Why do we
make? was one of the interesting questions explored at the ‘Craft(ing) the body’
conference held at UCA Farnham today. Although it wasn't the theme of the day it was a thread running through all the presentations. Professor Catherine Harper felt that
there was a need to craft and that the interaction between the body and the
thing being made was visceral. She commented that we don’t need craft but we
desire it. Her keynote paper on ‘Chasing the impossible: crafting the intimate
body’ compared the different approaches of female representation expressed in Judy
Chicago’s Dinner party and Helen Chadwick’s Eat me, arguing that Chicago
stylised and unified women as biologically feminine while Chadwick’s response
was more personal and placed femininity between the biological and the social
allowing multiple definitions. Interestingly the artists Gayle Matthias and
Karina Thompson, who work in glass and textiles respectively, both said that it
is only as mature artists that they have had the confidence to produce, exhibit
and verbalise personal autobiographical work. The potter Gareth Mason noted
that we make sense through craft, while artist Fiona Curran argued that craft
is a form of discovery and curiosity. Daniel Fountain spoke of his practice, crafting
a queer society in the form of nests from salvaged materials. The ceramicist
David Jones speaking about his own practice noted that giving matter form is
significant. He quoted Richard Sennett’s words that ‘making is thinking’ and Hannah
Arendt’s idea that craft requires a narrative rather than mindless making. Jones
argued that craft is not art or a subsidiary of art but lies parallel to it. During
the question time many in the audience said they felt compelled to make, others
said that they made because they had ideas to express and disseminate. Many
agreed with Jones that what we can make goes beyond what we can see and thus
produces nuanced layers of meaning.
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