Craft Research - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016

This article investigates the feelings of both social isolation and connection in female amateur crafters in knit and crochet who post images of their work and comments on their making to a Facebook group and ask whether this impacts on their sense of wellbeing. The project-in-progress involves thematic analysis of data purposively collected from women invited through Twitter and other online textile crafting pages to join a closed Facebook group set-up exclusively for a Ph.D. study. In research operating online and with the researcher employed as a participant-observer, the accepted ethnographic parameters of time, location and fixed cultural group are challenged. Initial findings suggest that crafters seek belonging, positive strokes of accomplishment, and celebrate the soothing qualities of the tactile to assuage loneliness; others feel that their creativity is devalued through depictions of isolation. Additional themes emerge, including the ways that sharing tangible making in knit and crochet online can support an improved sense of agency and self-esteem. The study highlights how both the acts of making and of sharing making online contribute to participants’ sense of positive wellbeing. Further research appears necessary into the role of tactile making shared in a virtual environment and reframing solitary creative activities as meaningful – including how these may contribute to feelings of personal and social wellbeing.

This article examines contemporary debates on the historical and theoretical relationship between craft and visual art through an analysis of the artworks of Jakkai Siributr. Siributr, a Thai artist based in Bangkok and who studied in the United States, creates tapestries and installations based on methods of weaving, constructed textiles and embroidery. Through the tracing of a critical history of relationships between art and craft since early influential precedents in proto-feminist and feminist art to more recent works by Ghada Amer and Do-Ho Suh, the article identifies how the art/craft division is typically understood as transgressed only on certain conditions: that opticality is emphasized over the haptic and the artist is engaged with issues of sociocultural identity. Noting how this complicates pervasive suggestions that the ‘international art world’ is a domain of free play – that is, that all forms of practices are potentially equally valid under the rubric of ‘contemporary art’ – Siributr’s works are explored as disrupting the discursive tradition of art/craft because his methods slip between optic and haptic experience and challenge an easy assimilation to questions of identity. This disruption is partly based on the artist’s use of the form and rhetoric of the ‘decorative’, and the article elaborates the challenges that Siributr poses for unspoken divisions of art and craft in terms of practice and types of engagement. These challenges are contextualized by remarks on the queer-theoretical interest of what it means to expose and break norms and shape less binary or dualistic forms of understanding and practice.

This research investigates the potential of structural flexibility as a functional and affective design element as well as its potential applications. Our research bridges the areas of jewellery design, emotion design and structural development in the Additive Manufacture (AM) of metals. The article offers a theoretical review of the nature of flexible structures and of current deformable AM geometries and their applications. In relation to this, we conducted a series of practical experiments, which explored AM flexible geometries to create emotional expression. Both, existing examples and the outcomes of the experiments were evaluated against the soma-semiotic framework of emotional expression developed by Niedderer. The outcome and contribution of the research is a better understanding of structural geometries of flexibility and their potential uses, as well as of its affective potential.

By attending to the rise of craft, museums can play an important role in asking questions about the material culture, context and the cultural life extending from craft. This article explores the relationships between the museum and current wave of craft. I argue that, as custodians and translators of material culture, museums are positioned powerfully to attend to matters of craft in ways that allow for the interpretation of a changing cultural phenomenon. I do so by exploring the extent to which the ‘third wave’ of craft has infiltrated public, cultural and scholarly life. This is considered in the context of the contemporary museum with regard to implications for museum positioning and practice.

This article is an autobiographical review by Jeff Zimmer discussing his multi-layered illuminated paintings on glass and how the theme of ambiguity threads through his work. Aesthetic and conceptual developments over the past decade are traced in this article, including research on mythological models of ambiguity, connections between seeing and judging reflected in security camera images, the use of the concept of averted vision in the expression of thematic content, the symbolic use of snow as a metaphor for ‘whitewashing’, and the use of drones to communicate disconnects between action and consequence. His aesthetic development is traced from flat figurative images to multi-layered, three-dimensional (3D) de-populated landscapes.

‘FlockOmania: Body, Space, Object’, Lanchester Gallery, Coventry, 19 January–19 February 2015

BE.HIVE UK Pavilion, Wolfgang Buttress (2015) Nottingham, UK: Wolfgang Buttress Studio, 128 pp., ISBN: 9780993285509, s/bk, £32.00

The Walter C. Koerner Collection of European Ceramics: A Discerning Eye, Carol E. Mayer (2014) Vancouver: Museum of Anthropology, the University of British Columbia, 172 pp., ISBN: 9781927958186, h/bk, $45.00

Crafting Design in Italy: From Post-War to Postmodernism, Catharine Rossi (2015) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 219 pp., ISBN: 9780719089404, h/bk, £70.00

Crafting Sustainability, OCAD University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 14–15 March 2015

International Conference 2015 of the Design Research Society Special Interest Group on Experiential Knowledge (ESKIG), Design School Kolding and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark, 25–26 November 2015