This project considers the potential impact of learning relations between hobby craft makers and formally educated makers. It questions how the craft based relationship of a formally educated artist and a self taught/amatuer maker can be renegotiated and implemented in a broader learning context. The artistic research aims to propose that a facet of ‘new knowledge’ in the field and future of contemporary art and craft production is one of togetherness; by embracing discomfort and the unfamiliar to affirm and reveal the knowns and unknowns of one's own practice and field. The question is considered in discussion with social/relational art practices, amatuer craft theory and gift theory. The project culminates both in this paper and an exhibition piece as part of Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design Spring Exhibition 2016.

The things we have an intimate connection to, handle, collect, and move around with us, are treasures that we need to hold on to. They are important in coping with the balance of movement and stability in a fast-changing world. This project is an investigation of the relationship between people and objects through the making and handling of stones. I explore why and how we connect intimately with physical objects, how they become treasures to us and what it means. Through digging into the stones, connecting to their story of endurance, change and solidity, and eventually letting them go, I explore the role of touching and paying attention, in making and relating to objects and transformation. The stone objects are made from pieces of rock I have collected while travelling. All of them have been transformed by human hands before I picked them out, and many have been given out and then returned to me. Through this ongoing process of transformation and physical encounters, it is becoming clear to me that connection is not only about solidity and stillness, but also about being part of the transformation. Stone as a material is both solid and changing. I aim to make objects of stone that attract and encourage people to engage with them – to experience the pleasure and groundedness that slowing down, zooming in and getting in touch can offer.

Through an exploration of Toronto-based artist Allyson Mitchell’s craft-art, this thesis investigates the complexities surrounding the functions and roles of public and private spaces; particularly the home and the fine art museum within Canadian society. I propose a reading of Mitchell’s art practice, activism, scholarship, and curatorial activities that focuses on a queering of both private domestic space and public social space through a conflation of the two. Mitchell’s textile installations make intimate and cozy the otherwise impersonal space of the public art museum, while Mitchell queers the heteronormative space of the family home by turning it into a public art institution, an archive and a classroom. Mitchell’s bright textile enclosures, "Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism" and "Menstrual Hut, Sweet Menstrual Hut," for example, visibly disrupt the sanitized and impersonal space of the art museum, disrupting the dominant ideological framework that privileges normative assumptions of sexuality and sexual identity, and exclusionary hierarchies of class, able-bodiedness and access. While Mitchell’s theatrical textile installation, "Ladies Sasquatch," has predominantly been theorized as a queer critique of the myths of femininity, gender, sexuality, and the detrimental treatment of the female body within popular media; I present a reading of "Ladies Sasquatch" as a radical decolonizing spectacle that has the potential to interrupt larger nationalistic and colonial narratives reproduced by museums. Through these powerful interventions in public and private space, I suggest that Mitchell’s crafty installations offer playful acts of resistance that create counter narratives which function to decolonize our physical, psychic and emotional space, while also creating new imaginings that undermine the status quo. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2013-01-14 15:58:08.015

Since the 1980s microbreweries in Ontario have gained in popularity, winning over beer drinkers in the province and earning the support of the provincial government that funds the expansion of this creative industry. The Emergence of Ontario Microbreweries, adopting the theoretical perspectives of Margaret Archer and Michel Foucault, looks at the factors explaining the emergence of the craft beer industry. Through the morphogenetic approach, which sees enablements take shape through entrepreneurial pursuits, and disenablements through Foucauldian disciplinary processes, we observe that Ontario microbreweries were constrained by strict government laws. Enforced by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), these laws acted upon the individuals and their ability to consume alcohol both privately and publicly. Over time, the strict governmental regimes which constrained beer drinkers and micro-brewed beer producers gradually transformed to allow for the expansion of microbreweries that create unique, distinct and authentic products that have specific geographic links to community.

This thesis is based on fieldwork carried out among weavers of rush-woven objects in rural Taiwan. In this thesis, I argue that nowadays rush-weaving is good work, though not good labour, for the weavers, and the social logic of Yuanli rush-weaving lies in the process of craft production. It is an ethnographic investigation into the practice of rush-weaving in association with colonialism, the heritage movement, and museum operation. Firstly, this thesis examines the economics and history and practice of craft production, in order to understand how the craft industry has become what it is and what is embedded in the process of production. The skill-based knowledge required of weavers is embedded in the relationship between a weaver and her environment. While this fundamental characteristic remains, new meanings and uses are attached to craft practice and the objects produced. Secondly, this thesis explores the process by which craft production is involved in the heritage and museum movement in contemporary Taiwan, so as to understand the interrelationship between craft production and the movement. I consider how ideas of tradition, heritage, and museums are perceived and enacted in everyday life, and find that these ideas contain contradictions and have different meanings for insiders and outsiders. The analysis as a whole seeks to explain why artisans keep weaving in contemporary society, and that it must be understood in terms of their continuous reaction to the constant transformation that the rush-weaving industry has undergone, which is reflected in the relationship between artisans and their objects in the process of production. The thesis addresses current issues – which are both fiercely contested in events and policies, and marginalised in everyday life – in Taiwan, but also attempts to contribute to the anthropological perspective on knowledge in practice, technology and social logics, past and present, and tradition and innovation.

This thesis constructs the cultural biography of the National Museum of the American Indian’s Stockbridge-Munsee tote, a twentieth-century souvenir craft, in order to examine the tote’s cultural and cross-cultural associated meanings and how these associated meanings shift from one context to another. It follows the tote’s history including its production, purchase, and transfer. This thesis briefly recounts the Stockbridge-Munsee Indians’ history and focuses on a few examples of craft objects produced prior to the 1960s, when the Stockbridge-Munsee tote was made. Wisconsin Indian Craft, a craft cooperative formed in the 1960s, produced objects such as the Stockbridge-Munsee tote. This tote, along with seventeen other Wisconsin Indian Craft souvenirs, was purchased by the Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board in 1964 and transferred to the National Museum of the American Indian’s collection in 2000. This thesis analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the inclusion of the Stockbridge-Munsee tote in the National Museum of the American Indian’s collection. From constructing the Stockbridge-Munsee tote’s cultural biography, this thesis concludes that the tote’s associated meanings do not merely shift from context to context. Rather, these associated meanings build upon one another to create layers of coexisting associated meanings.

We shall not starve. We shall not lack shelter. We shall have a hearth. Awake self reliance! Our art is for feeding, warmth, protection. Ceramics– our temporal salvation. Clay– our material life-force. Transformed by fire we arise with the skills of the ancients! No longer will we live in obscurity. To the deskilled, your fate is at hand! You have chosen alienation, distraction, banality, and sloth. Embrace your digital false Gods and die or be reborn to the natural physical world. Now, together we complete our reason for being. We create a new world of kinship. A hope for the utopia not of rigid modernism but one of a new world, a rediscovery of the natural order.

My thesis is a description of the issues encountered during the process of research and construction of the objects leading to, and consisting of, the work shown in Outside Things. The work is my attempt to gain personal insight into the complicated relationship between nature and culture. Through abstract furniture objects, floral patterns, and robots I explore the relationship between actual landscape and the constructed man-made bio-mimicry that convolutes the definition of Nature.

My research in this thesis delves into the corruption of American culture and my personal experience with the academic institution of art school. I delineate my symbolic representation of a social agenda through images and objects that reference the absurdity of institutionalized art and the decay of socialist idealism in the realm of crafts and contemporary culture at large.

This intent of this project is to explore the importance of handmade objects in the age of information.