Symposium

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Friday, September 15

Holiday Inn Burlington, 3063 S Service Rd, Burlington, ON, L7N 3E9

8:30-9:15

Registration

9:15 - 9:30

Welcoming Remarks

9:30 - 11:15

Session 1 - Making Education: The Changing Nature of Teaching Craft

Session 2 - Craft and Wilderness: Combatting Territorial Amnesia

11:15 - 1:00

Session 3 - Craft Residencies: Round Table Discussion

Session 4 - Intersections in Research and Practice

1:00 - 2:00

Lunch

2:00 - 3:45

Session 5 - The Openness of Craft: Complexity in Current Practices

Session 6 - The digital ties that bind: Practice-lead research in craft

3:45 - 5:30

Session 7 - Somewhere Between Folklore, Modernity and Utopia: Expo’67 and the development of Fine Crafts and Métiers d’art in Canada

Session 8 - Craft’s Collaborations

5:30 - 6:00

Closing Remarks

6:00 - 9:00

Opening Reception of the Canadian Craft Biennial, Lee-Chin Family Gallery, Art Gallery of Burlington

Session 1

Making Education: The Changing Nature of Teaching Craft

Convener: Dorie Millerson, Assistant Professor, Chair, Material Art & Design, OCAD University

Rachel Kelly: Ikebana: A creative model for interdisciplinary pedagogy

This paper starts with a consideration of collaborative learning in Art and Design Higher Education as a dialogic paradigm. A Modernist Perspective (Childs, 2000) would interpret a dialogic paradigm as an undoing of traditions and rooted practices as an enabling of The New.

There are many opportunities which collaborative learning generates because it puts practice cultures, learning styles, and ethical issues under scrutiny by students, making this unique context ripe for evaluation. Collaborative craft learning can enable students to make better decisions together by reducing prejudice and enabling peer approval, two aspects which Bruffee, suggests can lead students to develop new critical perspectives in their own disciplines (Bruffee, K A. Collaborative learning: higher education, interdependence, and the authority of knowledge. 2nd Ed.: Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999). Evidence suggests that shadowing and contiguous practice, can support learning as much as constructed taught activities. Early evaluations from my Ikebana research project suggest that in a contiguous model of collaboration where students gently co-exist for a period of time that deep learning outcomes can be achieved. Contiguous collaboration sits at the edge of constructionist learning (Papert, S. Mindstorms. Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic books,1980) in that it involves social learning but does not involve the experiential learning which getting involved and being allowed to learn through mistake making, practically, can generate. Within skilled craft teaching core skill learning must be cherished and supported, but it is the rationale of this paper and the research underpinning it, to suggest that an approach of contiguity in teaching and learning which aligns more with Action Research that a deepening of practitioner knowledge is achieved via the process of sharing practice.

Dorie Millerson & Dr. Lynne Heller: Hands on the Tech: Craft, Pedagogy and the Digital Challenge

This paper investigates the relationship between craft making traditions and the advent of digital tools along with the pedagogical implications of that confluence.

Craft has always been yoked to technology, indeed has been at the forefront of both mechanical and digital innovation (Adamson, G. The Invention of Craft. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013). When teaching craft, we encourage the development of skills that involve a spectrum of hand/eye/ear coordination with complex tools. The essentially embodied nature of craft engagement has implications for craft pedagogy Koskinen, A., Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, P., & Hakkarainen, K. “Interaction and embodiment in craft teaching.” Techne Series A, 22(1), 2015). We ask what does it mean to have objects digitally produced by outside sources and do students need access to equipment to fully understand the potential of digital tools? Can we outsource offsite and/or out of sight? If so, then who is the maker and what is the value of the object? In our studios technicians set up, supervise and problem-solve digital production, resulting in mediated access for students. The student interaction with a front-end laptop is just the start of a chain of production. In this scenario, does the teaching/learning focus on design supersede traditional craft methodology of hands-on involvement? The focus of this paper is twofold: to question how traditional studio methods interact with digital production to create innovation and intervention; and to look at how design processes are taught and assessed (Harrod, T. “Otherwise unobtainable: The applied arts and the politics and poetics of digital technology.” & Jönsson, L. “Rethinking dichotomies: Crafts and the digital.” Both in S. Alfoldy (Ed.), Neocraft: Modernity and crafts. Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 2008). By presenting a range of visual examples and teaching perspectives from faculty and technicians in the Material Art & Design program at OCAD University, we will unpack the pedagogical demands of working with digital tools that often increase the physical and psychological distance between maker and artefact.

Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat: Research by Hand: Craft Making as Research Method

The resonance of a ternary between art, craft and design has been ongoing for over two decades. Attempts have been made to distinguish craft from art and design and to define craft as a discipline in its own right.

This paper, instead of contributing to these, considers craft as “a means for logically thinking through senses” and suggests the role of craft making as a research method in a process of inquiry. The paper will begin with recent discussions of craft in relation to art and design practice. It will then adopt the viewpoints on craft as “a way of thinking through practices of all kinds” (Adamson, G. Thinking through craft. Oxford, UK: Berg., 2007) and as “a dynamic process of learning and understanding” (Gray, C., & Burnett, G. “Making sense: An exploration of ways of knowing generated through practice and reflection in craft.” In L. K. Kaukinen (Ed.), Proceedings of the Crafticulation and Education Conference. Helsinki, Finland: NordFo., 2009) to ground exploration into the role of craft making as a research method dealing with the research question to which literature alone may not yield an answer. Three examples of Ph.D. research completed in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia will be used to illuminate craft as a method that the practitioner-researcher may utilize to tackle research questions arisen from within his/her art and design practice. These examples will demonstrate how craft in a research context has potential to not only generate new or enhance existing knowledge of the practice, but also transform characteristics of the creative artefact. The paper will conclude that without craft making, some practical and experiential knowledge embodied in the practitioner-researcher and embedded in a creative process would not have been made explicit.

Elizabeth Roy: Unconditional Labour, You Have to Pick Up Every Stitch

The title of this paper, “Unconditional Labour, You Have to Pick Up Every Stitch”, delineates the present dilemma of teaching craft mediums in the contemporary art studio environment.

Currently, there is a subversive aspect to the engagement with craft in today’s art school studio. Disparaged or invisible, today’s students, predominantly female, are interested in textiles and want to work with other alt-materials, such as papermaking, beading, gut, caning, knitting, embroidery, using armatures and simple delicate structures to create sculptures rather than metal and wood. Labour and repetitive actions are important components in creating this work. Artifacts and objects that are culturally relevant are being re- interpreted. This may be about the overthrow of the de-skilled student of the previous decade in favour of the embrace of high material culture, but it is clear that craft material or craft processes are offering more interesting and engaging options to these students, who are choosing to ignore traditional materials of sculpture and methods of installation. This new work is impossible to make in typical sculpture environments that have the stale dated modernist focus, they are being dumpstered and replaced with the sewing machine, iron and steamer. There is a distinct separation in the process of making in these two environments. Refreshingly, it is becoming an entirely new scene that bathes in pattern, time and reflection.

D Wood: Craft Education: Provocateur of Change

In today’s world handmade is a mark of distinction. It connotes a kind of authenticity and devotion that people, increasingly cast as passive consumers rather than active citizens, feel is otherwise missing from their lives.

With citizenship comes moral responsibility yet how can we be responsible for a world that comes to us readymade? At the very same moment when the whole world is at our fingertips, it also seems completely out of our hands (Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, 122). Ingold’s statement points out the attraction of ownership of handcrafted objects yet also hints at one of the major reasons for the criticality of maintenance of craft skills: this method of manufacture represents an alternative economic paradigm to the planned obsolescence and instant gratification of mass production. In addition, knowledge of craft skills ensures that we can sustain ourselves whereas reliance on technology dictates that technologists, not our own hands and minds, control our lives. Within this socio-cultural context, craft is a political agent that can contribute to an agenda of transformation. This presentation will begin with a brief case-study overview of the consequences of loss of craft education in New Zealand. It will then outline the reasons why craft practitioners, scholars and supporters have a moral responsibility to campaign for the teaching of craft skills beginning in pre- school and primary programs. Craft as a practice and product is imbued with care; care of planet earth is indivisible from the perpetuation of craft education.

Session 2

Craft and Wilderness: Combatting Territorial Amnesia

Convener: Amanda Shore

Jim Many Hats Adams

Acimowin (stories) are our connection to all things earthly. Everything tells a story. When we place our hand on an object we are not assigning ownership rather we are beginning a process of engagement where we and the object can begin a dialogue as ancient as the earth itself.

Here we and the object mingle our experiences and if we are open to the moment the object can help us to awaken our blood memory or as science calls it cellular memory. From this point forward we are engaging in a ceremony. Words are seldom spoken unless we are engaged in something else. Think about it. When you talk on the phone are you not looking at something, touching something, standing on something? The act of speaking has always been connected to an action. A powerful story connects all seven senses. It awakens our blood memory and calls us to action. The acimowin is our creative map of discovery. For me as a kantiwenahawei, a carrier of words, I need my items to help me share the stories I have been gifted to share. The sights, smells, textures and tastes call up the senses and awaken the listeners. Words alone cannot entice the ears of the listeners to open. It is the multi-sensory experience that welcomes and supports the listeners in this ancient ceremony.

Anna Heywood-Jones: The Botanical Sphere: Plants, Textiles & Place

We live in a plant-dominated biosphere, and yet the relevance and meaning of vegetal life, beyond its contribution to human existence, is rarely considered.

This way of thinking has led us to see ‘nature’ as external to ourselves, as ‘other’, as that mysterious realm beyond the human sphere of being. As in visual culture, plant life possesses signifiers and coded meanings in their contextual configurations. Botanical literacy offers insight into environmental, sociocultural and historical narratives of place, as the forests and herbaceous margins of our communities speak of a complex past, a parallel history of survival and adaptation. Plants and textiles, the world over, tell complicated stories of colonization, migration, industrialization and the evolving nature of local and global systems. In my personal practice, working with plants becomes a point of entry in considering the complex meanings held within botanical life forms. The acts of harvesting, extracting and dyeing become a way of talking about place and the difficult histories that are etched into the vegetal and mineral layers of this land.

Denise Smith: Trails, Travel, and Tourism: Re‐imagining Wilderness Travel in Canada Through Craft

Touristic enterprises utilize mythology around Canadian wilderness in such a way that it becomes a consumable commodity; glossy postcard images of the Rockies promote picture perfect vistas, charming miniature illustrations of wildlife scenes on souvenir plates merchandise animals, interpretive trail guides and maps promote the collection of experiences.

Contemporary craft practices that counter the constructed idea of a pristine and untouched Canadian wilderness have the myth-busting potential to depict new ways of perceiving our relationship with nature. Through the presentation of the practices of Fiona Thompson, Katherine Boyer, Bettina Matzkuhn, and my own practice, I will relate how craft artists are re-imagining travel through, and connections with the Canadian wilderness. Each of the craft practices that I will cover through this illustrated presentation, outline the importance of re-thinking travel through the Canadian landscape. I will question the ways through which wilderness tourism is commodifying nature on a grand scale, and cultivating personal, individual, and traditional narratives. By peeling back the layers of mediation, we can develop more meaningful ways to connect to land.

Anna Sprague: In Tents: Art, Craft, and the Gore-Tex Classroom

The Keji Project is an innovative partnership between NSCAD University and Parks Canada aimed at cultivating a life-long appreciation for the wilderness and celebrating the intersection between the natural world and the visual arts.

The Keji Project presents students with an opportunity to get outside of the city and investigate their relationship to the natural environment though an en plein air approach to transdisciplinary art production. During the five-day immersive camping experience students direct their critical investigations and studio research towards topics such as ecology, national identity, colonialism, and site-specificity. This Gore-Tex classroom, with its focus on experiential participation and collaborative learning methodologies, encourages students to explore what it means to truly exchange, engage, and empathize. Within this open-air studio environment junior and senior students from all disciplines learn to skill-share and view creative production as a collaborative relational experience.

Session 3

Craft Residencies: Round Table Discussion

Convener: Leo Kowolik, Editor-in-Chief, Studio Magazine

Participants of the inaugural Canadian Craft Biennial Maker Residency and Canadian Craft Biennial Writer Residency discuss and reflect on their experiences with craft.

Julia Krueger

Andrew Rabyniuk

Mia Riley

Anne Steves

Carolyn Young

Session 4

Intersections in Research and Practice

Convener: Julie Hollenbach PhD Candidate, Department of Art (Art History), Queen’s University

This round table discussion invites craftspeople, makers, curators, historians, and critics to share the important ways in which their creative practices and research activities overlap and inform their work. Often, the products of our labour are presented as polished and complete achievements, divorced from other aspects of our work, our multifaceted research, or experiments that didn’t quite pan out. Furthermore, professionalism teaches many of us to edit our narratives of messy development into smooth swan songs. Similarly, at times, crafted objects are approached as stand-alone pieces or considered as finite examples of a maker’s straight trajectory. This round table session shifts the emphasis away from linear and singular approaches to objects and practices, instead, highlighting ways of knowing that are taken for granted, relegated to a footnote, or erased. The session will foster conversations about messiness, research as process, failure as a generative event, concurrent projects as inherently bound, creative practices as daily life, unorthodox methods of searching and teaching ourselves, piggy-backed approaches to sharing with others, and how these important practices today, inform our relationship with objects, practices, and people of the past, and structure the narratives about craft and scholarship tomorrow. This round table discussion invites participants and attendees to share the multi-discursive and multi-disciplinary processes that undergird their own projects; and how these approaches can enrich connections with others, create opportunities for new networks of exchange, and work to form creatively and critically engaged communities around craft.

Tamadher Alfahal: Curating/Creating Dialogue: Practical Exploration of Philosophical Principles as Basis for Islamic Creative Expression

Sarah Alford: Botanizing Chapter Two: Practicing Nineteenth-Century Natural Philosophy in the Coulee

Lisa Binkley: Making Homespun Quilts: Imagining Nineteenth-Century Canada

Rebecca Hannon: Disassembling a Crown-of-Thorns

Arianna Richardson: The Hobbyist

Session 5

The Openness of Craft: Complexity in Current Practices

Convener: Ruth Chambers, University of Regina

Seema Goel: Wool is 44% Carbon

Re-connecting craft to its political possibilities, the pieces Blood Sugar and Carbon Footprint work to explore how the movement, making, and consumption of craft materials are linked to the political discourse of both the producer and the consumer.

In Blood Sugar, porcelain and physical precarity are the metaphors for historical and contemporary power gained through sugar, the ongoing slavery maintained in 3rd world societies to produce this “food,” and the current 1st world biochemical enslavement we endure. Carbon Footprint, a public art project in which the public largely produced the work, exposes wool as a potent and compelling portrait of local Irish landscape and industry and works to rephrase wool as part of the climate change discussion by linking the handmade and single producer to positions of power through intention. Both these works engage the global conundrum of distance between producer and consumer and seek to reconnect the viewer/participant to the narratives hidden in the materials. I will discuss my pieces Blood Sugar and Carbon Footprint in light of the panel topic.

Jeannie Mah: I am Blue Mikado

“I find it harder every day to live up to my blue china.”
— Oscar Wilde

While studying Chinese ceramics in European museums, a small but acrobatic side-step led me to a love of European porcelain, which then introduced me to the history of Chinese export ware and European Chinoiserie. Having never ‘returned’ to China, I travel towards the East by way of English bone china. By isolating two figures in landscape on a Royal Crown Derby Blue Mikado dinner plate, I cheekily attempt to reverse the process of immigration. I usurp an Asian identity by inserting my Canadian-born southern Chinese face into a Japanese scene as imagined by 19th Century potters in Derby, England. By taking a British colonial detour, I study china without going to China. I play dress-up within English china to reclaim a (mistaken) Chinese identity, et voilà! I “am” Blue Mikado! Since the Age of Discovery and the ensuing mania for Chinese porcelain, European and Chinese manufacturers have copied each other, often inaccurately, to satisfy a prestigious and lucrative world trade. The travelling of ideas, iconography and technology can be seen in the history of porcelain, making explicit the geographical meanderings of material culture, via trade routes of land and sea.

Carmela Laganse: Perspective by Incongruity: Jade Inukshuk Hockey Players and the Canada Goose Trivet

Visual rhetoric surrounding immigration, multiculturalism and Canadian identity is indicated by national census graphs, government propaganda, regional souvenirs and identifying regional markers.

I propose to: critically re-consider objects such as Haida letter openers and moose formed salt and pepper shakers to examine the romance and humour of commercialized kitsch Canadiana, to further consider the location, politics and economy surrounding these objects, and to remind us of their agency and power. My research is informed by Paul R. Mullins’ essay, “Race and Victiorian Bric-a-Brac,” in which he asks “How we can interpret such apparently mundane material goods as consequential mechanisms that reflected and shaped consumers’ understandings of quite significant social issues, including racial ideology, nationalism and affluence.” I am aware of my position as a Canadian born, female, visible minority in academia. Influences of western middle class guilt and minority identity are in constant negotiation and a lens through which I teach, research and make. My past works tend to subvert tropes within our visual culture as a way of questioning underlying hierarchies, politics and ideologies. I will present visual/ conceptual sources and questions that contextualize my new works, which appropriate and re-frame the aesthetics of national visual rhetoric, particularly, the Canadian souvenir. These objects propose questions informed by the conflicted intersections of culture and my identity in Canada.

Heidi McKenzie: Paradox: Identity and Belonging

In March 2016, I moderated a panel at NCECA (National Ceramic Educators Council of America) in Kansas City entitled Paradox: Identity and Belonging.

The presentations and ensuing discussion placed race, identity and belonging centre-stage. Audience response affirmed my convictions that these issues continue to be relevant and critical to all artists, reaching beyond the bourgeoning community of “others”. I brought together American mixed-race conceptual artist Jennifer Datchuk, American figurative sculpture, Nathan Murray, and Canadian manga mash-up artist, Brendan Tang. Premise: The mixed-race artist inhabits two or more cultural identities. They position themselves at once inside and outside of their collective national narrative by virtue of their hybridity. In 1993, geographer Gillian Rose coined the phrase paradoxical space to define the inherent dualities at the crux of mixed-race identity. Paradoxical space moves beyond spaces of resistance and creates the possibility to shift the paradigm by mapping a future where the mixed-race individual is not positioned as out of place, but rather, constitutive of their own spatialities.

The complexity of race is necessarily heightened due to biracial and often bicultural lived experiences - inherently: passing, purity, caste, social justice, ambiguity, isolation, systemic and localized racism, ethnic heritage, familial dysfunction, alienation, support, personal and artistic nourishment. The panel explored the dynamic between modes of expression, artistic practice, and lived mixed-race experience. Through their creative output, each artist shared their own narrative as it relates to meaning-making and their journey to unravel “the paradox.” Via summary of this panel I will respond to “The Openness of Craft” through the lens of hybridity.

Ying-Yueh Chuang: Recent Works

This talk will discuss my recent and current works. Of all the materials I have encountered, clay has proven to be the most forgiving and accessible material, allowing me to explore ideas through the making of objects.

Certain ideas I learned while growing up in Taiwan have stayed with me, while others have been abandoned. In this same way, I am selective about how I adapt to Western philosophies and ways of living, leading me to live a hybrid existence with elements from both these cultures. This way of thinking has in turn influenced my interest in hybridization, leading me to take elements from plants or sea anemones in order to combine and create forms that are symmetrical and asymmetrical. My new work focuses on bridging two major craft media, clay and textile. I like the juxtaposition of the two materials and I specifically chose these two to address social issues such as equality. The inspiration for this body of work is this contrast between the cheap labor and mass produced fabric for the lower class and the highly intricate, slowly hand-built Imperial porcelain for the upper class. I have integrated this concept with my practice of using the + (cross). I see the repeated pattern in the fabric as a grid to govern the placement of the ceramic elements. In an ideal society, everyone contributes his or her talent equally to the wholeness and that is where Paradise exists.

Shelley Miller: Recent Work

I will discuss my art practice and specific projects that further my aim to aggrandize domestic craft practices traditionally done by women, both in terms of scale and importance, using public space to do so.

Two permanent public art projects are Tissu urbain (an outdoor ceramic mural for a commuter train station) and Structura habitata (interior mosaic and ceramic mural at the entrance of hospital). For each, I created geometric compositions that reference traditional quilt patterns. Although different environments, my intent for each was to invoke comfort and security to each space, while simultaneously acting as bold and energizing visual markers for their sites. I’ll also show a recent series called People, Pattern, Place that uses actual people to create geometric formations, referencing traditional patchwork designs of the area I’m working (to date, Brazil and Saskatchewan). This series continues my interest in micro and macro, bringing the individual back into the idea of a collective urban fabric. I’ll be creating 4 more of these collaborative photo shoots in Saskatchewan in June 2017. Adjacent to the photo shoots, I organize workshops called “Quilt-In’s” where experienced quilters from different cultural communities are invited to demonstrate varied patchwork techniques. The name references a “sit-in”—a means of peaceful protest. In this case, it’s a protest in support of something: traditional craft practices in today’s modern, technological society. In all of these projects, I use the quilt as a metaphor to address the idea of connections: connecting people, instead of actual fabric; connecting communities.

Julia Krueger: Keepsakes of Conflict: Contemporary Craft’s Role in Understanding Trench Art

“The duality of trench art is its one constant…it is both art and craft; it is both decoration and kitsch; it is both meaningful and vacuous; it is both souvenir and museum object; it is both hand-made and mass-produced; it is both new and recycled; [and] it is both beautiful and hideous.” Laura Brandon, “The Duality of Trench Art”.

On September 16, 2016, Keepsakes of Conflict: Trench Art and Other Canadian War-Related Craft, an exhibition informed by craft theory and material culture, opened at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery in Moose Jaw, SK. Trench Art is defined by Nicolas J. Saunders in Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War as “any item made by soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians, from war material directly, or any other material, as long as it and they are associated temporally and/or spatially with armed conflict or its consequences.” The current openness of contemporary craft discourse enabled Julia Krueger (researcher) and Heather Smith (curator) to examine the complexities of armed conflict and its consequences through the act of making and collecting on a human scale. This presentation will examine, by way of specific examples included in Keepsakes of Conflict, contemporary craft’s ability to facilitate a broader understanding of historical craft: one replete with multiple identities, hybridity, difficult subject matter and unorthodox aesthetics

Session 6

The digital ties that bind: Practice-lead research in craft

Convener: Stephen Bottomley, Head of School of Jewellery, Faculty of Arts, Design and Media, Birmingham City University

Dr. Ann-Marie Carey: The Lost Craftsmanship of the Cheapside Hoard

The Cheapside Hoard is a collection of over 500 items including gems, jewellery and precious objects, an incredible time capsule of Elizabethan and Jacobean craftsmanship.

Consciously buried beneath the cellar floor of a tenement workshop, it lay undisturbed for nearly 300 years. Cheapside of 17th century London, was well known for its global trading, Goldsmiths’ Guild and highly skilled workshops, which is evident in the materials and techniques of the hoards artefacts. Discovered in 1912 by workmen, this remarkable find provides an extraordinary but little understood window of our craft heritage.

The Museum of London (custodians of the hoard) sought to answer a simple but reoccurring question – How were the jewels made? Deciphering the craftsmanship embedded within the artefacts was fundamental to the research. A team of curators, historians, conservators, metallurgist, CAD technologist and jewellers were brought together in a collaborative project between the Museum of London and the School of Jewellery Birmingham City University.

The Cheapside hoard is a fragile collection of precious artefacts. The data collection required a non-invasive approach, combining observation, laser scanning and digital photos. Data sets were aligned through a central axis of craftsmanship enquiry. Artefacts were read not as finished objects, but as a scheme of work. Each layer of construction interrogated for witness marks alluding to fabrication techniques hidden beneath the surface. CAD provided the virtual framework to analysis the data, interpret the findings, and allow for further downstream activities combining 3D printing and current craftsmanship.

Tangible outcomes have utilised craftsmanship and digital understanding and taken the research beyond the museum case to become handling exhibits. Exhibits to be worn, touched and engaged with as they would have been 400 years ago. This paper will focus on two artefacts from the hoard, the Pendent Cross and Ferlight Watch Case.

David Grimshaw: Learning from Music - opportunities for creative craft knowledge to translate the idealised perfection of the virtual, into the expressive materiality of reality

In a world increasingly operating within a digitised version of reality, what is the relevance of thousands of years of material and making knowledge?

Can the applied knowledge of the craftsman be used, not just to bring digital visions to life, but to contribute positively to a more subtle and nuanced translation of data into physical reality? In music, conductors and musicians translate the digitised vision of the composer, to become the emotional experience of music. Similarly, digital design data has become the musical score of fabrication, with designer as composer arranging parts to be manufactured, as if parts on a score. However, musicians are not machines, and neither are craftsmen. Each can bring personal interpretation to the reproduction of a fixed composition, taking the raw data to bring a subtle and nuanced expression to the score - conductor and musician in collaboration with composer. The paper will present practice led research where the digital is viewed, not as a set of definitive instructions, but as a starting point for a conversation between data, tool and material. The work highlights that making can be a collaborative translation, where the craft knowledge of makers can be utilised to discover individuality and expression within the digital making process. A digital file is not rigid, it can be fluid, a set of instructions to be pushed and pulled by the skill of the maker - musicians have known the score for years, and it’s time for designers and makers to hear the music.

Barbara Rauch: Synthetic Materialization: an emotional transformation of the surface

In the studio/lab we aim to designate an alternative format of acknowledging research by instigating discourse around the topic of emotion in artistic practice.

Situating ourselves in an academic and interdisciplinary research-led environment, we consider the ‘studio’ as a geographic and emotional location in which process and production takes place. Through practice-led research, we connect current studio and craft practices to reflexive, critical visual analysis, as a transformative research methodology. My research project investigates the transformation of affect and surface qualities through the process of translating synthetic data into “real” (physical) objects with material qualities. Of particular interest is a critical examination of what qualities are gained and which are lost as objects move from digital instantiation, on a computer screen, to physicalization as 3D-printed artifacts. I am a trained crafts person with a training in glass blowing and glass painting prior to moving into the digital studio. Working in digital print studios, 3D printing has come more recently to our workshops and seems to re-introduce 3D sculpting and material manifestation into the studio. I believe the role of the artist today is that of a researcher; making is enhanced through additional techniques, borders of practices have shifted and interdisciplinary skills are important to execute concepts and ideas responding to a more complex society.

Stephen Bottomley: The Quick and the Dead. The Changing Meaning and Significance of Jewellery Beyond the Grave

Q. When is a piece of jewellery not a piece of jewellery?

A. When it is considered an amulet, charm or spell.

The National Museums Scotland holds in its archive the 1st Century Egyptian ‘Rhind mummy’, excavated in 1857 which was re-examined in 2012 by MRI scans made by the museums curators (J. Tate and S. Kirk) and University of Edinburgh anthropology departments (E. Kranioti, B. Osipov, J. Ouranos). Alongside the object attached carefully to considered locations on the outside of the Mummy’s body there was a piece of metalwork attached to the skull beneath the wrappings.

This project sought to reach beyond the identification and medical examination of the body and began to question if the mummy’s amulets and talismans might be classified as jewellery or religious and spiritual charms? These and other outcomes were discussed at the network’s first symposium held in Edinburgh, Scotland March 31st 2016.

The Adorned Afterlife network (est. 2015) brought together researchers from across Design, Archaeology, Forensic Anthropology, History, Philosophy and Museum Studies to examine objects of adornment captured with digital technologies.

Museums contain many intangible artefacts from our past that relate to the body as adornment. These objects may be represented in paintings and carvings, or literally buried in sarcophaguses or beneath layers of funereal wrappings. Often placed in the past out of sight and reach, but now made visible or recognisable as symbolic or spiritual objects, often relating to death or the afterlife.

The network aims to explore these objects with new technologies non-invasive techniques, such as computerised tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning, to reach, less tangible objects in museum collections that might be considered ‘Otherwise unobtainable’ (Harrod).

Sharing our insights and knowledge we will collectively question:

  • Their purpose (why were they made)
  • Their significance (both then and now)
  • How they were made (and by whom)

Session 7

Somewhere Between Folklore, Modernity and Utopia: Expo’67 and the development of Fine Crafts and Métiers d’art in Canada

Convener: Bruno Andrus, Ph.D.

Gilles Désaulniers: Parcours professionnel d’un fondateur des arts verriers au Canada: 1967-2017

Le travail de peintre m’amène à chercher une matière transparente puis l’EXPO 67, à Montréal, me fait découvrir les œuvres de Stanislav Libensky.

Je choisis alors d’aller à Prague pour apprendre à utiliser le verre. Les circonstances m’ont retardé et j’ai alors reçu une proposition de Gilles Boulet d’étudier la possibilité d’enseigner les arts à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) qu’il comptait fonder l’année suivante. À mon retour des études en Tchécoslovaquie, j’ai poursuivi mes apprentissages verriers, surtout le soufflage du verre, tout en créant et installant le premier atelier universitaire d’arts verriers au Canada. Les premières expériences ont favorisé des carrières artistiques remarquables et aidé la fondation de l’atelier Espace Verre (Montréal). Lors d’une année sabbatique en France, l’École supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg m’invite à collaborer à la mise en place d’un enseignement des arts verriers. J’allais former le professeur qui prendrait la direction de cet atelier tout en rédigeant avec lui le dossier qui permettrait à la direction académique de donner suite au projet. Tout ce travail a atteint son but puis j’ai eu l’occasion d’y revenir pendant plus de quinze ans assumer un stage complémentaire aux enseignements de plus en plus qualifiés. Tout ce travail e tout cet enseignement n’ont pas empêché la poursuite d’une carrière artistique personnelle ni la contribution à la création de l’Association des Arts Verriers Canadiens /Glass Art Association of Canada, Je poursuis mon travail de création en lien avec le groupe Atelier Silex qui, à Trois-Rivières offre des espaces et des équipements permettant la création de sculptures en différents matériaux. Trois membres y travaillent le verre.

Susan Surette, Ph.D. : Tundra Life: Questions of Earth, Images, and Surfaces

Canada’s Tundra Restaurant at Expo 67 participated in the construction and promotion of an authentic Canadian culture through its food and décor.

Key to the presentation of Canada as a land of the north were the handcrafted, dark brown, roughly textured, stoneware dinner plates, candle holder and salt and pepper shakers, made by the Southern Canadian studio potter Maxwell Muir, and inscribed with stylized images of arctic animals and Inuit people. Through a de-colonizing lens, this paper unpacks these stoneware dishes that were an integral part of the interior design of a northern –themed restaurant and aesthetically and technically tied to a menu that strongly referenced wild game, fruits and vegetables. This paper will problematize the stereotypical images deployed and employed on this table setting along with its geographical and cultural origins at a time when the Rankin Inlet pottery project, an undertaking where the forms, colours and content of the Inuit pottery were tightly controlled by Ottawa bureaucrats, was enjoying its first exhibition in southern Canada. Building on Rhona Richman Kenneally’s study of the cuisine of Expo 67, “Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67,” I argue that the table settings in the Tundra Restaurant project further complicate the notion of national and cultural authenticities. (R.R. Kenneally, “Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67,” in Expo 67: not just a souvenir, ed. by R. R. Kenneally & J. Sloan, (University of Toronto Press, 2010), 27-46.)

Mary Ann Steggles, Ph.D.: Searching for Utopia: The Vietnam Era Resistors Who Helped Shape Canada’s Craft Revival in Ceramics

From the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, approximately 100,000 Americans came to Canada as an act of resistance.

For these counterculture youth, they were leaving a country embroiled in political and social unrest. They established homes and studios across Canada where they created handmade objects that formed the framework for a new holistic lifestyle that was rebelling against a growing greed, materialism, and an immoral war in Southeast Asia. Overtime they helped to establish craft associations –local, provincial, and national – as well as a range of craft fairs to promote their work. Some taught and on occasion helped to found ceramic departments at Canada’s colleges and universities. The craft revival of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada can be directly attributed to these individuals. In the introduction to Hell No, We Won’t Go, Pierre Berton asserts: ‘It is to the credit of this country that we accepted the American draft resisters in spite of pressure from the United States and in spite of efforts by some of our own authorities to send them back. That they have enriched our culture goes without saying’ (Haig-Brown 1996, p. vi). My paper establishes the impact that these resistors made to Canada’s cultural and craft history, specifically to the field of ceramics.

Pierre Wilson: Expo67 revisitée! Imaginer 100 ans de métiers d’art, une exposition au Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec: conjuguer le passé et le présent des métiers d’art au futur

From September 10 to October 22 2017, The Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec (MMAQ) will host Expo67 revisitée ! Imaginer 100 ans de métiers d’art.

From September 10 to October 22 2017, The Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec (MMAQ) will host Expo67 revisitée ! Imaginer 100 ans de métiers d’art. This curated collective exhibition will present the work of 12 métiers d’art artists whom will each propose a tryptic in relation to Expo 67, but also in relation to two other “imagined” international exhibitions: Expo 2107 and Expo 2067. This major exhibition is a good example of the MMAQ’s mission, which is to valorize the ingenuity and creativity of the creators of traditional handmade objects and their contemporary continuity in the province of Quebec. The Museum collects objects and works of crafters from all historical periods chosen through continuums that encompass functional objects as well as works of fine craft produced through artisanal processes to more industrial ones. We believe that craft related museums, through their institutional activities have an important role to play in the field.

Session 8

Craft’s Collaborations

Convener: Mireille Perron, Alberta College of Art + Design

Tamadher Alfahal: Alternative Approach for Islamic Creative Expressions

In traditional Islamic philosophy, ‘Sana’a’ or art has always been associated with ‘I’lm’ or Knowledge.

Ikhwan al-Safa; the 10th century group of Muslim philosophers describe whoever brings out the form from his mind into a matter as “the artificer, the knower” (al-sani’ al ‘alim)… The notion of creativity in traditional Islam made no distinction between the different types of creating, thus there was no need to categorize a work of art as “fine art”, or “applied art”, or “crafts”. From this point, comes an attempt to investigate the possibility of a new approach for Islamic creative expression, to reconcile the traditional philosophy with contemporary design practice. Through practice-led research, multi-disciplinary collaborative sessions between artisans, designers and scholars will be conducted in order to examine the potentials of creating general principles for Islamic creative expression. The research outcomes will be manifested through different mediums such as: reflexive mind maps/ visuals by the researcher, ideas and prototypes that bridge the gab between craftsmanship and design. The outcomes of the collaborative sessions will eventually be showcased in exhibitions to raise awareness in the communities and receive wider feedback. This presentation will showcase the key findings and the outcomes of one of the collaborative sessions in the research process; which is a result of a residency in Morocco that aims at creating bridges between artists and artisans. Having this collaboration in Morocco, where the crafts are alive and transferred through generations of artisans is a great opportunity to challenge the boundaries between the creative fields.

Kathryn Walter: Between FELT and architecture

My presentation will focus on my practice working with industrial felt in collaboration with architects by showing examples of specific projects that integrate feature walls into an overall project design, and to consider this collaborative relationship in the tradition of the allied arts.

My felt walls tend to be formal investigations—like painting, they come together using a palette of tones and textures. Folds, layers and stacks of felt soften, both visually and acoustically, modern contemporary spaces of concrete and glass. My practice occupies a space between architects and trades, working at the front end with the design team, applying a site-responsive approach to creating built-in, customized installations. And, I’m involved in making the work and often at the end of the process, on the ground, on site, with the contractors, installing. My practice is equally bound to design and fabrication, and I identify as an artist, a designer, and a maker. Three projects I will cite include working with Levitt Goodman Architects and Seventh Generation Image-makers to produce a feature wall for Native Child and Family Services in Toronto, that incorporated images of the Thunderbird from the Great Lakes tradition; a collaboration with nushu architects to create a wall for Natural Resources Defense Council in Chicago made from materials and remnants that met the strict codes of this environmental advocacy group; and a project inspired by the industrial history of Queen Street West in which I worked with superkul architects to create a wall of felt for Aesop Toronto. By looking at my relationship to architecture as part of a history of collaboration since the days of William Morris, and considering how technologies and perceptions have changed in the allied arts since then, I hope to align my work with a resurgence of interest in collaboration, craft materials and the handmade.

Raine McKay: Dance/Craft: Interpretations and connections

We would like present our experience to date about around a collaboration between Joe Ink and the Craft Council of British Columbia involving 5 craft artists, 6 dancers and choreographer Joe Laughlin.

The craft artists involved are Deb Dumka, Stephanie Dueck, Debra Sloan, Peter Pierobon & Hope Forstenzer. Joe Ink has created over twenty-five original works and has produced major works in partnership with local, national, and international artists and organizations, this critically acclaimed company is well known for its wit and versatility.The project explores the collective experience and draws upon the powerful potential of highly skilled artists and community members whose aim is to investigate the physical and visual aspects of performance. We are bringing together a large group of people in a series of meetings, interactions, research workshops and rehearsals building towards a large-scale performance installation. This collaboration with several dance and craft artists is about mixed media, creating dance and object together, weaving the result into stories that express the natural world through movement, object and environment. Creation, collaboration and cross-pollination speak to human invention and our limitless possibility. Through this dialogue and building new constructions, we aim to push the forms into each other by exploring them through theatrical invention. We will discuss the powerful synthesis of knowledge and technique from both forms using the objects to extend and the ideas of the work highlighting the way that collaboration contributes fresh ideas and insight into dance and craft and by extension, the arts milieu overall.

Jennifer E. Salahub, PhD.: The “Unfriending” of Sloyd

This paper argues that Sloyd, a descriptive that has apparently been “unfriended” from the craft lexicon, was the driving force behind a short lived (1900-1903) educational reform movement that prioritized craft education and collaboration in Canada in the early part of the twentieth century.

Despite its brevity, I suggest that it was this cohort of sloyd educators, which set the stage for a century of craft education at the Alberta College of Art and Design. In January 1900 the Calgary Weekly Herald proclaimed, “Sloyd gives a healthier tone to all branches of education, and if it only redeems what we know as sleight of hand (for sleight is the English equivalent for sloyd) from the reproach of ages, no small victory will have been won.”(Calgary Weekly Herald. 4 January 2026). Eighteen months later that same newspaper summarized the progress being made, stating that craft (sloyd) not only fostered the creative instinct and imagination but brought a student “into touch with the beauties of the universe and his own relation to the world.”(Calgary Weekly Herald, 11 July 2026). There is no doubt that craft and collaboration were at the core of social, political and cultural life in Calgary with several of the original sloyd instructors remaining in Calgary even after the initiative ended. Their voices continued to be heard – as educators – as administrators – as advocates of craft. The approbation of craft took a variety of forms – from an appreciation of skill and aesthetics to a general expectation of its inclusion in post-secondary education. Thus, when the precursor to the Alberta College of Art and Design, the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art, opened in 1916 craft was central to the curriculum. Arguably sloyd was the driving force underpinning a century of craft education at ACAD.

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