Symposium

Lexie Owen: New Genres: Craft + Public Art

Both the fields of Craft and Public Art have seen renewal and expansion in the past two decades.

The emergence of what theorist Glenn Adamson has termed post-disciplinary practice in the crafts has expanded the field to include new materials and methodologies, challenging preconceived notions of what is and can be considered craft. Similarly, the field of Public Art has been in flux since the emergence of Relational Aesthetics and a turn to the social, or as Suzanne Lacey terms it the emergence of ‘New Genre Public Art.’ These shifting fields provide an exciting space for cross-disciplinary practices. In New Genres: Craft + Public Art Vancouver based artist, writer and curator Lexie Owen focuses on her own artistic practice, which weaves through both disciplines, exploring perceived dissonances between these fields. Her public practice balances what she sees as the central concerns of Craft, namely labour, value and the meaning of making, with those of New Genre Public Art, a field deeply concerned with problematizing the central role of the artist in the meaning making processes. While these concerns can sometimes be at odds with each other Owen creates a hybrid practice deeply dedicated to both fields. Drawing a trajectory of practice from her early public projects The Tacit Knowledge Front (2013), Jam Exchange (2013) and the Textiles Institute (2014) to her ongoing works The Collaborative Embroidery Society (2015 -) and ODD JOBS (2016 -) Owen’s practice places craft in public using the social as her primary material.

Susan Surette: Sturdy-Stone Ceramic Murals: the ups and downs of a “visually perceived environment”(Izumi Kyoshi, “Some Considerations on the Art of Architecture and Art in Architecture,” The Structurist 2 (1961,62): 51)

We all wait for elevators, expectantly eyeing the floor indicators above them - between inside and outside, up and down, we patiently or impatiently linger in the liminal space of an elevator lobby.

In modernist public multi-storey buildings elevators and their lobbies have been evaluated in terms of efficiency, safety and accessibility, but decoration, visual delight, and intellectual diversion (beyond what the materials might offer) have not been compelling considerations. In these modernist buildings the decorative style adopted for the gates, doors, or surrounds of the elevator correspond to the style of the lobby in particular and to the overall architecture of the building in general, promoting a visual, conceptual and even social unity.

This paper argues this emphasis on functionality and de-emphasis on decoration actually opened up a space for social intervention in one building’s elevator lobbies. Using a case study of five stylistically eclectic ceramic relief murals installed above the elevators on five different floors of the 1979 brutalist-style Sturdy-Stone Centre, Saskatoon, I suggest decorative disunity promoted social and cultural pluralism. Their individual visual vocabularies ranging from folk art to beaux arts to modernist abstraction, coupled with their collective stylistic disunity, confront a captive audience waiting to change floors. Analysis of the murals, commissioned by the provincial government for their new government office building from studio ceramicists, indicates how they disrupt the notion of metanarratives and unified social agendas. Ultimately they interrogate the role of government-sponsored art in the formation of social and cultural identities.

Lisa Binkley: Marketing Reserve Craft at Agricultural Fairs in the Nineteenth Century

Agricultural Fairs have been used as a form of displaying government objectives and settlers’ achievements of colonial life since the mid-nineteenth century in Canada, inspired by the British Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, 1851.

Through the practices of display and marketed as a celebration of local achievements, agricultural exhibitions offered a venue for participants to share the fruition of their labours with items such as livestock, agriculture, and craft. In 1876, however, and following the inception of the Indian Act, Aboriginal peoples across Canada were restricted to participation in agricultural exhibitions only on reserves. While this made it possible for Aboriginal women to continue to display their handmade crafts, it altered and objectified the way in which handmade items were viewed by attendees to the fair, which usually included tourists and settlers. For the Canadian government, reserve exhibitions became a way of demonstrating their efforts in ‘taming the savage’. Craft items were given awards, determined by a committee of government affiliates, and offered for sale as Indigenous craft. For Aboriginal craft artists, the sale of craft items at the reserve exhibition provided necessary income, but cemented their identity as ‘other’ and their crafts as different from those made by settlers. This paper considers Mrs. J. Lalonde’s silk patchwork quilt, which won first place at the 1880 St. Regis Reserve (Quebec) Agricultural Fair. Recognized for its superb needlework by the government’s Indian Agent, Lalonde’s quilt was one of three examples of her needlework that was awarded a prize-winning ribbon. Although Lalonde’s needlework objects were considered the products of an expert needle artist and offered for sale to outsiders, by virtue of the venue in which they were displayed they were identified as “othered” craft and she as a marginalised artist. Thus an analysis of the making, use, and circulation of the silk coverlet, will explore Lalonde’s identity and experiences as an Aboriginal woman in the context of colonisation.

Elaine C. Paterson: Tracing Craft: Labour, creativity, and sustainability in the Home Arts Movement

The late nineteenth-century Home Arts Movement was a network of craft guilds designed to provide sustainable creative work to craftspeople through national and international exhibitions and may be understood as an important historical antecedent to current concerns for art and labour.

The Movement’s organising body, the English Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA), was officially founded in the same year as the well known, London-based, Art Workers’ Guild (1884), itself established as an alternative to the perceived elitism and exclusive practices of the Royal Academy and leading to the creation of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (the official body of the better known Arts and Crafts Movement). Many of the anti-industrial ideals of the time were expressed in the craft workshops scattered all over the country as part of the Home Arts Movement. These ideals were exported (by people, in print or as exquisitely crafted objects) as far as Canada and Australia and included concerns for reskilling, collaborative making, sustainable creative labour, as well as rural regeneration through art and a belief in the emancipatory effects of the workshop for craftswomen. In this paper, I explore the multiple ways labour, creativity, and sustainability intersected within this mainly rural and largely women-led artistic movement. Through the concept of the ‘art worker’ I examine notions of labour and skill, amateur and professional, collaboration, materials and craftwork as these were brought together in the working lives of particular craftswomen. For instance, Mary Seton Watts of the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild in England, Evelyn Gleeson of the Dun Emer Guild in Ireland, and May Phillips of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Canada all positioned themselves as artists and workers while aligning their work with that of the international Home Arts Movement. To conclude I trace a historical trajectory from these nineteenth-century craft revivals to the more recent explosion of Do-It-Yourself ‘crafters’ and politically inclined craftivists at the turn of the twenty first century. Doing so highlights how the historical inflects the contemporary in the complex, intertwined history of art and labour.

Akycha Surette Dirty Words, “Money and Market”: The One of a Kind and Craft Professionalization

BFA Contemporary studio craft, among other things, is a commercial enterprise. For many studio craftspeople selling is not selling out, and sales are an acknowledged sign of professionalism within the Canadian studio craft community.

One way that craftspeople may choose to access a market for their products is to participate in craft shows, especially juried craft shows. Scholarship around craft fairs and commercial craft has so far mostly been neglected by Canadian craft history. In this paper I argue that One of a Kind influenced the professionalization of Canadian craft through its formation of professional expectations within the commercial market for both the craftspeople who either participated or hoped to participate in the show, and the show’s audiences of private, commercial, corporate and public craft consumers. One of a Kind was instrumental in creating a Canadian ‘craft brand’ particularly as it restricted itself to, and actively marketed itself as, the venue for Canadian craft producers and their “Made in Canada” products. The show increased both the distribution of craft objects and craft’s associated values through the accessibility afforded by a patently commercial venue. This venue, which became a commercial and cultural institution, created a link between craft’s cultural values and its economic value. Craft shows embody some of the complexity of the continuously changing faces of contemporary craft. This complexity is not just about what is being made but who is making it and how it is being received.

Mia Hunt: Managing marginalised material in the craft marketplace

This paper highlights the work that goes into crafting the material and the message to market ceramics produced by marginalised women.

By way of a grounded ethnography, it steps inside a pottery-based social enterprise in Toronto which uses craft to support women facing poverty, homelessness, addiction, and trauma. Involvement in this craft-based employment program is undoubtedly empowering to individual women; through their participation and their craft practice, participants recover self-esteem and dignity and gain supplemental income. In many ways, the program challenges current academic conceptualisation of craft as white and middle class. Despite this welcome subversion, much work goes into guiding the aesthetics through the making process in order to produce goods that are marketable to those with mainstream taste. Though these efforts are meant to benefit the women by increasing sales, they may also shape personal expression and, as a result, the subjectivities of the women involved. In this paper, I consider the management of aesthetics in the studio and reflect on my own participation as a designer in the normalising of the participants’ creative outputs. I also look at the particular ways in which the ceramics are then marketed within both the craft marketplace and within the realm of local social enterprise. In each case, the multiple – and often complex – identities of the women are bound up in processes of managing the material and the message presented to the world outside.

Shalini Sahoo and Imrana Shahryar: Reanimating the Indigenous Crafts

Indigenous craft tradition remains as the oldest and the most refined symbiosis of functionality, technology and aesthetics. It evolves over generations and constitutes to a living heirloom of a culture.

Today when by noticeable degrees the reign of craft objects is being lost to cheaply manufactured machine goods, the need is more than ever urgent to have a sound understanding of what ‘craft culture’ in its totality means and what from it we want to preserve and reinterpret for the next generation. In the year 2007 we initiated a craft project with the faculty of textile design at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture (IVS) in Karachi. In this project apart from analyzing, documenting and contextualizing the rich craft culture in Pakistan, we also aimed to develop a sense of appreciation for this indigenous tradition amongst the young students at the IVS. This work is divided in three parts: the first is a field research. Here students are instructed in the basics of active ethnography. The duration is three weeks in the field. The students and craftsperson encounter each other for the first time. The role of the student is that of a silent observer. He documents the complete process of the selected craft with the aid of photographs, drawings, texts, videos etc. The second phase is in the studio, where with the method of Systems Design Analysis (SDA)- the craft product in its holistic context is mapped and analyzed. Problems and issues are filtered out and contextualized. The third phase is of a pro-active design intervention. The student goes back to the field with the identified issue or problem in hand and works in close association with the craftsperson to find solutions to it. This phase spans from 6 to 12 months depending on the intricacy of the issue.

Elizabeth Kalbfleisch: Celebration or Craftsploitation? Cultural Diplomacy, Marketing and Coast Salish Knitting

On December 26th, 2012, Justin Trudeau, then still vying for the Liberal Party leadership, met with Theresa Spence, Chief of the Attawaspiskat First Nation.

Chief Spence was three weeks into a hunger strike to draw attention to living conditions in her community as well as to the larger Idle No More movement, then at its zenith. Trudeau entered Chief Spence’s camp, reporters and photographers in tow, wearing a handknit Coast Salish cardigan, popularly known as a Cowichan sweater. Photographs circulated widely, with Trudeau’s carefully chosen outfit signalling political and cultural identification with Spence’s cause. Settler politicians have frequently and publically donned Coast Salish sweaters, offering up a symbol of Canadianess that resonates domestically and abroad, and alternately, as in the case of Trudeau, signifying cross-cultural solidarity with Indigenous people.

This paper will examine the political and cultural capital of Coast Salish knitting, practiced by Indigenous women on the Northwest Coast for over a century. Drawing on the visual culture documenting the knitting industry, I will consider historical and contemporary examples of how this craft has morphed from practical outdoor dress to a go-to form of cultural diplomacy. Equally, I will consider how Coast Salish makers, businesses and communities have marketed knitting in ways that both support and undermine these identifications. Assertions by Indigenous people of intellectual property rights over knitwear designs reinforce the cultural and commercial value of this craft, which I will consider in tandem with the more recent movement by Indigenous people to reclaim Coast Salish sweaters as cultural dress.

Shannon Black: Crafty impressions: Performing craft work on Instagram

Moving away from an exclusive focus on what photographs show to consider what photographs do, scholars suggest that photographs are spaces in which social relations, subject positions and identities are performed (Harrison 2002; Murray 2010; Rose 2010; Van Dijck 2008).

From this perspective, photographs are regarded as social processes, inseparable from the various social, political and economic practices that constitute, and extend beyond, photographic production, exchange and consumption (Rose 2010). Following this conceptual thread, I consider the photographs posted by ten female sewing, knitting and quilting bloggers on Instagram. I explore how their photographs offer a unique space for the performance of textile-based work and the marketing of craft identities. I explore how these performances are significant- not so much for their “indexicality or authenticity” (Van Dijck 2008) - but rather for their capacity to communicate particular and partial “messages” (Rose 2010, p. 62). Through their visibility, these performances appear to challenge gendered norms around work, space and craft, offering ‘new’ visions of what craft can be and of who crafters are. However, because of their partiality, they also obscure important social, economic, and political dimensions of women’s craft work, reinforcing problematic discourses about creative labour and creative subjects more broadly.

Dr. Sandra Alfoldy: Crafting Kindness

A grandmother in her rocker knitting a baby blanket. A father and son proudly holding up snifters of their carefully distilled whiskey in their strong, capable hands.

These images have been used for centuries to brand craft. After all, crafting sells. Kindness sells. Together, they are a marketing dream. My paper, “Crafting Kindness” will argue that Western perceptions of craft have shaped today’s easy popular culture references that have been co-opted for successful branding and marketing in corporate campaigns. At their core is the messaging that the labour, processes and end products of craft represent kindness, a set of values based on Christian messages of care. This is no accident, as the connection between craft and kindness has deep roots in Western history. In Ancient Greek Xrēstόs was an adjective meaning “to furnish what is suitable; useful (beneficial, benevolent).” This term was adapted to Chrestotes, referring to Christ, and was used in the Bible in Galatians 5:22 to mean “useful, fit for use,” and providing labour and objects that were “good, virtuous, mild, pleasant.”( Definition from Strong’s Concordance, accessed 15 May 2016, www.biblehub.com/greek/5543.htm). No surprise given that Jesus Christ and his father were both carpenters. The sense of love, kindness and comfort contained in an object that clearly holds the maker’s essence has been the basis for much craft history and theory, and a wonderful marketing tool. This paper will argue that kindness and craft are such nebulous terms that corporations can appropriate them without any obvious consequences. They have enduring appeal, even as the message of craft becomes increasingly diluted, and audiences overlook issues around labour, gender, race and access.

What is the future of craft? How do today’s emerging makers navigate the historical, political, cultural, and social context of craft? With over 100 works by students from nine Canadian post-secondary craft programs, Crafting the Future: A National Student Exhibition, will examine these questions through innovative and engaging works in ceramics, fibre, furniture, glass, jewellery, textiles, metalsmithing, video and mixed materials. Juried and curated by Audrey Hudson, Dorie Millerson, and Robert Mitchell, this exhibition opens on September 16th at OCAD University and runs from September 11th-23rd, 2017.