Catherine (Kat) Gordon

Kat Gordon (she/hers) is a knitter and general lover of textiles who lives in a small city that thinks it's a big one, in the midwest. She reads, writes, works, knits, plays music and board games (not usually at the same time), works for revolution and explores craft amidst a joyful chaos of family, kids, pets, and community. 

This is her second year in Warren Wilson's Critical Craft Studies program. She is looking at the impact of social media on the craftscape.

Practicum Project: Knitting Between the Gaps:Using Formal and Informal Writing by and for Knitters to Fill the Gaps in Scholarly Research

• IG: @fiercebean

Laurin C. Guthrie

Laurin C Guthrie (she/hers) was born amongst the tall trees in 1989. Some call that place Palo Alto. 

She seeks freedom through education and the reclamation of the means of living. She approaches craft and making as political acts, empowering people to break the rules of capitalism.

She is interested in the insidiousness of usable objects: How can an object invite, reinforce or even create behaviors and relationships? Handmade objects are a useful antidote to increasingly less tactile tools and more tenuous connections to making.

Today, she is a craftswoman, artist and educator based in Oakland, California.

Practicum Project: Learning to Dye in the Anthropocene: Environmentalism in Natural Dyeing in the United States from the 1960s to Today

• IG @laurincguthrie

• Website laurincguthrie.com

Kate Hawes

(they/them) I am a woodworker by trade with leanings towards asking impossible questions, learning to unlearn what I have learned so far, and obscure poetry.  I have a wood shop where I live in the Catskills where I make custom furniture, carve bowls, and make sculptural pieces. 

This summer I taught a carving workshop at Peters Valley Craft Center where I tasked my students with finding a form inside a block of wood. The subtractive process of carving is daunting at first, not an easy translation from image to matter, but I believe in getting lost and making a mess.  I find truths and untruths along the bumpy way. I have no ""ax to grind"" about traditional methods or tools. I have been known to say, ""I may be fussy, but I am not orthodox."

I discovered green woodworking only a few years ago. I fell into a New York City Spoon Club meeting by accident, came out with a cherry spoon still wet with bound water, and a taste for carving green wood. I am curious what kind of argument the hand carved spoon makes in the world I live in. I am talking to spoon carvers about the current spoon craze, what feeds it, where it gets its ways and why not use sand paper. I am interested in online craft communities, finding tree limbs, and ungendering woodworking.

My beginnings were at The Crafts Students League In NYC, cutting dovetails with a little bearded man named Maurice who got me a job as an apprentice to a furniture maker. I ended up at the North Bennet Street School for cabinet and furniture making where I endured a traditional canonical furniture slant so that I could get the technical skills I needed. I have spent the better part of my life making things from wood, teaching woodworking, living a queer life with queer family, and writing down my thoughts.

Practicum Project: Spoons in Exchange: Carving Intimacies

• @kvosh on Instagram

• katehawes.net

• Magic Praxis Podcast

Kae Lorentz

(she/they) I started out as a lacemaker and vintage fashion enthusiast, and that spiraled out into a deep love of all things femme and fiddly. Most of my scholarly work centers around self-beautification and self-adornment as craft praxis. I did not necessarily enjoy professional wrestling before this program, but now I do; if you ever hear mention of the resident “Wrestling Scholar,” that’s me. I’m just as surprised as you are!

Practicum Project: “The Steadiness of a Demolition Expert:” Craft Skill in 1960s Eye Makeup

Lexie Harvey

Lexie Harvey (she/hers) is an events organizer, gardener, occasional set designer and enjoys a good mise en place. As a current student in the MA Critical Craft Program, she draws from her experience in hospitality and arts, focusing her research on events, festivals, and gatherings as a craft medium and exploring the intersection of identity, community building, race, and cultural economies. She lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina.

Practicum Project: Craft on the Dirt Circuit: Commerce and Community at a Contemporary Renaissance Festival

• Instagram: @agreatlake

Maru López

Maru López (she/her) is an artist, educator, and emerging craft researcher. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico she is presently based in San Diego, CA. Maru holds a BA in Latin American History and studied jewelry for 4 years at Alchimia Contemporary Jewellery School in Florence, she is currently pursuing an MA in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College. For the last decade, she has focused on jewelry, its intimate relationship with the body, and how this provides a powerful platform to process and share ideas. Her jewelry has been exhibited throughout Europe, Latin America, the United States, and her home island of Puerto Rico. Some of the exhibitions including her work have been, Jewellery is a Metamorphic view of the World at the  Ilias Lalalounis Jewelry Museum in Greece, Manfred Bischoff: A Retrospective during Munich Jewellery Week 2015, Alchimia: An Anthology at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston Vinte e Tres: Joalharia Contemporanes na Ibero-America in Lisbon Portugal, II Bienal Latinoamericana de Joyeria Contemporanea in Argentina, Hot Dog: An Exhibition during SNAG 2019, Passengers in Munich Jewellery Week 2020, as well as Insurgencies: Women’s Art on the Border in the Era of the Cold War at The Front Gallery in San Diego and Objects D’ Art at Embajada Gallery in San Juan. Alongside her artistic practice, Maru teaches jewelry workshops and works as a museum educator in San Diego. She is currently researching Puerto Rico, its crafts, notions of Puerto Ricanness, fluid movements of diaspora, and possibilities of re-imaginings as part of her MA.

Practicum Project: Interwoven Mesh of Re-existence: Craft Knowledges in Puerto Rico

• IG @marugenia2

• Website marugenia.com

Mellanee Goodman (she/hers)

Mellanee is an avid lover of classic cinema. One of her favorite films of all time is the 1948 film Snake Pit.  Alongside classic cinema, Mellanee also has a deep devotion for all things vintage. Her favorite  leisure is a Saturday spent thrifting. She’s likely scouting a variety of vintage wares, including clothing, books, and tchotchkes.

Mellanee’s main research focus is the study of material culture and Black women through the lens of craft history in the upper American South.

Practicum Project: In the Fray: Black Women and Craft, 1850 – 1910.

• IG: @mellaneegoodman

Amy Meissner (she/hers)

Alaska artist Amy Meissner combines traditional handwork and found objects to reference the literal, physical and emotional work of women. She has shown internationally and has work in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum, the Alaska State Museum, the Contemporary Art Bank of Alaska, and the Alaska Humanities Forum as well as various private collections. She holds undergraduate degrees in both art and textiles, an MFA in Creative Writing, and an MA in Critical Craft Studies. Her research focuses on the craft of repair in the Circumpolar North, which informs her studio practice and social practice fostering a local repair culture.

Research keywords: Repair, Mending, Craft, Circumpolar North, Indigenous, Settler, Alaska, Repair Culture

Practicum Project: Guest Editor, Chatter Marks journal, Issue no. 3, “The State of Repair.” A Practicum Project researching the Craft of Repair in the Circumpolar North, completed in conjunction with the Anchorage Museum, 2021. Designer: Karen Larsen; Commissioned by Julie Decker, Director/CEO Anchorage Museum and MACR mentor

• www.amymeissner.com

• IG: @amymeissnerartist

• FB: @amymeissnerartist

Heather Powers (she/her)

Heather K. Powers is a textile maker, organizing professional and coach, project manager, and design consultant with experience in a wide range of textile manufacturing processes. Heather takes an interdisciplinary approach in her organizing and design business, HKpowerStudio, to help clients craft intuitive spaces to live and work in. Heather’s curiosity about the intersection of organizing and creativity led her to a social practice interview series on the topic. Her research during her MA, Critical Craft studies further investigates how craft studios are represented and understood by different audiences to learn about craftspeople, their practices, material, and visual culture. She writes, consults, and teaches across a wide range of creative topics and serves on the board of a regional (SE USA) creative nonprofit working to promote the art & history of natural Indigo textile dyeing.

Practicum Project: Sensing the Studio: The Role of Embodied Knowledge in Understanding Visual Representations of Craft Studio.

Pheonix Booth

Pheonix Booth is a white, non-binary, queer, crip , maker and craft scholar. They hold a BFA in metalsmithing from the University of Oregon and are an MA candidate in the Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College. Their work, both objects and research, explores issues surrounding craft being used therapeutically. Their current research examines how meaning is made and maintained in fiber objects when they are deconstructed and reconstructed during a paper making workshop. They are committed to using interdisciplinary, feminist methodologies to dismantle hierarchies, expose often missed social inequalities, and to shed light on a subject often ignored due to social stigmas.

Research keywords: art therapy, craft, craft process, craft theory, feminist methodology, inalienable objects, memory, military arts and crafts, occupational therapy, semiotic analysis, theory, therapeutic craft, thing theory, trauma processing

Darrah Bowden

Darrah Bowden is an artist, arts administrator, and researcher based in Boston. Born in Maine, an early interest in making led her to experiences with wood, metal, fiber, paper, food, bicycle repair, ceramics, and to her membership in the inaugural cohort of the MA in Critical Craft Studies. Her MA thesis explored the social, cultural, and material aspects of kite making and kite flying in the Northeastern United States. She holds a BFA in ceramics from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2013). She currently works as the assistant to the director at the Ceramics Program, Office for the Arts at Harvard, where she has been a Resident Artist since 2014.

Research keywords: collaboration, craft, kites, shared social experience, public space

Nick Falduto

Nick Falduto is a craftsperson and researcher living in Black Mountain North Carolina. He holds a BFA in Interior Architecture and Design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and has worked in the design/build industry since 2008. His interest in the working lives of craftspeople led him to explore organizational cultures within woodshops. This interest in shop culture would become the topic of his thesis for the inaugural MA in Critical Craft Studies cohort at Warren Wilson College.     

Research keywords: craft, factory, labor, masculinity, organizational culture, woodworking

Mike Hatch

Michael Hatch is a maker and a scholar. As a maker, he has worked in hot glass studios throughout the United States, and for the past twenty years he has been creating and selling his work through his studio/gallery Crucible Glassworks in the mountains of western North Carolina. He currently serves as the vice-president of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild’s board of trustees. He is a member of the MA Craft Studies 2020 cohort at Warren Wilson College. As a scholar, his research into the American Studio Glass Movement and Southern Appalachian craft economies rely heavily on the use of oral histories. For his final practicum project for the MA Craft Studies program Michael is curating a multi sensory exhibition titled Crafted Roots: Stories and Objects from the Appalachian Mountains at the Center For Craft’s John Cram Partnership Gallery.

Research keywords: American Studio Glass Movement, Appalachian studies, constructed identities, craft, curation, inclusive histories, oral histories

Matt Haugh

Matt Haugh joined Warren Wilson College as Blacksmith Craft Crew Supervisor in June 2017. His research interests include craft pedagogies, curriculum design and blacksmithing practice/methodologies, integrating project based and inquiry based learning with a particular focus on collaborative learning and toolmaking.

Matt’s practicum project, Staring into the Fire: A Play in Three Acts, uses description and narrative as research method to develop understanding of reflexive pedagogical practices in dialogue with the embodied knowledge of the smith. HIs research seeks to expand curricula strategies by combining material based practices and text based peer reviews of Intercultural studies of blacksmithing and iron in its varied material and symbolic forms.

He previously held appointments as Arts faculty in both public and private high schools; including 2 years serving Native students living on a reservation in Montana and 7 years immersed in models of experiential and outdoor education, primarily in the disciplines of backpacking and mountain biking in the Colorado plateau region. 

Matt received an MFA in Metals/Blacksmithing and a BA in Film from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. Between degrees, he worked as a recording and performing artist and his metalwork has been featured in exhibitions across the US and in several publications on forged ironwork.

Research keywords: blacksmithing, collaboration, craft, embodied learning, expeditionary learning, pedagogy, technique, technology

Sarah Kelly

Sarah Kelly currently lives in her home state of North Carolina, where she explores concepts of tradition through the works and words of potters between the Piedmont and Western parts of the state. In 2019, Kelly was awarded a Windgate Museum Internship by the Center for Craft at the Asheville Art Museum, where she was also a Curatorial Fellow for the spring of 2020. Kelly spent the past decade working in various positions making, selling, exhibiting, researching and promoting regional makers. She looks forward to continuing this work with all she’s gained through the Warren Wilson College MA in Critical Craft Studies.

Research keywords: craft, craft economies, curation, human migration, museum collections,, museum methodologies, pottery, systemic racism, tradition

matt lambert

Lambert’s current research looks at fixity in relation to indigenous and other minoritized structures to western craft pedagogy and the relationship of craft to nation-state formation and nomadism. By unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of culture and land lambert is interested in ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms through a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating to create systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at in regards to the othered body. 

Lambert is now a PhD student at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and University of Gothenburg in Sweden.  Lambert holds an MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art and degrees in Psychology, Art History and American Studies from Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan. Their work and research has been supported, collected and shown at venues internationally.  Lambert has contributed to Metalsmith Magazine, Norwegian Craft, Garland, and Art Jewelry Forum. Lambert is a 2020 Craft Curatorial Fellow with the Center for Craft in Asheville North Carolina. 

Research keywords: big questions, borders, craft, decolonization, representation

Samantha Rastatter

Sam Rastatter has been living and working in rural Wyoming for the last five years. She works as the Executive Director of the Lander Art Center in Lander, WY. This position requires her to wear many hats and she has worked collaboratively with the Wyoming Arts Council, Wyoming Game & Fish, and the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. Part of the 2020 cohort of the MA in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, her research focuses on craft histories in Wyoming with an emphasis on materiality. She came to this program with a background in archaeology and outdoor education. Sam can often be found outside fly fishing, cross-country skiing, or hiking. Her love of the local environment inspired her research on craft materials in Wyoming. 

Research keywords: craft, Identity, material culture, material history, regionality, value

Katrina St. Aubin

Kat is a California based multimedia artist with a background in photography and applied design. She holds a BA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing and a Minor in Women’s Studies from San Diego State University. Kat’s research draws from her experience as a maker and someone who has worked within the food service industry for over 15 years. In her research she interviews cooks about tools and connects them to the work of craft scholars and anthropologists surrounding labor, tools, and skill.

Research keywords: cooking, craft, labor, skill, tools