F.3.1 Craft as Ontological Training: Relations and Marginalized Knowing

Anna E. Mudde, Campion College at the University of Regina

In Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge (vols. 1 & 2), the feminist Newfoundland artist and filmmaker, Pam Hall, describes her practice as “looking closely at what is close by" (Hall, 16). Hall tells us about how to attend to the local knowledge of crafters, of and as knowing bodies, engaged in and reliant upon entanglements in the world: "The main instructions for this kind of work are simple: look carefully, ask everything, listen deeply, pay attention.” (29; original italics) When we attend in this way, we find “we are surrounded by a world produced by [human] knowledge… a book is not the only evidence of knowledge in a room with you." (16)

Using the still-“womanly” skill of knitting, in this paper I explore how attending to craft can provide exemplary sites of relational — ontological — training and thus, of relational knowing and skill. In craftwork, bodyminds make claims about reality by expressing knowledge about worldly relations. Crafting necessarily both expresses and trains us to relational orientations, to taking up oneself as entangled with one’s world, and to understanding craft work as claiming knowledge. To demonstrate this, I theorize craft, rooted in the orthodox philosophical attention to technē,⁠ as expressing already-present, deep relational connections, and consider the potential that craft-thinking can have for answering the call to better relational/ontological practices. Orienting this way reveals that “we are surrounded” by often marginalized, deeply knowledgeable, ontological claim-making work; it is an orientation toward marginalized knowing. In craft, as process and as product, the crafter matters: crafters express embodied knowing and being concretely in their work. Not only might this knowledge be better appreciated, attending to it may also allow us to shift and change when the outcomes of craft practices reveal relations that harm others. I suggest, that is, that a lens of craft can enliven strategies for opening lived situations to the consideration of others, as part of designing, making, and living material and discursive practices of solidarity.

F.3.2 Redwork: The Emperor of Atlantis – Case Study of a Work in Progress

Catherine Heard, University of Windsor

I propose a case study of my current work-in-progress, Redwork: The Emperor of Atlantis, a collaborative project that invites members of the public to contribute embroidered motifs to a large-scale installation that camouflages political imagery within a collage of traditional red-on-white quilt embroideries. I will contextualize the project in relation to the social history of redwork embroidery and through the written reflections of project participants. Examining Redwork: The Emperor of Atlantis in parallel with redwork embroidery traditions is an opportunity to consider why imagery of cataclysmic world events have so often been elided in women’s craft production. This tendency will be contrasted with the anomalous example of a collection of WW2 patterns that depicted tanks, fighter planes and guns. These patterns interjected imagery of war directly into the sphere of decorative hand work, and potentially functioned simultaneously as a patriotic gesture and as a disruption of the domestic space.

When world events have been presented in traditional redwork embroidery, (for example, in Ruby McKim’s Colonial History Quilt Patterns, 1930), they invariably have reinforced dominant cultural narratives. As part of my case study, I will analyze how present-day context has shifted the readings of redwork patterns featuring Indigenous peoples; and propose how the identities and intentions of the people embroidering colonial motifs can potentially transform their signification. As part of this analysis I will reference written commentary by project participants. In conclusion, I will summarize the development of redwork patterns for The Emperor of Atlantis (including scenes from Canadian Residential Schools, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, Abu Ghraib, and the Columbine Massacre); and I will address the question of how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact the logistics of the project, while simultaneously providing impetus to develop new imagery: emperorofatlantis.com

F.3.3 Saorstát Éireann as Museum: Identity, Ideology, and Art in the Official Handbook of the Irish Free State (1932)

Brandi S. Goddard, University of Alberta

In an 1894 letter discussing the forthcoming publication of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, Edward Burne-Jones wrote, “indeed when the book is done...it will be like a pocket cathedral.” Inspired by the craft ideals of Morris’s publishing firm and Burne-Jones’s sentiments above, my paper seeks to extend the book-as-architecture metaphor through an examination of the Official Handbook of the Irish Free State. Published in 1932, a decade after Ireland achieved independence from Britain, this handbook is a beautifully crafted object, but is also intensely ideological and nationalistic. My paper offers a reading of the Handbook as a museum: a carefully crafted and curated collection of text and art that functions to construct Ireland as a nation that is nationalist, rural, and traditional. I argue that the Handbook is a microcosm of state-sanctioned identity formation and mythologization that was underway in the early decades of the Irish Free State’s existence. This is a fascinating post-colonial examination because of the Handbook’s role vis-à-vis Ireland’s other major cultural institutions, the National Museum and the National Gallery, both of which emerged prior to Ireland’s independence and which initially functioned as colonial outposts for British cultural tastes. This analysis seeks to expand on the notion of what constitutes a museum, as well as explore the politicized craft practices inherent in several small-scale Irish publishing firms and printers.

F.3.4 Recrafting Brick Origami: Jonathan Cross’ Ceramic and Organic Landscape Creations

Annette Condello, Curtin University

In the late 1930s, when Juan O’Gorman designed Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City, little did he think that the volcanic-cacti landscape would be ecologically-driven, augmenting organicism. At the time, Rivera had consulted with Frank Lloyd Wright about organic architecture. Resembling a carved, folded pre-Columbian relic, it was considered by architectural critic Brunco Zevi as decidedly “Mexican grotesque." Despite such a condemning resistance to pre-Columbian pyramidal forms, other architects turned to make a progressive change to the way they thought about modernist building landscapes. Less emphasis was placed upon the collection of crafts or how they could integrate them with modern buildings through “origami” architectural techniques. Today there is an upsurge in sculptures using architecture for inspiration for recrafting vessels. This is particularly the case with American ceramicist Jonathan Cross’ ancient/post-apocalyptic multi-purpose vessels, crafted with the assertion to transform origami in reverse. Instead of throwing paper sculptures into the fire, Cross carefully fires clay origami in the kiln. Cross’ recrafted ceramic origami are plural pieces de résistance and have topical relevance for American arts.

This paper will concentrate on Cross’ creations that highlight the ground embedded through clusters and horizontal tilts, and 2018 bonsai exhibition held at the Case Perfect (formerly Elvis Presley’s home) in Los Angeles. It will critically interpret Cross’ origami techniques embodied in his heterogeneous sculptures. Reminiscent of the profound material themes explored in Allen S Weiss’ Unnatural Horizons (1998) and The Grain of the Clay (2016), this paper challenges how Cross’ recrafting origami technique transforms the meaning and practice of organic architecture through the ceramicist’s association with clay and landscape. Building on Weiss’s material themes, this paper argues that the pre-Columbian episodes and origami technique in Cross’ vessels continue to recraft practice, informing both the arts and the landscape architectural disciplines.