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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Craft Research - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
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Printed pots and computerized coils: The place of 3D printing in ceramic practice
More LessAbstractThe emergence of innovations and new approaches in the field of 3D printing inspires and enables creative work that integrates the traditional languages of ceramics with digital aesthetics, processes and technologies. For makers, new tools to 3D print in clay present a range of ways to make, conceptualize and communicate ideas, and yet, for some, such methods of design and production signal a loss of traditional making skills and a loss of the ‘humanness’ in craft. This article presents a number of examples of practitioners who have found ways to reinsert the essence of human experiences into their work, not via metaphor or artistic interpretation, but through data. Instead of the maker’s touch, we find ‘spoken’ forms shaped through the digital data capture of voice and breath. Chris Gustin uses a CAD program to convert peaks and valleys of voice into bowl forms, whilst Jenny Filipetti captures the force of breath to shape her vessels, which are then 3D-printed in clay. In their work, we see evidence of the emergence of a new language of making that asks questions of the dialogues between traditional and digital craft skills, and between human and machine. The dialogic spaces that emerge from the coming together of data patterns and vessel forms, and of traditional and technological making processes, promote an understanding of 3D-printed ceramics as a series of structured conversations between forms of a diverse and eclectic nature. In terms of a 3D-printed ceramic language this means vessels that quote ceramic forms and processes that have been ‘said before’, and yet that also speak in anticipation of future vessel shapes and the syntax of process possibilities. This article suggests that 3D-printed ceramics should not be seen as a conflict or a compromise within crafts, but as a productive dialogue.
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‘I like knowing when the zombies arrive, I won’t be naked’: Young women and leisure handcrafting in the United States
Authors: Marybeth C. Stalp, Emily A. Gardner and Ashley BeairdAbstractIn a modern world where technology is readily available, handwork is sometimes taken for granted, hidden or viewed with suspicion by outsiders, without fully understanding the benefits of engaging in such mindful activity. Younger women face challenges of trying to fit into a hobby subculture that is stereotypically reserved for older women (45 years and older). In-person and online qualitative research with 32 young women leisure crafters (aged 18–44 years) attest to some of the difficulties of trying to engage in time- and labour-intensive creative activities. In this research, we demonstrate that young women rely on both traditional and new ways of learning creativity; they resist consumer culture to learn handcrafting practices; they have to negotiate space and time to engage in craft; and they find themselves defending their choices of handcrafting as young women.
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Knotty cartographies: Augmenting everyday looking practices of craft and race
By Marijel MeloAbstractThis article examines the disruption of looking and seeing behaviours pertaining to everyday engagements with race and domestic crafts. The notion of the ‘everyday’ derives from Philomena Essed’s approach to analysing racism, a framework that makes visible the veiled manifestations of racial and ethnic inequalities pervasive within societal discourses and practices. Essed’s idea of the ‘everyday’ emphasizes the invisibility of everyday racism. This idea can be extended to domestic crafts: both are perceived as inconsequential, apolitical and ordinary. Despite its innocuous demeanour, everyday racism has material consequences that continue to perpetuate racial inequalities at a systemic level. This article maps out the socio-political impacts of racism vis-à-vis domestic craft. It traces these impacts theoretically. In addition, the author has conceived a visual representation of everyday racism in the form of a macramé wall hanging and augmented reality (AR) technologies in order to offer the viewer a medium for reflection on the socio-political implications of the ‘everydayness’ of racism.
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Learning by doing: ‘Working out’ in craft research
By Kathryn GillAbstractAs part of a conservation and access project, the author was asked to replicate a set of rare thread-wrapped coat buttons that proved to be of a previously undocumented form. Using knowledge of the technologies of historic textiles and upholstery and extensive experience of image-based documentation, the thread-wrapping of the buttons was reconstructed through a process characterized as ‘learning by doing’. This involved: studying the surviving buttons and button fragments; working with large-scale images of the buttons to analyse possible wrapping sequences; making large-scale models to study the effects of thread-wrapping in practice; and finally, having worked-out (literally and metaphorically) the wrapping techniques, making appropriately sized buttons for a replica of a coat dated circa 1700. This paper demonstrates how knowledge creation (replicating the button-wrapping technique and the thread-wrapped buttons) was achieved by a dialectical process of manual discovery, comparison with published sources, and evaluation and adjustment ‘in the hand’.
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Crafts as serious hobbies: Impact and benefits in later life
Authors: Carolyn E. Adams-Price and Linda W. MorseAbstractAlthough the creation of crafts by middle-aged and older adults is common across the globe, its significance has been overlooked in western culture. This article reviewed current research on the benefits of long-term participation in culturally meaningful creative arts and crafts (i.e., serious hobbies) and their impact on positive development in mid to late life. Creative hobbies are seen to have major benefits when practiced longterm. In addition, they often reflect aspects of one’s culture and the desire to add to that culture. A series of studies from the Synapse Project demonstrated that older adults who spent several hours a week for a few months learning to participate in a new craft activity showed improvements in their cognitive performance and neural efficiency as compared to control participants. Tomioka et al. found that participation in different types of groups, including hobby groups or volunteer groups, led to less decline in everyday functioning and independence among older adults. Adams-Price and colleagues investigated the impact of long-term practice of creative hobbies and found that serious participation in crafts may play a role in life satisfaction and successful ageing. Their work found four factors: (1) identity, (2) spirituality, (3) calming and (4) mastery/recognition from others. These factors impact life satisfaction through generativity, which is an important construct in Erikson’s theory of adult development. These studies and others, which are discussed, support the importance of crafts as a type of serious hobby that impacts cognitive and social well-being and life satisfaction among older individuals.
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The right politics: Conservative craft in a reactionary milieu
More LessAbstractCurrent events have shown that conservative politics are not the same as reactionary politics although they often share political parties. When we realize that craft is inherently conservative, we can also reveal where craft risks being reactionary in its nostalgia. Subsequently we can illustrate craft’s inner logic, and in so doing rid craft’s identity of elements that serve either as nostalgic bid for pre-industrial simplicity or as a tool to be appropriated by consumerist branding falsely appealing to fictive notions of personal authenticity.
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Hybrid design: Combining craft and digital practice
Authors: Rina Bernabei and Jacqueline PowerAbstractDigital fabrication technologies are transforming disciplines and their practices. It is now the norm for a product designer to undertake almost the entire design process, from creation to fabrication, using digital means. Yet, at the same time, traditional crafts are experiencing a resurgence, and craft outputs are valued in a world filled with cheap mass-produced artefacts. There are now an increasing number of design practitioners and researchers investigating how to merge traditional craft practices, forms and qualities with those of digital fabrication. This shift is leading to a new paradigm of digital craft that is influencing design narratives and practices. This collaborative, cross-disciplinary article, written from within the disciplines of interior design and product design, will provide a case study of one of the author’s product design practice outputs that reflects on the process of designing for both craft and digital fabrication. The resulting designs constitute a new form of hybrid materiality that applies a design model developed by the authors. This design model is called ‘user-completion’ and is situated at the intersection between craft, mass-customization, and mass-manufacture. The user-completion model provides a framework for designers to engage users in the making process by personalizing and completing their products. The case study explores how the user-completion model is contributing to the redefining of craft through the use of digital manufacturing technologies within design disciplines.
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Reimagining lace: A contemporary response to place and textile making
More LessAbstractOver the last decade interdisciplinary engagement with lace as a contemporary design source has opened up a new emerging space for designers to explore unconventional approaches to traditional technologies and materials. This can be evidenced through International Contemporary Lace exhibitions over recent years, whereby artists outside the discipline of textiles have been invited to explore material innovation as a means to open up new definitions of lace (Radical Lace USA, 2007; Lost in Lace UK, 2011; Love Lace Australia, 2011–13). This portrait is an overview of my own contemporary lace practice during this time. I view my work as a practice of a practice made up of iterations of the one intent – that is to explore notions of making as an embodied response to the materials and places that I work and live in. Traditionally lace could be read as a place marker and came to represent the family and region where they were made through the materials and patterns employed to make them. Drawn to the technical complexity that this allusive textile holds I am interested in demonstrating how making knowledges move between generations. Historically embroidered laces for example are known as ‘punto en aire’ (‘stitches in the air’). This prompts me to question how new notions of stitches in the air can be re-imagined as a modern-day place marker. The motivation behind my lace works is to create original work that reflect back a unique recognition of place. It is in the experience of recognition itself that enables us to view our environment in a new light.
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Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Alana Clifton-Cunningham, Ania Sadkowska and Sarah WalkerAbstractOut of Hand: Materializing the Digital, Museum of Applied Art and Sciences, Sydney, 3 September 2016–25 June 2017
Units of Possibility: The Reknit Revolution, Amy Twigger Holroyd, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, 24 June–2 September 2017, Rugby, UK
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Book Review
More LessAbstractGlobal Clay: Themes in World Ceramic Traditions, John A. Burrison (2017) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 339 pp., 231 illustrations, ISBN: 9780253031884, h/bk, £19.14; ISBN: 9780253031891, ebook, £18.18
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Conference Review
More LessAbstractINTERSECTIONS // Collaborations in Textile Design Research, Loughborough University London, London, 13 September 2017
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