Snow goggles

Contextualization

In Materials Lab 3, we considered the authoritative voice of the audio-guide as object descriptor. How do we interrupt this voice and provide alternative histories and/or underrepresented context for an object? This snow goggle text is from phase one of the assignment, a prompt to create a transcript and record an audio-guide of an exhibited object. I chose to emphasize the importance of this particular mend as situated in the extreme environment of the Arctic. By focusing on the implications of object breakage with regards to personal and community survival, this audio-guide relays the interconnectedness of materials, skill, the environment, and people as situated in the Circumpolar North.

Further Readings

Gearhead, Shari Fox, Lene Nielsen Holm, Henry P. Huntington, Joe Mello Leavitt, Andrew R. Mahony, Margaret Opie, Toku Oshima, and Joepie Sanguya, eds. The Meaning of Ice: People and Sea Ice in Three Arctic Communities. Hanover, NH: International Polar Institute Press, 2013.

The three Arctic communities traveled to and studied in this text include Barrow (now renamed Utqiagvik), Alaska; Kangiqtugaapik, Nunavut; and Qaanaaq, Greenland. The text is an exploration of literal meanings of ice within and for each of these communities and is a massive undertaking in the art of translation, both between countries, but also between scientific and local understanding of ice. I returned to various essays and interviews in this book numerous times as a way of understanding how to communicate underrepresented and/or alternative place-based knowledge in respectful and thorough ways.

Goeman, Mishuana. “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment.” In Native Studies Keywords. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015.

As a loose nod to Raymond Williams’s Keywords, Native Studies Keywords seeks to add and expand on the vocabulary of Native culture and society that Williams leaves out. Goeman’s chapter on land reveals the Native connection to land as one of responsibility, rights, sovereignty, and belonging, an interdependent concept that connects people through common understanding and experience. I found this chapter helpful when describing the Circumpolar North and various ways people—Indigenous and non-Native—have or feel a meaningful connection to this place. Goeman defines culture as “meaning making” rather than as a form of differentiation or isolation in a multicultural situation. In a similar way, repaired objects, their histories, and connection to place also have the propensity for meaning making.

Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.

Lipari aims to bring the value of listening to the forefront of the human sensual experience, via the complexity of listening through personal, cultural, and philosophical points of view. Considering the act of listening from a communicative, socially interactive, ethical, and embodied perspective was helpful to think through for this project in particular. How do we listen? How do we convey the information we want others to hear? How do cultural institutions—via wall text or audio-guide—convey their missions? And are we listening to it?

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed, 2012.

Research has been and remains vital to the process of colonialism since it serves to legitimize the colonizer and extract from the Other; it is also not innocent, but rather takes place within established political and social positions. Smith provides an approach to research from within Indigenous communities by Indigenous researchers as a way of decolonizing Western research and its entrenched ways of “knowing.” A critical component to the pedagogy of decolonization has been “coming to know the past” by providing access to alternative knowledges, which form the basis of alternative ways of doing. This text provided insight into the importance of understanding my position as a white settler researcher with regards to where authority currently resides, thus questioning its intention and interpretation. Asking who is doing the writing, and for whom, will be an ongoing interrogation of myself and of those in positions of power.

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.