft of repair through essays, poetry, and the work of craft practitioners via contemporary and historic repaired objects. Researching the craft of repair within the harsh and shifting environment of the Circumpolar North where seasonal abundance or scarcity of materials shapes activity, reveals a repair practice based on adaptation, prolonging, circular methods of production, and ongoing maintenance. It reveals the collapsing of time through generational learning, craft’s connection between people, objects, and methods across great distance, ways of belonging to a place, and an ability to foster an ethical response to the broken––whether an everyday object or a climate in crisis. Engaging in this craft considers repair, rather than discarding as a first response to brokenness. Whether short- or long-term fix, an act of repair is an expression of care for people and their possessions.