to: Craft > #08 - Questions (#30)
#30: What is the role of craft in a disposable culture?
Amy Meissner
During the first residency of MA Craft Studies, the 2021 Cohort worked with Portland-based artist Lisa Jarrett to develop a list of “100 Questions” around practice, research, materials, and our relationships to craft. This exercise was revisited over the next two years, both as a way of developing our methodology through the act of questioning and as a point of reference for our changing orientations to these queries. Many questions on the list remain unanswerable, yet served to shape our research projects during the program.
“What is the role of craft in a disposable culture?” remains a living question.
How would you answer this based on the land you live on, the materials you access, and your relationship to craft or making?
Further readings
Berger, Randi Gov and Tonje Kjellevold eds. Earth, Wind, Fire, Water. Stuttgart, Germany: arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2020.
Produced in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the Nordic Network of Crafts Associations and in collaboration with Galleri F 15, in Moss, Norway, this catalog for the 2020 exhibition Earth, Wind, Fire, Water features work from 17 artists along with essays addressing issues about the future of craft and the relationship between humans, materials, and the environment. As a maker living in the Circumpolar North, I’m interested in the role craft plays within a threatened climate and how our entanglements with nonhuman worlds begin to inform how and what we make, which materials we use, and how to prolong the life of craft objects we already have.
Martínez, Francisco and Patrick Laviolette, eds. Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019.
This anthology explores states of brokenness and practices of repair across cultures and within varying social conditions. Many of the essays are place-based and contributed to my own thoughts on the situatedness of repair and the ways untold histories can emerge from the study of and politics around the craft of repair. The essays also prompted me to ask the questions: What does it mean to fix, and how do we learn from the repair process? How do we pass this knowledge on to the next generation? How do we accompany a repair through single or multiple phases of mending, or, alternatively, across a threshold to the end of use? As a maker, I ask how one recognizes and/or creates objects with inevitable repair in mind, and how this influences what and how we make.
Watson, Julia. Lo-TEK Design by Radical Indigenism. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2020.
Within the field of anthropology, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is the study of Indigenous bodies of knowledge, practices, and beliefs passed through generations via oral history, songs, and everyday life. This book provides global case studies of various techniques for building and infrastructure that act in symbiosis with nature, adapt to environmental obstacles and changes, and are designed to sustain rather than exploit or extract resources. The study of climate-resilient infrastructures, many of which have been in use for generations, provides insight into material use and sustainability from a craft perspective. This feels adjacent to my area of study of repair culture, which is merely one small part of this larger craft- and place-based conversation.
Biography
Amy Meissner
She/Her/Hers
Written By Heather K. Powers
Alaska artist Amy Meissner entered the MA Craft Studies program intent on bridging literal distance between herself and other thinkers and makers while connecting theoretical constructs to her own textile-based practice. After 20 years of living in the North, Amy is familiar with her embodied response to nature, the seasonal swings of daylight and darkness, and the wide fluctuation of temperatures. A vulnerable and threatened environment influences her definition of “place-based” materials, particularly items that arrive in a place and become stuck or are expensive to remove, such as garments, shipping containers, or plastic waste. This affects her approach to the craft of repair, particularly how and why objects are mended. A frugal, sustainable, and accessible consideration of material and tool selection is always present in her personal work and social practice teaching mending. No fancy imported needles, just reaching for what is at hand.