Stepping Up to Loss: Crafting Feelings through Encounters with Crafted Memorials
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2024-03-09
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Abstract
This 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.
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craft research, memorials, grief, loss, embodiment, encounter, absence, funeral wreath, memorial objects, roadside memorials, keepsakes, affect, emplacement, attunement