Abstract This project takes the researcher’s established fashion and textile design practice into a new space of the virtual and digital as a context for creative enquiry. Through discussion on two speculative experiments that use motion capture technology, this enquiry considers the transformational potential of a digital materiality as an environment in which to re-imagine and re-image the surfaces of future fashion. Specifically, it asks what influence the virtual/digital environment will have in shaping the aesthetics of the experiments. These acts of transformation, through morphing surfaces and shape-shifting material forms, question contemporary norms of using, consuming, engaging with and understanding fashion and textiles. Enfolded in this creative research is the recognition of how these shifts from matter to metaphor, from object to ephemeral, from dress to transformable interface could ignite alternatives to the current fashion manufacture and consumption process.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Subversive crafters portray feminist messaging within stereotypically non-feminist (e.g. domestic) items. They express irreverence, politics and a culture of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) practices embodying irony, sarcasm, parody and humour. Drawing on 44 North American interviews and participant observations, we explore how subversive crafts and crafters exist outside of the traditional gendered domestic context. We discuss how socio-political and sociocultural visual imagery in subversive crafts plays a role in defining contemporary handcraft culture.

The skills required in craft practice involve a high degree of tacit knowledge which is frequently difficult for the craft expert to articulate. Nicola Wood, a multimedia designer, has undertaken extensive research over the last ten years seeking to understand the knowledge of skilled craftsmen and find methods of capturing and passing it on. She has developed an elicitation strategy that employs an expert learner to uncover the skilled knowledge of master craftsmen, and a transmission strategy based on the concept of bridges to assist the design of learning resources for novices. Ulrik H. Lassen has used the techniques developed by Wood to record and transmit the skilled knowledge needed to make timber-framed buildings, knowledge that today is in danger of being lost. The focus of the study has been the procedure for scribing timbers, which is a central part of the building process. The aim of the research was to investigate the possibility of combining the two roles defined in Wood’s research as an expert learner and designer. Being a skilled carpenter, Lassen has acted as an expert learner, learning the skills of scribing through a combination of researching existing documentation, working with master craftsmen and his own experimentation. At the same time, he developed and tested a multimedia learning resource to provide ‘bridges’ for new learners to this knowledge. The outcome of the application of Wood’s elicitation and transmission strategy to plumb line scribing is a demonstration of the transferability of Wood’s methods within this new context. This is important because it reveals the potential for other craft practitioners to apply Wood’s methods to their own learning and teaching, and produce learning resources to provide bridges to their craft knowledge and preserve their unique skills.

Craft and the New Economy Symposium, Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Saturday 10 March 2012

This article investigates the point when craft revival and avant-garde innovations merged to create objects that combined traditional peasant skills with innovative Suprematist compositions. The peasant craft revival in the Ukraine, which has been little studied thus far, aimed to raise the national consciousness of the local population and to preserve the disappearing handicrafts. Several avant-garde women artists, such as Natalia Davydova, Alexandra Exter and Evgenia Pribyl’skaia, headed the craft revival workshops. The Suprematist embroidery created in these workshops was a combination of many layers of historical meaning, from the reduction of formal artistic elements to the technical complexities of the embroidery, wherein one layer was topped by another to create a textured three-dimensional effect. Created during the period between the two revolutions and on the verge of World War I, when Russians and especially Ukrainians were attempting to negotiate and define their national identity, the question arises as to how these objects can illuminate the artists’ and the workers’ understanding of that period. How could participation in the workshops and the design work enrich and/or change the experience of the artists and the workers? This article analyses the processes and meanings of craft production and consumption to explain the complex relationship between artists and craftspeople, between handicraft revival and avant-garde practice.

Craft art discourse has centred on the use of physical materials. In Finland, craft art students are trained to understand various techniques and the materiality of their chosen medium. However, the materiality is often taught in terms of physical properties (e.g. tensile, elasticity, etc.). Conceptual or expressive properties (e.g. feel, impression, etc.) are hardly discussed and it is left to students to experiment with these properties in their studio practice. The conceptual issues of craft art practice concerning the use of materials thus remain personal and implicit. This article illuminates how the conception of materialness generated from within practice-led research in textile art can stimulate students' creativity in relation to physical materials and enable them to design the meaning and aesthetic of their work more intentionally. The consideration of materialness can thus serve as a useful means for textile artists and other craft artists in creating meaningful artworks with any chosen materials.