Column

Jonathan Scott is an artist and writer based in Toronto. His research focus is Devolved Sculpture and fictioning. He holds a PhD from York University and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. 


The curse of hyperaesthesia is petrified under every wrinkle of luminosity on the gilded frame’s surface. 

In/finitely in/visible. 

The craftsman’s hand captures each stratum of matter and memory. A wealth of communicability under/stood only by a discerning ‘eye’ that can bind a moment in One’s blink. 

VAM VAM VAM 

The mallet’s rhythm beats a fallen gold kernel thinner and thinner. 

VAM VAM VAM 

Volcanoes rumbles, plates shift. Golden rivers of magma congeal and flow deep within our core. Folds of liquid layer and merge in a molten loch.
Perpetual presence in ruptures and ripples. Material ethereal planes asking to be communicated in moments of im/pure perception. 

VAM VAM VAM 

The hand of the maker must be invisible. It must not take away from the artist. It must be precise and careful. Support the artwork, not distract from it. The hand of the maker must be invisible. Perfection must always be its ambition. It must not be evident. It must be seamless. Flawless. It must be in harmony with the artwork. The hand of the maker must direct the ‘eye.’ It must enhance the artwork. The hand of the maker must be invisible. It must be Adept. It must know its limits. Its responsibility. Its place. To become one with the artwork. To become the artist’s hand, but never hold it. The hand of the maker must be invisible. 

Leaf – layed leaf. 

Pushing his hand over the coarse surface, his thoughts travel to the aggravation of touch only T.I.M.E can heal. Pitted and scorched, a haptic chaos. Scratches, spots, ruptures. What calm can be found if each pause is infinitesimal? 
“You won’t be able to see it, you can only feel it!” she shrieks. 

He – holds – his – breath. Slowly. 
Ex – hale. Breath – shallow. In – hale. Short, light, In, Ex. 

With each undulation of his chest, reflections of gold flicker in his periphery. A flick of his finger bats the air. Eddies of wind spiral and catch the leaf, whipping it back into shape. The perfect square reforms, only to fold and roll into tubular waves of vermillion and dusk. 

The surface ripples. Currents take form and instantly disappear. Repeated, shifting peaks succumb to troughs of imminent energy as light hits and holds to each plane. Mountains of tiny mountains. Their frenetic alteration at nauseating speed. Rough, calm, round, down. Sharp, flat. From each direction nowhere is up. Nowhen never available, always present. 

VAM VAM VAM 

His raft of experience floats on the underside of the river. 
Sinking further and further away from its surface. A void of 
deafness. What can be held onto if not the experience of 
the past. Its existence in the present un/deniable and 
un/detachable from now. There is a real calling. 

The ripples slow. 

He sits patiently waiting for the size to 
dry, gripping the gold as it does. His 
mentor, dead now, led him into a 
trade that would carry him 
through his artistic life. A 
supporting role as a 
framer. As a framer of 
artworks. As a 
framer. ~~As a 
framer of 
T.I.M.E~~ 
 

The body 
sits poised in 
precarity, the 
legs of the human 
and chair equally 
unbalanced. A halo of 
luminosity shimmering on 
each canvas as ghosts or 
returning souls. Muscles torque in 
strokes of pink grey oil. The painted 
blobs ooze out. Nor body, nor mark. The 
directions are dot . dot . dot . dash – Hoop, 
swivel. Abject mass of pictorial illusion. When a 
disembodied figure is fixed in time, what is framing 
it? Is it the affected plane or ornate structure around 
it? For him, it was the structure that broke the barrier of 
time. The frame made the image an object, brought into the 
now. The frame was the transition of the inside to the out. As 
the shadow falls, the ground feels stable. The light between each 
panel refracts. Blinding at once, shallow at next. Lines of gold shot 
outward. Glossy horizons of matrixed ostentation give way to matte 
passages of doubtable imitation. 

 
On a surface so pristine as yours the dents and bumps take precedence. 
“Don’t look, they’re not important,” she shrieks. 
But they look at you. Telling you of their T.I.M.E. Their accident. That moment that moves 
slower in your mind, but unescapably faster in our real. 
Birds chirp incessantly. 
His body doesn’t move, but is in constant flux. Each leaf sealed till the next accident. The rub of the hand, 
fingerprints buried deep within the strata of its surface. Who am ‘eye’ to lay claim to the importance of the 
frame? 

Body morphed. A slight cut. Face ripped. Hold/Hold/Hold/Hold/Stop. 

With one foul move the leaf is lost. 

He lays the leaf on the gilders pad again. Out of its book, it becomes instantly vulnerable, far removed from its signification. Maneuvering it takes a decisive patience. Each leaf a membrane of air trapped in precious metal. It wants to adhere to any surface it can, even if that surface is absent. The pressure of its worth makes any episode of its use fraught. 

In/visible in/finitely 

The clouds appeared as a static moth-eaten blanket. He ran his eyes across the pitted and pocked surface. The unfiltered sun shone down, exaggerating each im/perfection. Cruising over their fluidity, Mina’s questions took hold of his thoughts. Was it simply a difference of perspective that granted access to the refractured equality between matter and self, or was it a plane of delusion that pulled one into an image-thought of existence? 

VAM VAM VAM 

The moth in the window reanimated. Its wings slowly closing and opening, their tips never touching. The vibrations of air resonating with every awakening beat. Its echo
inaudible. 

VAM VAM VAM 

Shards of golden light pierce the window, cutting sharp bars through space. Flecks of blinding gold dust flutter in and out of focus with every breath. 

VAM VAM VAM 

He can see the ocean now. Far below the clouds. Ripples of tranquility patterned with shadows of moisture. The moment just before. 
She is gone.

Writer

This issue embraces the expansive nature of craft—focusing on the relationships among artists and their materials in conversation with lineage, embodied processes, function, survival, and life as it is lived. Many contributors elaborate on craft as perpetual motion: continually reformed bonds in the act of making that serve as proof of self-definition. Artists and writers explore the psychedelia of time devoted to a loom, material kinship, tea encounter, sentimentality as a curatorial drive, and more, following craft as it moves through families, diasporic realities, and markets of trade, tourism, and commercial art.


Craft

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Memory

Time

Jonathan Scott draws on his experience as a gilder to think of a sheet of gold leaf as a shimmering plane of time. Moving through disparate memories as they intertwine with the gilding process, Scott’s experimental text generates questions about what is and what isn’t visible of the craftsperson’s hand.


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Composition: – GILD – Dedicated to V.T.G.N.R.S.M

Sumin Hwang is an artist, researcher, and arts worker based in Brooklyn. She is from San Diego, CA, Houston, TX, and the Korean Peninsula. She is currently excited about devotion, desire, monstrosity, and Clarice Lispector. 


The nine figures in the photograph are split by 25 scissor-cut lines. At the critical moment of the shutter’s closure, the figure in the bottom left-hand corner shifted—her destiny is to be forever in a state of blur. While mostly everyone purses their lips into tight lines, her mouth hangs just slightly open, as if on the cusp of speech. One of the 25 cuts splices right across her eyeline. For a moment, her mind, hidden under bowl-cut hair, floated separate from the rest of her body in garbage piles. What would she have said once reunited with her mind?

For its age, the black-and-white print has been well-preserved, the recent incisions its only notable surface scars. Each sitter’s age places the image within the early 20th century in Korea. In the catalog for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition “The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art” (2022–2023), Kwon Heangga articulates the links between the emergence of Korean photography and Japanese colonial rule. As Kwon writes: 

> ##### After its victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Japan began promoting various war sites as tourist destinations, a project that included selling photographs of the locations as souvenirs and mementos of national pride. Today, most extant photos of Korea or Koreans from around the turn of the twentieth century were taken either by Japanese or Western photographers and thus present Korea under an exoticist or anthropological gaze. [1] 


“Rediscovered” images of anonymous, everyday life have come to be known as “found photography,” which largely encompasses any photograph “not originally intended as art” that has since “taken on new meaning when reordered and recontextualized.” [^2] Found photography derives its name from “found art” or “found objects,” art that is created from items that already have (a) “non-art” functions or (b) frequently circulate within broader commercial markets. [^3] As artists began to integrate and resituate components that might otherwise be widely exchanged and multiplied, the introduction of the found object as art object in the early 20th century posed a threat to artistic singularity and opened larger discussions regarding artistic anonymity, models of cultural production, and commercial circulation.

Since the ’70s, the accessibility and plasticity of found photographs have drawn greater interest from institutional curators, archivists, and collectors alike. [^4] Many of these survived images of “anonymous” life, frequently acquired by means of flea markets, estate sales, the garbage, or otherwise, have been subsumed in bulk into Western archives. With the case of early vernacular Korean photographs, research institutions such as the New York Public Library and the LIFE Picture Collection have acquired and now steward large quantities of images from the 20th century—they encourage us to become wide-eyed voyeurs, to liberally assign new meaning, to “go
forth and reuse!” [^5]. 


In considering the tensions between access, agency, and archival dispossession, I look to Tina M. Campt’s critical approach to found photography. Interrogating the categorical adjective “found,” Campt argues that when collectors, curators, and audiences characterize an image as an “unidentified, ownerless image-object,” the image’s “primary state is ‘lost’ or, more precisely, loss—a loss of identity, a loss of place, a loss of attachment.” [^6] Within this zone of loss, viewers are instead invited to fill in the gaps through a supposedly neutral ritual of non-consensual discovery and comprehension. In his seminal book _Poetics of Relation_, Édouard Glissant urges us to challenge this reflexive desire to comprehend, a word whose etymology lies in the Latin root _prehendere_: “to seize; catch; occupy violently.” [^7] Carefully evaluating the stakes of transparency and visibility, Glissant reasserts the power of a person’s, or even an object’s, “right to opacity”—a liberatory framework that leans into the stickiness of inevitable difference, “accept[ing] the unintelligibility, impenetrability and confusion that often characterize[s] cross-cultural communication.” [^8] In line with Glissant’s notions of opacity, how might we imagine the fate of a photograph that does not eagerly anticipate its own recirculation?

This is not to equate opacity and unknowability with an inherent mysticism or pretentiousness. Rather, I am interested in how images that lie beyond the public assert an intimate type of refusal: refusal to be reassigned, refusal to be commodified, a fundamental refusal to be known by the world. As more and more “found” images of formerly (and still) colonized states are uncovered and circulated, they are frequently re–called upon to cyclically push the same neocolonial agendas that set the stage for their original violent capture. In response to this phenomenon, Campt attunes herself to the latent fugitivity of these images—recognizing them not for overt melodrama or heroism, but rather for their ability to quietly remember survived performances of the everyday.[^9] Resisting the demands of infinite circulation, may we embrace survived, dusty, and invisible images as archival “killjoys”—difficult objects that resist the overbearing expectations of documentary images and circulation. [^10]


This is a call to let them be still.

●

My mother successfully recovered 24 of the image’s 25 fragments from the trash. I am forever grateful for her commitment to the sacred, granting me the opportunity to see my grandmother as a child for the first time. During my mother’s subsequent visit to the US, she carefully traveled with the image’s 24 remaining pieces, and we collectively reassembled and restaged its original capture nearly a century later in Nashville, TN. Three of the photograph’s direct descendants, including my mother and I, quietly participated in this performance of arranging, taping, and memorializing, an ode to lives past. Within this performance of the everyday, there lay no hidden agenda, commercial novelty, or artistic genius—only the collective project of caring for a bodily archive lost and reborn over.


[^1]: Kwon Heangga, “The Birth and Gestation of Korean Photography (1880s–1960s),” in The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art, ed. Virginia Moon, Nora Noh (Los Angeles: Delmonico Books/ Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022): 123.
[^2]: “Found photography,” Wikipedia, last modified July 27, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_photography
[^3]: “Found object,” Wikipedia, last modified October 10, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
[^4]: Douglas R. Nickel, "The Snapshot: Some Notes," in Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, ed. Douglas Nickel (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998): 12–13.
[^5]: Shana Kimball, “Free for All: NYPL Enhances Public Domain Collections for Sharing and Reusing,” New York Public Library, 2016, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/05/share-public-do-main-collections
[^6]: Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017): 81.
[^7]: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy. Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
[^8]: “Opacité/Opacity (Édouard Glissant),” Keywords in Transcultural English Studies, last modified May 4, 2017, http://www.transcul-tural-english-studies.de/opacite-opaci-ty-edouard-glissant
[^9]: Campt, 91.
[^10]: Sara Ahmed, “In Conversation with Judith Butler,” feminist-killjoys, last modified July 26, 2023, https://feministkilljoys.com/2023/07/26/in-conversa-tion-with-judith-butler

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Photography

Found

Sumin Hwang ties the vernacular of craft to vernacular photography, or images of everyday life. After the institutional boom of found photography, especially as images from colonized states are uncovered and circulated in the West, Hwang attunes to how these images retain a fundamental refusal to be known and commodified.

One Thing: This File Cannot Be Found

Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Trained as an urban planner, they took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies and currently practice as an independent curator, writer, and service designer. Shalaka curates projects for Textile, a hyperlocal project on the Haldimand Tract, and is a Visiting Curator at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery. They currently hold roles at OCAD University and, more recently, at the Blackwood. 


Suzanne Morrissette is an artist, curator, and scholar from Winnipeg. Her father’s parents were Michif- and Cree-speaking Métis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire Loyalists and Mennonites expelled from Russia. 


On November 18, 2023, the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice (C’cap)— formerly a gallery called Blinkers Art and Project Space—was launched under the continued leadership of Winnipeg artist Luther Konadu. The intentional move toward a community arts and project space will allow it to continue to support exhibition artists, while acknowledging and extending into broader cultural ecosystems to enable conditions for ongoing practice. In conversation with Konadu, Shalaka Jadhav and Suzanne Morrissette reflect upon the needs of art centres and their models today. 

> **Suzanne Morrissette: Can you introduce yourself and your role at C’cap?** 

**Luther Konadu:** I’m the sole director, an all-encompassing role that includes day-to-day operations,administrative dimensions, seeking and working with other volunteers, attending to visitors, as well as curatorial programming, grantwriting, and working with a board that I recently put together. 

> **SM: We know you’re also an artist; how does that factor into how you approach your role?** 

**LK:** I’m always an artist first. I came in to run the space as an artist, and as an artist who’s always been curious about other artists’ work: what motivates their thinking, the work they make, and why they stick with it. I’m constantly curious about what drives artists to stick with creating, exhibiting, and extending themselves through their practice over a long period of time. That kind of curiosity is very much a central part of how I go about my role in the space, and who I collaborate and am in community with. 

> **Shalaka Jadhav: Can you share a little bit about how the rebrand for C’cap came about?** 

**LK:** When I initially took over the lease two years ago, I wanted to delineate what was there before and where we could go. Part of this delineation included a name change. This took time, as I wanted to be intentional and careful with that process. I wanted accessible language for anyone who isn’t in the arts or who isn’t familiar with the space and what we do. Last fall, through some collective brainstorming, I arrived at the “Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice” to suggest activities that go beyond exhibitions and beyond merely viewing objects in a room. Contemporary art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and I’ve always been itching to see a space (at least in Winnipeg) that considers, central to its programming, the broader cultural ecosystem it emerges from. I’m interested in alternative ways of thinking about what a space like this can hold and how this expands who our publics could be. We are currently going through a consultation process of translating the name to reflect the First Nations communities here in Treaty 1. 

> **SJ: How do you want people to see C’cap? Is it a continuation of Blinkers, or does it signal something else?** 

**LK:** It is decisively a rebirth untethered to anything previous. Not merely a change of name but of ethos. 

> **SM: What changes in the ethos?** 

**LK:** What’s important is being in community and commingling with other disciplines beyond the visual arts, such as literary arts, theatre arts, sound art, etc. Blurring those artificial divisions allows us to think beyond established conventions regarding what else an institution like a gallery can offer as a space and a platform within our own modest means. It doesn’t escape me that we are a very small space, but my ambitions aren’t contained by architecture. 

> **SM: In our work together, Shalaka and I talk quite a bit about the way that galleries work administratively. With this more intentional move toward _community_ as a project space, how are you thinking about governance at C’cap?** 

**LK:** This is frankly one of those crucial areas that isn’t resolved enough for me to express it well. It is still something that is very much a process of development and learning for me. It is not something I have a complete and predetermined view of as I step toward the future. 

I will say that, so far, a significant part of how things have been running is through volunteering, including myself. The impetus behind this is a desire to see C’cap flourish. It is a labour of love. Profit is out of the question, and we aren’t prioritizing personal gain; rather, it’s about having something that we all can experience and enjoy. We give a little bit of ourselves, our time, our skills, etc. It all adds up to something more formidable. I think that’s also one thing that is great about working in Winnipeg. It has the kind of community support that you can cultivate and benefit from without having to be heavily reliant on funding. Of course, funding is very important and crucial, but it’s always good to think about, well, if we don’t get a grant one time, then what do we do? And thinking about other contingencies to be able to be independent. 

> **SM: The way you talk about volunteerism in the space, it’s almost like service to community organizations. I’m thinking about how the idea of a “labour of love” can mean a dedication to a vision, while at the same time it can signal the state of challenges in the arts field where labouring in precarity becomes normative and standard. How does this new model ideally work into the future and for you to keep to your vision?**
 

**LK:** A big, big part of it is persistence through setbacks, having an intrinsic sense of determination, passion, introspection, and seeing the significance of what I’m doing. It is a huge encouragement to see how much it means to both the artists that I work with and the community who engages with it. It’s still something that I am learning, and I don’t really think that it’s something I’m doing on my own. For the moment, I think working from a place of love is what keeps this in motion for me. I’m definitely interested in the possibility of not exclusively relying on funding bodies, but thinking about other means of supporting ourselves and aligning the right resources to be able to achieve what we set out to do. 

> **SM: Do you feel that the current climate for arts funding is restrictive in some ways then?** 

**LK:** If you are starting out, you are essentially out on your own as far as the foundational capital required to get the ball rolling. In this way, it is often difficult for new, potentially cycle-breaking initiatives to take off and sustain themselves without fizzling out. If you don’t have a strong community around you to support the vision, it becomes nearly impossible unless you are independently wealthy. Even at that point, you are likely to be—and understandably—a commercial space.

I wish arts funders wouldn’t be too afraid to take risks: instead of favouring more and more funds toward 50-plus-year-old institutions with often stale ways of engaging with contemporary arts, I wish these funders could take a chance on the new generation of thinkers and cultural workers with a livelier energy to direct fresher paths forward. In a discursive sense, I think it stifles the larger cultural health of the country in relation to its role in a global contemporary-art ecosystem. 

> **SJ: How will you know that this shift is achieving what you set out to achieve?** 

**LK:** Some signs of achievement for me would be when I start seeing people I don’t usually see coming through, when I start engaging with cultural workers who are interested in our intentions, and when there are more successful collaborations. 

> **SJ: What values do you hope to shine through at C’cap? Is this about breaking down silos that divide our communities artistically?** 

**LK:** My hope is to continue to cross over into a larger community that may not consider itself to be in the arts. I want it to be a space that takes seriously the partnerships and collaborations that it has with artists, and various cultural workers. I want it to be a space that is hospitable and isn’t alienating to audiences. I want it to be a space that’s serious about creating and maintaining friendships and being present for people. And overall, for it to be an approachable space. 

> **SM: What about the art scene today feels most alienating to you? What are some examples of ways that C’cap can help to address these challenges?** 

**LK:** I guess when I say alienating, I mean it in a few different ways. Some aren’t intentionally alienating, but the outcomes of operations create those conditions. It is a tricky tightrope to navigate, and that’s part of the learning process I’m making myself open to as someone running an arts space. One way I think about the alienating potential of this work stems from what an organization names itself and how it visually presents to the public. Another related dimension is how artworks or programs are communicated (the type of language used) or presented to audiences. Then there are also the intentions behind who and what gets programmed and who does not or has not historically been represented. I am very cognizant of these complex navigations and committed to working at responding to a mix of communities with whom C’cap is in relation.

Luther Konadu is an artist, writer, editor of _Public Parking_, and director of C’cap: Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices. He lives and works on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). 


Speaker

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Curatorial practice

Institutional critique

Shalaka Jadhav and Suzanne Morrissette speak to Luther Konadu about his directorship of the newly launched Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice in Winnipeg, and how the space plans to bridge divisions between artistic genres, to be relevant to “a larger community that may not consider itself to be in the arts.”

Tilling: The Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice: In Conversation with Luther Konadu

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Editorial

Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

We began thinking about this issue as a way to touch in: to focus on artists’ relationships to their materials, and by extension, to lineage, embodiment, function, survival, and tangible connections to life as it is lived. That we dedicated a theme to Craft perhaps tells us something about how conversations about art are framed differently according to perceptions about medium or genre. If long-established craft disciplines (which publications like _Studio Magazine_ have supported for decades) are intimate with material cultures, what can craft teach us about creative practices more expansively? 

Craft is a vessel that holds space for embodied contexts, the consequences of making, and the meaning of objects as they circulate in the world. This includes movement within families, across diasporic realities, and through local and global markets of trade, tourism, and commercial art. Many of the artists and writers in this issue elaborate on craft as perpetual motion: a continually _happening_ relationship to repetition and process, tools, practicality, the development and sharing of skills, and the crafting of identities. These kinetic acts can be thought of as persistent, stubborn proofs of self-definition for individuals, for communities, for ceremony, and for loved ones. 

Cover artist Akash Inbakumar, in their interview with Holly Chang, speaks about their methodology as one that builds worlds with material kin, in which the artist, materials, and equipment are all active agents: “It’s up to the maker to develop a [...] vernacular of working with something over time, to understand the language of that entity or being.” Jasmine Gui further supports this idea, and evokes curator/historian Glenn Adamson in stating, “Craft only exists in motion. It is a way of doing things, not a classification of objects, institutions, or people.” In her feature on the multiple “islands” of crafts and diasporic adaptations that formed the Nuit Blanche tea installation _Ichigo-Ichie_ (2022), Gui writes about the evolving relationship between people and objects as they travel away from their origins. 

Multidisciplinary artist Anni Araújo Spadafora elegantly weaves hours of time spent on the loom (“these threads who become kin”) with myth, memory, citation, and noise music, to mark patterns of art and life that appear when you spend time absurdly. Sparked by conversations with D. St-Amour, Spadafora’s text ruminates on devotion to repetition and the psychedelia of weaving that creates cloth from accumulated patterns. She interprets repetition as metaphor, in which, conjuring Etal Adnan, the human body is like a weaving-loom: “our bones the warp, trying to stand in this illusion which space is; and there’s that perpendicular thread to the warp, which we call time.” 

Amanda Shore further takes up how craft can be love made object. Shore reflects on the commemorative exhibition “For the Love of Sandra Alfoldy (2020–2021),” dedicated to the beloved mentor and eminent Canadian craft scholar, and asks what happens when sentimentality and feeling become a curatorial driver. Defying the conventions of gallery texts, didactic panels in the show featured anecdotes about Sandra written by the exhibiting artists. In opening up the narrative to anyone who wanted to contribute, the show created a space that might hold fuller truths about craft histories— in all its joys and baggage—in a moment of immense loss. 

Reflecting on Qualeasha Wood’s practice, Salena Barry traces how the artist straddles textiles and digital imagery, handicraft and industrial fabrication, and craft and commercial art worlds, from a lineage of Black American creative production that is not discipline-bound. As Wood’s textiles are taken up by commercial galleries and rendered more “precious,” she notices that “what seems to happen is that fine art expands to accommodate elements previously considered craft.” In the midst of this expanded commercial interest, Barry underscores the urgency of protecting alternative relationships with objects that are at stake in our understandings of craft. 

Javier Fuentes Martinez’s sweeping feature asks how Latinx identities are stitched together by the movement of objects and people. Fuentes Martinez begins with a discussion of ships as sea craft for Europe’s early colonial crossings to the Americas, and for people’s current migrations, and suggests that the ingenuity of migrants itself is a craft. The writer critiques how Latinx identities are also externally influenced by the way that art and tourism markets, museum collections, and colonial classifications treat Indigeneity, and makes the case for a more expansive Latinx art discourse in Canada. 

The body is visibly figured in Trevor Novak’s Artist Project, where he sculpts ceramic and digital figures in surrealist predicaments, creating bodies that sprout from his own body-as-maker. As matt lambert writes, this work places a classic nude subject in cheerfully abject poses against perfection. In Composition, Jonathan Scott draws from his experience as a gilder to think of a single sheet of gold leaf as a shimmering plane of time. Moving through disparate memories as they intertwine with the gilding process, Scott’s experimental text generates questions about what is and what isn’t visible of the craftsperson’s hand. In One Thing, Sumin Hwang ties the vernacular of craft to vernacular photography, or images of everyday life. After the institutional boom of found photography, especially as images from colonized states are uncovered and circulated in the West, Hwang is attuned to how these images retain a fundamental refusal to be known and commodified. Finally, in Tilling, Shalaka Jadhav and Suzanne Morrissette speak to Luther Konadu about his directorship of the newly launched Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice (formerly Blinkers Art and Project Space) in Winnipeg. For Konadu, C’cap is a space that can bridge artificial divisions between artistic genres, in order to be relevant to “a larger community that may not consider itself to be in the arts.”

156_Editorial.pdf

Editor Joy Xiang reflects on the issue’s theme: _Craft._


Editorial: Craft

Feature

Holly Chang is an artist, curator, researcher, and writer living in Toronto who has recently completed her MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York University. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation mixed-race identity. She maintains cultural ties with her cross-cultural identity and draws on her hybrid background for inspiration. 


> **Holly Chang: How would you describe your practice?** 

**Akash Inbakumar:** My practice primarily focuses on craft, methodology, and world-building as a way of storytelling. I focus on material kin as a way of conceiving or making an alternative form of family while queering the notion of family-making. I conceptualize my weaving as a process of sex between the loom and myself. The fabric is the child we conceive through our ritual. The cloth then carries genetic information—it tells a story, carrying context from me as the maker, but also from the materials and equipment that I use. My exhibition “Era of the Moon: Phases” [Art Gallery of Burlington, 2023] investigated cyclical patterns in our lives and used the moon as a metaphor for how we go through these changes. 

“Era of the Moon” is a part of a much bigger story, inspired by the in-depth world-building of the video game _Elden Ring_. This show is one part of a three-part story, with the working title _An Age of False Gods_. The other parts are “Era of Stars” and “Era of Rot”; Stars is about connectivity and navigation, Moon is where we have made all these connections, and Rot is where everything falls apart, but the matter from the decay forms new stars in a cycle of creation, manifestation, and destruction. 

> **HC: Can you describe “Era of the Moon” as if someone has never seen it? As well as what you’d want a viewer to take away from the show?** 

**AI:** The exhibition had four components: in the centre, hand-woven and hand-stitched garments hung on a custom made palm wood structure, which acted as an armature to symbolize the figures of two dancers. A large cotton fabric piece, where I used lace-stitching to connect the panels, covered the ceiling and depicted a batik [an Indonesian technique of wax-resist dyeing] moon in the middle. The back wall featured a three-panel triptych made using shibori [a Japanese dye technique typically used with indigo dye] with the image of two batik hands holding pearls, and pearl embellishments in the stitching. Lastly, there was a video of a performance that captured two dancers in movement with the garments, who orbited each other like the relation of the moon with the earth. 

I’d want the viewer to recognize the abundance of natural metaphors in the world that can console us. We can be very polarized by the world we are in and often forget it as a place to look for answers. During the pandemic, the moon was my biggest support. It was a guiding light for me at night—having that companionship helped me a lot. This was my thanks to the moon. The viewer doesn’t have to be attached to the moon, but I hope that they can go into the world and find metaphor and support through nature. 

> **HC: I am interested in circling back to your concept of material kin— can you speak to how it comes through in the exhibition?** 

**AI:** Primarily, material kin comes through for me in the wearable pieces— how do I get the viewer to interact with the garment? Often when garments are displayed, they are very stagnant. I had an opportunity this time to work with Roya DelSol, who is my co-director for the video, and choreographer Sofi Gudiño. The choreography involved us listening to what the textile had to say. For the viewer, beyond the movement and looking at the other pieces, I think of the textiles as roadmaps that can lead the way. The kinship part includes what kin can do with each other—they lead the way when you are stuck or stay with you where you are stuck. It doesn’t always have to be about moving forward. I hoped the ceiling piece would have an element of comfort, giving the viewer the sense of being wrapped in a textile womb, as it engulfed them. 

The notion of material kin is from the book _Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene_ by Donna J. Haraway. She talks about making kin with animals and hybrid species in speculative fiction, where people are being gene-spliced, and children have three parents. I thought this was a beautiful concept especially in this time of ecological terror. I was really interested in doing the same, making kin, with material. It’s my proposition to the question of, “How do we pass on information?” This is slightly post-human. When you are wearing my garments, they act as a second skin and transform the wearer into a material kin hybrid that is more than its parts. 

I don’t always view material kinship as 50/50. Maybe it’s more like 33 percent, 33 percent, 33 percent (plus the decimals)—between me, the material, and the equipment, where we are all agents of change and practice. In that sense, I believe in material agency when something breaks or reacts in a way that the maker wasn’t expecting. It’s up to the maker to develop a skill set and vernacular of working with something over time, to understand the language of that entity or being. 

> **HC: What do you think about the agency of the objects you create and its connection to craft and other craft practices/processes?** 

**AI:** How my material kin connect with deeper narratives of craft and craft-making stems from a romanticized vision of craft. An example of this is that often motifs in clothing came from the world our ancestors lived in. The paisley pattern that originally came from the Middle East and travelled to South Asia became really tied with the image of a mango because that’s what people had around, and it is similar in shape. It reminds me of when religions hybridize to form new gods and rituals. A lot of Pagan rituals were integrated into Christianity—these motifs come from another place that gets reinterpreted in context and narrative. To me, these are hybrid children of all these cross-pollinations through generations, which carry knowledge in their bodies. This is my personal perspective on why people have biological kin/children. I think there is this idea of you yourself passing down knowledge, to this new being. I think material can also do that, and objects can be made with love and feelings and be associated with conceiving. I love the double entendre of conceiving an idea and the physical idea of conceiving a child. 

> **HC: You’re directly involved with the performance that is part of the exhibition—how did that begin, and how is your craft practice embedded in performance? Does performance have a possibility to be an extension of craft?** 

**AI:** It’s been quite the journey to get to performance and moving in my own work. I’ve always gravitated toward making wearables. In my first year at OCAD U, I had made quite a few but was always too shy to perform in them. So, I would install them like artefacts: on the floor, half-buried like it was a “performative artefact.” It was me being shy, but I would wear them and strut around the studio like a diva. But to conceptually move in them the way I wanted to, I felt like I couldn’t.

For a long time, I was making wearables and not wearing them. Eventually I got really depressed in my practice and stopped making for a while. This whole time, these material kin were screaming at me, “We want to be worn, we want to be performed in.” Finally, I applied to the Plug-N-Play residency with the Toronto Dance Theatre, and was accepted. 

The first day was me absorbing the humongous space. I also felt very imposter-y, like this could have gone to an actual dancer. The second day, I put on the costumes and realized how intuitive the movement was. I let the garments guide me. It was a big boost of confidence to take the jump and have that space to practice and explore the movement. 

If I’m going to pivot and tell a sappy story, I feel like performance was a roadblock because of how much feedback I got from my parents about the way I moved my body. Being queer and BIPOC, I feel like it’s always a tight-rope. From the way I walked to the way I use a knife in my right hand and a fork in my left hand, I felt so self-conscious about any notion of my body being perceived. And to finally let go, there is still body dysmorphia that holds me back sometimes, but I think the first step was just doing it and letting it implode. 

I feel like there is the “craft of dance” and the “craft of cheese-making”; there are so many crafts. My question is “What is craft?”—which I don’t know. What I realized is there is this thing of “sampling” that forms a connective tissue between traditional notions of craft and material, and the craft of moving your body. In textiles, you’re probably going to make a few samples to explore techniques. In dance, Sofi and I were getting to know each other’s bodies and leaning into each other to understand body weight and how each of us distributes our weight. I didn’t realize all these building blocks that dance can have. Repetition in dance is so familiar to me through the repetition of weaving or sample-making. 

> **HC: For me, I can see three distinct craft processes in the exhibition— indigo and natural dyeing, weaving, and costume-making. Can you talk more about your processes?** 

**AI:** Shibori and batik have become two of my favourite processes. I used to be against surface design techniques. I used to buy yarns and not dye them, to focus on the weave structure. During the pandemic, I didn’t have access to my loom and I gravitated toward natural dye, which is safe to do at home. Dyeing using shibori and batik feels more freeform, and I want to engage in processes that I like doing—I don’t want to force myself to conceive kin. 

When I started draping woven wearables on my body, I was like, “Oh this works!” My first instinct now with textiles isn’t to put them on the wall, but how can I play with them on my body? I wouldn’t call myself a costume maker. I think about them as wearable sculptures; I don’t mass-produce anything and they are not very functional. It is more like the costume is wearing you than you are wearing the costume—if you move the wrong way, it will slip off. 

> **HC: Do you feel like your analogue processes engage with the canon and histories of craft? How does your practice expand on more traditional values?** 

**AI:** I think what draws me to more traditional practices is repetition. Even digital weaving still has a lot of repetition. But I like that analogue is slow— with that time, so much communication happens between me and the material. I think the history of craft and any traditional craft practice (at least the ones that come to mind) is based in community and sharing material. I wouldn’t say my practice begins from picking raw fibre—the craft industries used to be so interconnected, where you would know where the material comes from and the person processing your yarn. And before that, you were the one processing the raw fibre, letting it dry, spinning and weaving it, and making fabric for your kin/family. There is something that I romanticize about that whole process, a kind of richness of technology. 

I find that repetition is a way of investing yourself into what you are making. I often think about my mom’s Buddhist prayers; you repeat them daily, and it shows your worship and commitment to something. My first [moon] work was a lot of hand-stitching rope, and each stitch is a mantra of my thanks. My mind is in the work because of how repetitive it is. If it is in a community base, you are surrounded by people doing the same thing or working to the same goal. 

> **HC: When you talk about community, even looking at the zine you produced for “Era of the Moon,” I see so many names included. How do you think community figures into the creation of your show, and craft more broadly?** 

**AI:** This exhibition took a village to make. In the craft perspective, I want to delve into each component of the show... 

For weaving, I was taught in a formal university setting and I was weaving with a bunch of peers and had a teacher to ask. The first time we wound a warp was in a group—one person was counting the thread, the other person was talking and hopefully didn’t lose the thread count. This engraved in me that weaving can be done alone, but also as a group. Every time I weave, I’m reminded of who taught me, from the way I dress my loom to the way I know how to keep a thread in tension. 

In the show specifically, even in filming—how many people are on set to bring your vision to life is astonishing to me. There’s the PA, AD, director, camera grip, lighting person, etc. On filming day, there were 15 people on set that I had never met, but they were all there to be a part of the process. As an artist, often art practices today are a “one-man show” until you are installing, then you have a team. From social media to self-promotion, documentation, making the work—to me, this is ridiculous. It takes a village to even be an artist, and with this project, I was able to obtain a Canada Council grant to pay a competitive rate to my studio assistants and everyone I worked with. To have these people to bounce my ideas off of—to know they supported my vision—felt great and made the work feel fuller. 

The goal of my work is to world-build; to do this alone leads to the world that we are living in today where very few people have a voice. To be a leader is about sharing and this takes so many voices and feedback. I kept telling Sofi, “Please direct in a way where we are working with the cloth, but if you want to throw something in, throw it in.” With Roya, I said, “Listen, if there is a shot you see, ring it in. I trust what you see, your expertise, what you are bringing to the table.” With the fabrication team, I was asking, “What do you think of this, what does this look like?” I can be a liaison because other people have great ideas and there are things you haven’t thought of. People that we often forget are the install team, which included Joseph Thomson, Rollin King, Jasmine Mander, Yahn Nemirovsky, Samuel Kwan, and Miao Xuan Liu. You can make work and it’s half the game; the last part is how you install it. Installs can make or break the work. I came with no install plan to the gallery and described it to the team, who brought the vision to life and worked with me to adapt and change. I couldn’t have done it without all of them. 

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**Akash Inbakumar** is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their interdisciplinary practice uses installation, costumes, and performance to explore world-building, mythology, and kinship. Entering partnerships with multiple media, tools, and processes, they conceive material kin. These kin represent a world where craft objects play the role of storytellers who carry family lineage. Inbakumar is a recent graduate of OCAD U and has shown work at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Art Address (Oakville), The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto), Patel Brown (Toronto), Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto), and Riverdale Hub (Toronto). 


Akash Inbakumar is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their interdisciplinary practice uses installation, costumes, and performance to explore world-building, mythology, and kinship. Entering partnerships with multiple media, tools, and processes, they conceive material kin. These kin represent a world where craft objects play the role of storytellers who carry family lineage. Inbakumar is a recent graduate of OCAD U and has shown work at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Art Address (Oakville), The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto), Patel Brown (Toronto), Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto), and Riverdale Hub (Toronto). 


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156_Chang.pdf

Textiles

Relational

Holly Chang interviews Akash Inbakumar about their practice, which focuses on craft methodologies and performance as a way of building worlds. Centred on a discussion of “Era of the Moon: Phases,” their 2023 solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Inbakumar explores what it means to make kin with material.

The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar

Anni Araújo Spadafora (she/ her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her work spans performance, music and sound, and textiles. She regularly studies at the Marshfield School of Weaving (Vermont). Recent project and performance sites include Extrapool (Nijmegen, NL), Milieux Institute (Montreal), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is also a founding member of the band New Fries, who have released music with Telephone Explosion Records (Toronto) and Soul Jazz Records (London, UK). New Fries has toured across Canada and internationally and opened for The Pop Group, Neil Hagerty, The Ex, and Xiu Xiu (among others).


D. St-Amour (they/she) is a writer, book-maker, and recovering arts worker. Since 2011, St-Amour has held curatorial, administrative, and research positions at a range of institutions, including the AGO, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Art Metropole, and Galerie SBC. St-Amour regularly writes about artists’ books and publishing practices through the lens of visual arts and media history, and is slowly publishing a series of queer sci-fi and speculative fiction books through their slow-press project, specific. place (with co-editor S F Ho). Recently, St-Amour completed an MA in Art History/Visual Cultures at York University, and is currently an MLIS candidate at Western University in London. 


A while ago, I watched a video on Instagram of a weaver cutting a tapestry off her loom. The video was shared by Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center, a textile studio established in 1952 in Harrania, Egypt. In the video, the weaver takes her shears to the warp threads after completing the weaving of her tapestry. Warp threads are those beamed tautly on a loom and act as the bones of the cloth to be woven into with weft thread. Musically speaking, warp threads are rhythm, weft threads are melody. In front of an audience of friends, family, visitors to the art centre, and other artists/weavers, she slides her shears across the warp threads, slowly releasing the cloth from the tension of the loom. About halfway across the width of the tapestry, her company begins to cheer. The cheering sounds like ceremonial applause. More than the applause you would hear at a performance, this clapping is boisterous and intimate, much like the applause given to a couple entering a dance hall following their marriage officiation, or someone running across the finish line of a marathon. In this moment for the weaver and her company, cutting cloth from the loom is exactly that kind of meaningful event; woven cloth is a ceremony, a mighty accomplishment, a marathon. I later read that the tapestry took her a year to weave. 

When first learning to weave, I enrolled in a ten-week beginner weaving workshop at an adult-education community centre in Etobicoke, taught by Line Dufour. I was the youngest person in a group of mostly retired women, many of whom had been attending the workshop each consecutive season, weaving their work slowly over long periods. One woman had been weaving a tapestry on an upright loom for years, building the textile line by line in weekly two-hour sessions. The piece had a geometric pattern of mostly neutral colors, like hearty electric earth. It was a thrill to see each time I returned to class. Her tapestry had a satisfying balance, graphic boldness, and a quality of woven structure that I’ve later learned comes from good practice and quality time. I was present the day she finished weaving it. Everyone in the workshop gathered around her loom when the time came to cut the tapestry off. She dragged her shears across the warp threads, cutting small groups of threads one at a time, and we all watched as the cloth gradually relaxed from its tension on the loom and slowly sprang to life. A group of us stood around her, gasping and cheering. When it was fully released, a fellow student popped open a champagne bottle and we clapped and cheered loudly. I felt an incredible communion with these women, as we shared in the unique joy of celebrating weaver and cloth. It was a thrill to watch this weaver come to the end of her warp threads—this was her marathon, her mighty accomplishment, and for all of us present, the ceremony. 

I have cut many warps off my loom. It feels like a unique kind of ending after spending countless hours with these threads who become kin, and understanding their challenging yet pleasurable behaviours, while building something that resembles cloth. It is also a very material act of finality, _a marking of time spent absurdly_. And I think this is the ceremony of it, the release so grand that it affirms a commitment to playing with time differently. Eileen Myles wrote in their book _For Now_ (2020), “But if you’re somebody that wants to do that with your life which is just waste your time moment to moment, I mean it’s great, I thought I will waste it being a poet, I threw the gauntlet down and what happened after that was nothing and nothing is where I work.” I’m not a poet, but the absurdity of time spent at the loom feels exactly like what Myles is describing. Weaving cloth by hand—what a waste of time! A ceremonious waste of time. 

A friend and collaborator D. St-Amour paraphrases notes they took during a 2015 writing seminar with Eileen Myles: “They said [that] poetry is a play-shaped language. With poetry, the negative space becomes a place of possibility, its subject is allowed to be aerobic, it is the inflectional space, forced to the fore. This is the space where all of the peripheral and marginal thoughts can happen and are given room. Room to change. They also said, _all subjects are fugitive._ You’re in constant pursuit of the subject. Not to capture it, but to surround the subject with a negative space that can frame it, shape it, [and] allow it to keep an aerobic quality.” 

I want to think of Myles’s poetics alongside Penelope in Homer’s _Odyssey_—a potent story about time at the loom. Penelope’s husband Odysseus is off fighting the Trojan war for 20 years. The people of Ithaca believe that Odysseus has died at war and demand that Penelope find a new suitor imminently so the Ithacans can have a new leader. Penelope promises to comply once she weaves a burial shroud for Odysseus. Penelope is convinced Odysseus is still alive, but needs to buy herself some time in the event he returns home. She spends her days weaving the shroud but at night sneak- ily unweaves whatever length of cloth she’s woven that day. She buys herself time. Penelope’s unweaving is her material modulation of desire and agency and an absurd play with time through her threads. In _In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy_ (1995) Adriana Cavarero writes, “Penelope’s epic is the story of inventing new forms of space and time.” 

Perhaps I have an investment in understanding the poetic quality of time spent at the loom because weaving requires so much of it. And time has never been more expensive in this late-capitalist hellscape. I learned very quickly that weaving requires devotion. Anne Low’s sculpture _Bedpost_ (2020) honours this. The Sointula, BC–based artist studies regularly at the Marshfield School of Weaving, a small, rural, independent weaving school in Marshfield, VT—the same school where I developed my foundational weaving skills and regularly return to for study. The weavers who attend workshops all sleep at a small farmhouse located uphill from the barn-based weaving studio. _Bedpost_ is a replica of one of the weavers’ lodging bedposts, a memorial to the beds that host all the weavers who pass through the school. The bedpost is singular and upright, and draped over it is a replica of Low’s work shirt, which is hand-woven, hand-dyed, and adorned with custom silver buttons fabricated by a silversmith. In her 2023 University of Victoria visiting artist lecture, Low described the work as “a garment that represents, in a quiet way, this passage of people practicing this specific skill or method.” A bedpost to honour the many who practice this devotion. [^1] 

Perhaps weaving in the negative space of _nothing_—in that absurd spending of time—is a place of possibility. The threads themselves teach lessons there—this is the stuff of material practice. Sophy Naess, New York–based artist and weaver, says in her publication _Weavers Discourse: Fragments, No. 1 Origins_ (2016), “Perhaps in weaving everything is equal. There is no hierarchy, there is no detail, there is only structure. Color is superficial. The pattern would exist without color. Decorum is possible but not necessary. If you pay attention to the weave you are paying attention to a superstructure that every fiber can be made to participate in. Does it sound fascist? Holistic?” Naess’s collage-like pictorial tapestries are woven with wildly painted warps—there is so little order in her grid of warp and weft. She embellishes her cloth with supplementary weft thread, which brings a material depth to the work, and makes it challenging to recognize the structure. The results are intimate, smudged woven images, almost glitchy from the layers of colour and varied thread-interlacement techniques. They are unlike anything I’ve seen in their vibrancy and complete abandon of how the loom (and the weaver’s shuttle) should be used.[^2] 

A few years before learning to weave, I began writing and performing music with a band called New Fries with Tim Fagan and Jenny Gitman. Two out of three of us had never played music before. New Fries made deconstructed and dissonant pattern music. Succinct, brash, noisy songs with repeated drums, bass, guitar, and voice. Because two of us lacked a language of musicianship, we came to rely on elemental expressions of music to create songs, a language of repetition and dynamics: loud/quiet, fast/slow, space/noise. The music had an absurd performative quality to it and was at times unlistenable. But its urgency demanded attention. The music was not unlike that from the no-wave era of the lower Manhattan neighbourhoods of the late ’70s/early ’80s. Arto Lindsay was the example: attack a guitar with chaos and abandon the convention of use. And like his band DNA, do not emulate any style or tradition, but work to find a language unique to the members of the band. 

For years, weaving and noise music felt at odds with each other. While doing both, I resented weaving for its preciousness, in contrast to the brazen freedom and connectedness that came with making music in a community of bands. I often wondered if weaving was just talking to oneself. I later realized both pattern music and cloth were concerned with repetition as a style and device. Repetition was insistence both atthe loom and with the band: one quiet, one urgent.[^3] Weavers commonly describe an intimacy felt at the loom, in the repetitive psychedelia of weaving, counting threads, and paying close attention to accumulations of patterns and structures. Weaving is also very physical in its cycles of passing the shuttle, beating the weft thread, and beginning again. Our bodies sit at the loom as its choreographed extension, our hands and feet dance as the cloth climbs. It’s cyborg-like. In _Life Is a Weaving_ (2016), Etel Adnan wrote, “The human body is indeed this weaving-loom, our bones the warp, trying to stand in this illusion which space is; and there’s that perpendicular thread to the warp, which we call time, making us invisible crucified ones [...] [T]hat’s how vertigo comes from being suspended by only one thread, from having a destiny as elastic as wools, from being imprisoned in such flexible stitches that one feels covered by a sheepskin and protected against the evening dew and the morning’s, the vertigo comes from the fact that we are a tapestry which can’t be undone and that none can contain.” 

The artist and weaver Paola Besana expressed this more directly in her work _Telai umani (Human Looms)_ (1977–1980). In this performance piece, the mechanics of the loom are performed by multiple bodies, creating the tension and movements for the warp threads to mimic the action of a loom. Warp threads are secured around hands and feet and in collective up-or-down movements to create space for the weft thread to pass and interlace into a woven structure. Cloth is a technical object made of basic elements of warp and weft. The loom, in its many structural iterations, is essentially an apparatus to keep threads taut and move those threads in a mechanical operation of binary code (up or down). 

While discussing Adnan’s tapestry works, Lynne Tillman writes, “Weaving is a way to consider entanglement, say, of love and hate, of small events and great ones, of an individual in culture.”[^4] As a weaver it is impossible to not feel the enormity of cloth as industry, as (often) exploitative labour, as resistance (luddites!), and as a complicated ethnographic object. How does one begin to make sense of cloth as the most ubiquitous material in contemporary life, often produced violently in our highly industrialized, globalized world? Or of weaving as the most ancient of crafts? Or cloth as bourgeois marker? Cloth can also be a material expression of local agriculture. Cloth can be a record of a language, or the material of state independence. Cloth is the material of home and of the body. It’s what we are born into and later die in. Weavers are so dramatic! And we feel the weight of cloth. 

In March 2023, I visited the home of the late Paola Besana in Milano. The small three-bedroom flat holds a studio to host weaving workshops, a historical textile library, and an expansive collection of handmade objects containing her central curiosity: woven structures. Besana’s interest in woven structures had her working across disciplines: visual art with a focus on sculpture, performance, historical textile research, teaching, and design and production across interior decoration, fashion, and industrial design. Hers was a very alive, deeply curious, and devoted practice. And in Italy, where cloth is still woven by hand in many parts of the country, Besana’s work was especially relevant. After passing in 2021, a team of artist-collaborators, students, and family have maintained Besana’s home as an archive of her practice, and a site for research open to the public. Anna Ravano, an artist and former collaborator of Besana’s, hosted my visit and mentioned that artists, architects, historians, industrial designers, mathematicians, anthropologists, and weavers all come to Besana’s home for research—all of them are interested in woven structures. During my visit, I spent time researching in her library, but I also spent a good, slow time looking at the tools and handmade objects hanging on her walls and from her ceiling. Hand-woven wire mason sieves, baskets woven in wildly complex hexagonal structures, and of course, hand-woven cloth. Besana was unconcerned with the designations of “art” and “craft.” She created work across disciplines freely. She researched and educated freely. She hung the sieve on her wall in wonder. With Besana in mind, can you imagine any preoccupations with the disciplinary boundaries of “art” and “craft”? How embarrassing, how suffocating. 

In _Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen_ (2022), a book about cooking and repetitive practice, Rebecca May Johnson writes a chapter titled “The Kitchen is a Weaving Room.” When I first arrived at this writing I was electrified. I have commonly described weaving as similar to cooking (repetitive, highly methodical) and cloth as similar to food (as omnipresent and plural as heads on Earth). Johnson writes, “I am writing an epic in which I cook the same recipe a thousand times. I will make big dick claims about the knowledge that is produced through this cooking. I am writing against the tendency for people to diminish cooking as almost the opposite of thought. Cliché is served with a side of cliché to make such work appear minor, uncomplicated, or almost accidental: unworthy of critical attention.”[^5] Like Johnson, I want to make big dick claims about weaving, as I have watched with great amusement at the ways people (artists included) often receive the information of woven cloth with great indifference. I will insist that weaving is not simply talking to oneself. But any big dick claim cannot fully articulate the devotion of sitting at the loom—such claims would only get folded into the _continuous present_ of weft threads built line by line into the warp’s scaffold. And though the cloth itself rarely marks this devotion, weavers know the absurd spending of time required for its making. 
 
 
 
##### Hello. I originally asked Anni to write this with me, and then, for a litany of reasons both personal and general, I was not able to. Though I have some sadness that we couldn’t write together, I’m very glad that it presented a space for Anni to make some word-shaped thoughts around her very special practice, a practice that means so much to me. When I saw the call for pitches on Craft, I immediately thought of Anni and a strange, public conversation we had a couple of years ago. Anni and I bonded in our planning process for this public talk, manically sending thoughts back and forth over email, making playlists, and making a map underneath a seemingly disconnected landscape of craft, music, and art. What we were trying to dig at was the DIY ethos that we have seen build, knit, and shape communities—more specifically, our communities, separate and together, over many years. At a picnic table in a park last year, we picked up on some of the threads we weren’t able to tie in during the talk. We spoke about how, for much of our lives, we hadn’t realized that we had persistent interests (or maybe we thought our work was athematic), because we’d both followed such circuitous paths to where we currently are. I may be putting words in Anni’s mouth, but I feel like we settled something through that conversation that is confirmed here in Anni’s piece: what we both value most is the negative space, the area around the object(s) at the centre of the ceremony, the place where human bodies gather, where meaning accumulates. The value in the time that’s spent, and the time that’s marked, absurdly.—D St-Amour


[^1]: In her text “Thread-Twisters,” which accompanied Anne Low’s exhibition “Figure like hearse” at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2020– 2021), Lisa Robertson writes, “And also like a language, or any human know-how, if weaving is not consistently practiced and hence transformed, it can recede from community knowledge.” 
[^2]: Naess acknowledges this in _Weavers Discourse_: “There are different ways to use a loom. When I get this loom set up I will use it differently than my grandmother, who always obeyed the grid, going back and forth, back and forth, all the way across, like a slinky with one clear path to the bottom of the staircase. I will use it instead to make a tapestry, which will require a different butterfly hanging loose from the warp for each of the colors I choose to wedge into place. This is called a haute lisse or basse lisse, accumulating its imagery by the weaver’s will and fingers rather than the scheme prescribed by the grid and the obedient shuttle.” From _Weavers Discourse: Fragments, No. 1 Origins_ (New York City: 321 Gallery, 2016). 
[^3]: Richard Kostelanetz wrote of Gertrude Stein’s use of repetition, “by dominating the reader’s attention, repetitions become a device for focusing and emphasis; a passage is remembered in terms of this repeated material.” And he continues, “In reading Stein, one finds that the reapplication of attention, especially after a lapse or rebuff, can produce a range of unusual effects, because the reader’s mind is forced out of its customary perceptual procedures.” From "Gertrude Stein: the new literature," _Hollins Critic_ 12, no. 3 (1975). 
[^4]: Tillman continues, “Adnan titled her essay about how she came to do this work ‘Life Is a Weaving.’ ‘A weaving’ is one of a multitude, not ‘the’ only one. There are many ways and approaches, many versions of society and culture, many kinds of poetry and art. Life wears a coat of many colors. A Bible story could be a line in a poem, and an ancient tradition can make things new or renew them.” From “Etel Adnan,” _4Columns_, December 4, 2020, https://4columns.org/ tillman-lynne/etel-adnan 
[^5]: Johnson continues, “Similar thinking lies behind Sigmund Freud’s suggestion in 1933 that women’s only discovery in the history of civilization is the invention of weaving. But even that, Freud speculates, was probably only an imitation of nature.” Freud suggested that nature was a model for women’s invention of weaving (not ideation). In fact, he claimed that women were imitating the growth of pubic hair. From _Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen_ (London: Pushkin Press, 2020), 38.

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Anni Araújo Spadafora threads together discussions around contemporary textile-based artists, noise music, myth, and memory. With editorial contributions from D. St-Amour, Spadafora interprets the hours of time spent on the loom as a kind of devotional repetition that makes absurd temporalities possible and reveals patterns of life. 


Marking Time Spent Absurdly

Salena Barry is a writer from Toronto, Canada, who is currently based in London, UK. She was a 2021 Frieze New Writer and a 2022 Jerwood Writer in Residence. She has written for institutions including Delfina Foundation and Site Gallery as well as for publications including _Frieze, ArtReview,_ and _Emergent Magazine._


“Someone walked right across it,” Qualeasha Wood tells me about an exhibition in which she placed one of her tapestries on the gallery floor. “It was a tapestry with my face and my body on it, and so I felt that pain of being stepped on. It felt violent.” After the show, she decided not to place her textiles on the floor in this way again, although she continues to experiment with the way she shows her work. For her, the moment was a lesson in how people view textiles, and by extension, craft. It demonstrated how quickly something can go from being art that is respected, like her other works hung on nearby walls, to something that is not. 

Working primarily in Jacquard tapestry and tufting, Wood doesn’t mind her work being called craft or art, but she tells me that in the last few years, she has been increasingly referred to as a textile artist. As a Black American artist who comes from a family working in printing and photography, she draws from a rich personal and political history of Black American craft and art production. However, as much as her practice fits into this lineage, or perhaps because it does, she troubles discrete categorizations. Black American creative production has always been difficult to align with existing Western genres, because its makers were historically excluded from the structures (social, academic, etc.) and communities that created them. This necessitated creating beyond and in spite of these categories. 

Wood’s tuftings, bright and cartoonish at first glance, are forms of storytelling. Unlike tapestries, which are woven on a loom, tufting involves a needle, or tufting gun more contemporarily, which draws yarn through a backing fabric to create a series of U-shaped loops on its surface. When Wood saw people, notably men, use tufting to create trendy commercial products— think Supreme-logo rugs—to make money quickly, she thought otherwise: “I wanted to figure out how to have a critical conversation on a rug.” Her tufted works feature a recurring character: a black silhouette of a girl with two Afro puffs and large eyes that peer knowingly at the viewer. This figure approaches and recalls racist Black caricature but stops short of it by not employing any of the exaggerated features that make this imagery offensive. 

Her figures’ cuteness allows Wood to draw viewers in and, upon capturing their interest, the sinister element of her images emerges. Wood replaces the cheerful scenarios or light-hearted hijinks traditionally expected in cartoons with scenes suggesting exclusion, danger, and loss. The referencing of racist caricature through its silhouette symbolizes the continued subjugation of Black bodies, but through means that are less blatant. It is also a way of reclaiming and subverting these images to serve those they are meant to denigrate. By placing this character in uncomfortable scenarios, Wood uses it to demonstrate the realities Black people experience. In _All You Must Hold On To_ (2023), the figure holds another like herself, who rests limply in her arms. Where there should be bright white eyes on this second lifeless figure, there is a single blue teardrop. 

In contrast, Wood’s tapestries are more hi-fi: internet-age collages rendered in fabric. Text boxes, screenshots, emojis, menu bars, cursors, and the signature red, yellow, and green macOS window buttons are abundant. The result looks like a screen that is glitchy and frozen after opening too many tabs, folders, and images. These tapestries feature images of the artist—mostly selfies taken on a webcam or phone—and chronicle her online experiences, which have included doxxing. 

In _Clout Chasin’_ (2023), she incorporates screenshots from real online exchanges. A text box on the top right of the work shows an exchange between Wood and a user named “James” (his last name pixelated) in the comments of a Facebook post. James writes, “Qualeasha were you born to Crack head parents?” Underneath, Wood matter-of-factly responds, “Nope both military veterans!” The artist has received many comments like these, many of them much worse than what she has chosen to depict. “I didn't want to put the worst things in [my tapestries] because I just didn’t really feel like I needed to use the most graphic thing in the world for people to grasp how fucked up it is that the average person will just have interactions like these casually with zero consequence.” 

By fixing the ephemeral and fast-paced nature of the internet in fabric, Wood slows and solidifies the experience of being a Black femme online for contemplation. Instead of being able to ctrl+alt+delete away, we are forced to look. More than that, part of her decision to work in Jacquard weaving and tufting relates to specific moments and places from her home life, such as her grandmother’s house, where a blanket depicted photographic images of her grandchildren. Wood’s tuftings were inspired by a Looney Tunes rug in her childhood room. Using these materials to articulate and grapple with her experiences shows how those encounters continue to linger in the reality we inhabit after clicking away and powering off, as well as how deeply felt memories are—they can be held, they have a texture. When I ask Wood about her decision to transfer the images she makes onto textiles as opposed to paper, she explains that “how something feels is sometimes more important than what it looks like.” In her tapestries, which could be dismounted from the gallery walls and wrapped around the viewer, Wood withdraws the possibility of comfort and leaves the viewer cold and bare in front of her reality. Here, both recalling and subverting the usual function of blankets expands the work’s conceptual purpose. 

Stereotypes about craft have associated it with the domestic space and handmade objects. Although Wood does not shy away from these ideas of craft, she destabilizes assumptions about them. She shows her work in galleries, hanging them as one would paintings. With her tapestries, she has removed herself from a large part of the physical production. She creates digital images, then sends them to an industrial weaver in South Carolina where they are uploaded to a computer. The data is then sent to a machine that autonomously weaves the physical work. The results are, unsurprisingly, technically perfect. Every thread is held impeccably in place, nothing too taut or too loose. Walking up to the works in person feels like being let in on a magician’s secret. The weave looks so perfect that it plays with the potentially lowered expectations of technical precision toward craft forms. Wood’s practice also calls into question how the hand of the maker is valued. While handicraft has not often been elevated in Western categories of art, evidence of the maker’s hands in other media like painting and sculpture has been seen to transcend human imperfection and idiosyncrasy to become literal “strokes of genius.” 

Despite their unblemished technical appearance, there are imperfections in Wood’s tapestries. These imperfections come from errors that Wood leaves in the digital files, which then show up on the weavings— pixels misplaced, images interrupted. In this way, and by adding beaded embellishment to the tapestries after receiving them, she shows her hand. Craft objects are often designated as such through the materials and processes, whether by hand or machine, involved in their creation. [^1] Wood’s beading feels more connected to craft while her industrially woven tapestries feel akin to fabrication methods used by artists like Damien Hirst or Ai Weiwei. This industrial production encroaches on another line, between art and commercial product. By using a process typically meant to mass-produce, Wood upsets the notion of singularity or limited production as a marker of value through the object’s ability to be replicated. Wood’s fabrication methods that span art, craft, and product remind viewers that minor differences in context can tip an object from one category into another. Sometimes these differences are so indistinguishable that the validity and utility of these categories feels flimsy. 

In the gallery space, categorizations are also negotiated. Bringing objects into the gallery certainly changes the expectations placed on them. “I never created my work for the places it exists in now,” Wood says. She used to hang her work by nailing it to the wall. “It only created small holes,” which did not bother her, but would be deemed damages in a commercial gallery, where significant efforts are made to preserve a sense of art’s preciousness. Now when Wood shows in galleries, invisible fastening mechanisms must be created so that her pieces lie flush, like paintings, against the wall. She also tells me that she and other textile artists have been asked to change the materials they use, materials they enjoy working with, so that they are more appealing to buyers and can be better preserved: “These are the things your work has to lose to enter these spaces.” Wood feels that the increased interest in textile work mirrors the rise of interest in Black artists around the time of George Floyd’s death and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. By working in service of the market, and attempting to demonstrate their diversity, galleries and museums show these works without a deeper concern either for the works’ materiality or the communities in which they are embedded. Wood thinks this is a troubling trajectory: “My concern for textiles right now is that we’re going to start losing a connection with the medium, and it’s going to be more about the content than the technical skill.” 

In the wider lineage of Black American textile work, technical skills, such as quiltmaking, provided a range of functions from self-expression to community building, and for those who were enslaved, it could facilitate emancipation as well. When Africans were forcibly taken from their homelands and brought to the Americas as slaves, their outlets for expression were greatly limited. For Black women in the United States, quiltmaking became a means of marking out space for expression on their own terms. They took pieces of the cotton they picked, spun and sewed them for slave owners, and used the materials to make quilts in their quarters after the day’s work was done. For example, ex-slave Fannie May Moore describes her mother “work[ing] in the field all day and piec[ing] and quilt[ing] all night.” [^2] This making was communal and ultimately passed down generationally—seen, for instance, in the experimental minimalist designs of the Gee’s Bend quilters who had been quilting in the Alabama hamlet since the 19th century. In rarer cases, slave women’s technical skills allowed them to purchase their own manumission. [^3] More famously, the quilts along sections of the Underground Railroad hung on the laundry lines and banisters of “safe houses” and used a range of symbols to guide escaped slaves from the US north to Canada. These quilts signalled paths toward safety. [^4] 

Despite these women’s mastery of textiles, their works have been historically overlooked based on Western designations that denigrate women’s work and craft. The latter term and its associations removed textile works from critical conversations involving other two-dimensional arts like painting and drawing. [^5] Additionally, the identities of the makers—slaves, women, Black— all worked to exclude them artistically as much as they did socially, politically, and economically. Despite this, the primary goal of these makers was not to win the appreciation or acknowledgement of larger Western and white audiences. These quilts were threads linking them to cultures lost in the middle passage. Take, for example, Guinea-born slave Louiza Francis Combs’s woven wool blanket (c. 1890) that, with its asymmetrical horizontal lines, draws on Mandé spirituality. The Mandé believed that evil spirits could only travel along straight lines, and so this object serves multiple purposes—beautification, warmth, and spiritual protection. [^6] Indeed, many of the cultures on Africa’s west coast from which slaves were taken shared the view that art and life were intrinsically intertwined. For them, an object’s utility did not demote it to a lesser category. According to Malian historian and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ, “[S]ince all objects and actions were endowed with special meanings, every gesture or movement was considered art—nothing was considered to be utilitarian, domestic, or recreational alone.” [^7] 

Perhaps today, a question of function still exists in delineations of craft and art. In craft critic Rose Slivka’s influential 1961 essay “The New Ceramic Presence,” she writes, “At the point that all links with the idea of function have been severed, it leaves the field of the crafts.” [^8] However, since the ’60s, global art practices that serve express functions have widely emerged, from creating social gathering spaces to providing public education. Additionally, the craft-oriented practices of artists like Adebunmi Gbadebo present more contemplative paths. In works such as _In Memory of Carrie Dash, 1903–1930, Here I Lay My Burden Down, B.A.S._ (2023), Gbadebo creates pots using clay from the land her enslaved ancestors worked in South Carolina, where their very materiality holds historical and emotional significance away from Slivka’s ideas of function. As Wood notes about the increased appearance of textiles in art spaces, what seems to happen is that fine art expands to accommodate elements previously considered craft. This process often asks “craft-now-art” to ignore its practical origins and relationship to the materiality of life. As this reframing takes place, the question of who it serves becomes more relevant. Moreover, protecting what is at stake in craft—alternative relationships with objects made through creative expression—becomes increasingly urgent. 

As Black American textile practices like Wood’s and others demonstrate, there is much room for negotiation in the boundaries of craft and art. Dawn Williams Boyd uses the collage-like aesthetic of quiltmaking to depict stirring narrative imagery, while Bisa Butler’s vibrant works are created through a technique that many note makes them nearly indistinguishable from painting. Faith Ringgold, whom Wood met while she was studying at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), is another important example—her “story quilts” were born out of necessity. Practically, she chose the medium because she wanted to create work light enough to carry on her own without her husband’s help. Her content came from the desire to tell stories about Black people on her own terms. Working in quilts, with their historical significance to Black Americans, was a way of nodding to overlooked Black history. Ringgold elevated this history by painting scenes on to the panels of her quilts. When I ask Wood, who also experimented with quilting while at RISD, if she sees herself as part of this lineage of Black textile artists, she says that she does. Then she reminds me that Black history is cyclical. I suppose it’s like a needle pulling thread, circling as it binds histories, categories, and people. 

[^1]: T’ai Smith, “The Problem with Craft,” _Art Journal_ 75, no.1 (Spring 2016): 80, accessed August 16, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2016.1171544; and Howard Risatti, _A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression_ (Chapel Hill: The University Of North Carolina Press, 2013), 17.
[^2]: Lisa E. Farrington, _Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28.
[^3]: Floris Barnett Cash, “Kinship and quilting: An examination of an African-American tradition,” _The Journal of Negro History_ 80, no.1 (Winter 1995): 33.
[^4]: Farrington, 33–36. 
[^6]: Ibid., 28.
[^5]: Ibid., 27.
[^7]: Claire Polakoff, “Crafts and the Concept of Art in Africa,” _African Arts_ 12, no. 1 (1978): 22.
[^8]: Rose Slivka, “The New Ceramic Presence,” _Craft Horizons_ 21, no. 4 (July/August 1961): 36. 



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Technology

Race

Writing on Qualeasha Wood’s practice, Salena Barry traces how the artist straddles textiles and digital imagery, handicraft and industrial fabrication, and craft and commercial art worlds, from a multi-disciplinary lineage of Black American creative production. 

Weaving Through the Binary: Qualeasha Wood's Textile Inheritances

Jasmine Gui is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist, arts programmer, and PhD student based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She works in paper, ceramics, tea, and experimental book formats through the inter-arts and publishing space Teh Studio. 


**Crafting Encounter** 

> ##### “The experience of craft, precisely because it is hard won, is always a revelation.” 

>> ##### —Glenn Adamson, _Thinking Through Craft_, 2019 [1] 

At 7pm, I poke my head into the Heritage Lounge at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, where the room is abuzz with the frenetic energy of last-stretch preparation. The tearooms, wooden structures panelled with white linen, are being finessed. Running water from a fountain bubbles quietly, underscoring the sounds of focused and hurried movements. 

Ichigo-Ichie, a project named after a Japanese philosophy that translates roughly to “one season, one encounter,” is gearing up for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2022. Tea masters Susanna Sun of Cha Gloriette and Momo Yoshida of Momo Tea are preparing to serve tea with their assistants in their respective tearooms. The tea-ware being used was made specifically for this event: Japanese chawans by Satoshi Yoshikawa, and Chinese gaiwans by Helen Kong of Secret Teatime. A ceramic and paper sculpture garden forms a transitional space between the tearooms. I arrive here as a participant, a friend to many working on this event, and a researcher with her own tea practice. 

As the ceremonies begin, I am seated in the Taiwanese tearoom with Tracy Wei, an assistant of Susanna’s, who is brewing oolong with a practiced hand. The Cha Gloriette style is five rounds of tea brewed from one pot of tea leaves. Each cup offers up consistent flavour with subtle, evolving tasting notes. The gaiwan lid features details of a forest floor, and Helen’s teacup designs structurally open at the rim in a petal formation. The experience is mostly quiet, as Tracy only offers necessary information while presiding over a slow and contemplative silence that, at the same time, does not prevent small conversation between participants or the occasional question. 

An hour later, I enter the Japanese tearoom, turning past the tokonoma where a plant arrangement by Mika Sato cascades quietly underneath a calligraphy print reading “一期一會” (ichi-go ichi-e). Momo begins the Japanese tea ceremony, a multistep ritual that delivers a creamy matcha whisked in Satoshi’s neat black chawan into my cupped hands. Each step is accompanied by an assistant’s explanation of its meaning and purpose. Once all participants have been served, Momo answers any questions we have and thanks us for sharing space with her. 

Both tearooms offer service on the hour, every hour, for the rest of Nuit Blanche. The RSVPs are full and people trek in from all over the city to have tea all night long. In the early morning hours, after the last round of tea-making, the team strikes and the tearooms are disassembled and removed, returning the Heritage Lounge to its original layout. 

When Helen first told me about this project, my initial response was curiosity: “What is alluring about brewing and serving tea from sundown to sunrise?” The tea practitioners offered various answers. Whether for a sense of connection and curiosity, a desire to create a certain experience, or education and access, their attraction to this project stemmed from the unpredictability of who would be seated at the table, and what those encounters with tea would be like in the specific context of Nuit Blanche. This iteration of ichi-go ichi-e is what Momo Yoshida calls an “inappropriate situation,” one that calls for chaos and invites bodied exhaustion, particularly in the way it disrupts the unhurried condition of tea practice. Serving tea repeatedly from sundown to sunrise is no relaxing task, let alone within the ritualized and formalized steps in which both Susanna and Momo have developed their practices. 

So how is the tearoom built in and for this “inappropriate situation”? The Ichigo-Ichie tearoom structure can be considered through what curator and historian Glenn Adamson calls the “well-defined terrain” of crafts—“an archipelago of discrete islands with fixed boundaries.” [^2] From the wood structures, ceramic and paper sculptures, plant and floral arrangements, tea, and tea-ware, the space is constructed from traditionally crafted objects that bear the mark of their makers; the contribution of each Ichigo-Ichie member is distinct and identifiable. The “crafted” status of these objects also means their functionality and technical finesse are considered necessary aspects of their valuation, demonstrated through the crafter’s ability to “make with skill” or activated through the practitioner’s “mastery in use.” The evocative power of crafted objects is linked to their animation as well-made tools that become intimate partner-things to their users, through a process of doing. 

The archipelago of disciplinary crafts that constitute this space reflects a worlding effort by the gathering of people in the name of ichi-go ichi-e. In tea culture, this concept reflects an intentional attention to the fact that each tea gathering is unique unto itself and will only happen once. Momo shares that all night she did every tea ceremony like it was the first one, “to give heart to every round. And it did happen after I put myself into that mindset.” Momo’s sentiment gestures to the singularity of each gathering. Since the selection of crafted objects can hypothetically be reused from encounter to encounter, unrepeatability must emerge through other crucial aspects of tea gathering that are intangible. It is toward this intangibility that I want to think through craft. 

When asked about the motivation to do ichi-go ichi-e, Helen answered that one key reason was the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded creatives and tea practitioners; Momo was attracted to the unique experiences such an unconventional event would produce; and Carina Fung, who assisted in the Japanese tea room, expressed a curiosity toward potential participants and their reactions. Guided by these intentions, Ichigo-Ichie’s constellation of practitioners share an understanding of craft by way of Adamson, as “an approach, an attitude, or a habit of action. Craft only exists in motion. It is a way of doing things, not a classification of objects, institutions or people.” [^3] Whether it be through woodwork, sculpting, arranging, or brewing, mastery over these actions constitutes and is constituted by specific habits and attitudes that become recognizable and respected by a community of people. The intangible craft that propels Ichigo-Ichie is a shared belief in the value of gathering—through tea practice enabled by the material conditions of the tearoom—that performs and demands presence, open attention, and postures of learning. If Ichigo-Ichie is about the recognition of special encounter, then craft is a praxis of active presence. To craft is to master habits of motion so that revelatory attention is intimately possible in the encounter as it happens. 

**The Assertion of Thingness**

> ##### “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” 

>> ##### — Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” 2011 [4]

There is a third room at Ichigo-Ichie that I haven’t described. The Guided Meditation Room was conceptualized as a drop-in cafe-style space where visitors learn how to make matcha or black tea with volunteer tea facilitators. Helen cites the intention of this third room as a space to offer guided encounters that might interrupt assumptions or fears people have about handmade tea-ware being too fragile and precious for daily use. The tension regarding the tea-ware, as an object that can be distant and art-like, while also an everyday kitchen item, produces a “thingness” as defined by Bill Brown. He argues that an object reveals its thingness when it stops working as it should, “when [its] flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.” [^5] In the case of the tea-ware, participants’ uncertainty with how to approach or use it arrests its usual functional flow, revealing it anew as a “thing”. 

Additionally, in the tearooms, live sketchers are hard at work documenting the history of each piece of tea-ware as it unfolds. Who is holding what bowl, with what tea, in what room, served by which tea practitioner? Recording the tea-ware’s history of use through sketches and stories is a part of Japanese tea and ceramic culture. The acknowledgement and documentation of this history constructs conditions through which to understand tea-ware as _thing_, “a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.” [^6] Helen plans to include these notes with each piece of tea-ware when it is sold, so it “becomes a vessel for memories and encounters as well. [...] It accompanies the wares when they are sold. This way, human companions to the pieces can continue to record the piece’s journey.” The sketchers who create records preserve the memory of encounter, transformed into a material trace that follows the tea bowl as metaphysical presence. The tea-ware as thing has history of its own that challenges the comfortable assumptions we have about ourselves as subjects and the bowls as objects we own and use. This destabilization has reconstitutive potential: as the live sketchers document the stories of the tea-ware, a strange reversal occurs where we in fact become “object” in the tea-ware-as-subject’s history. 

If “thingness” names a disturbance in subject-object relations, then in the tearoom, there is more than one “thing.” As tea-ware becomes a subject with its own history, the other “thing” that emerges is us. Ichigo-Ichie stages—through encounter—an arrest of our flow through the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, revealing our thingness as well. We are asked to turn away for a brief moment from external objects, toward the things in the tearoom. On an otherwise hectic night, Helen speaks to the allure of offering people a space of rest and slowness—seen in the arrested posture of a seated participant, waiting for Susanna to quietly count the brew time for another round of tea, or for Momo to whisk and serve each individual bowl of matcha. 

Each tea practitioner’s description of their process directly reaffirms the drive of Ichigo-Ichie, such as Carina’s “connection, mindfulness in chaos,” Helen’s “decluttering, comfort, and empathy,” or Momo’s “relaxation and learning. There is no end to learning even after ten years of doing tea ceremony.” The meditative pauses in this tea practice resist larger circuits of relations that practitioners are entangled in daily, which place an insistent demand on their bodies toward productivity and divided attention as subjects. 

The creative choices in this space stack up, all facilitating the possibility of arrest and attention. In making the vessels, for instance, Satoshi explains, “The enjoyment of a tea gathering, in my view, lies in stepping away from the current marketing-driven economy, grasping the unique characteristics of diverse materials, individuals, and environments, and striving for harmony while eliminating unnecessary elements, finding joy in inconvenience. I believe that the reason I created each tea bowl in a different form this time is to make people feel the harmony that can arise from each person’s uniqueness. I consider this to be the essence of ichi-go ichi-e—a once-in-a-lifetime encounter.” 

In Ichigo-Ichie, craft is a way of doing—the crafting of encounter initiates other possible relations between people and objects, new intimacies. 

**Making Do at the Limits of Tradition and Authenticity** 

> ##### “Things is a word that tends, especially at its most banal, to index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable: Dr. Seuss’s Thing One and Thing Two.”

>> ##### — Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” 2011 [7] 

In the habits of and approaches to craft, there is no separation between knowledge and action. Adamson, for example, demarcates craft from a definition of art (ideology explored through medium or form) by its integrated praxis of mental know-how and bodied skill. There is only the continuous fluidity of experience of one through the other, and not in any set order either. The crafting in Ichigo-Ichie emerges from this praxis that I call “thinking-doing,” both existing at the same time. 

Meanwhile, the use of descriptors such as “ceremony” and “traditional” tether these tea gatherings to influences from the “elsewhere” of East Asian craft practices, whose genealogies are seen as stable and unchanging. The situation at Nuit Blanche becomes “inappropriate” because these practices are doubly detached from their originating contexts and their adapted diasporic formats. The preconditions for traditional encounter have not been met. 

What then does the “thinking-doing” craft of Ichigo-Ichie mean when it is situated in Canada, emerging from diasporas’ unbounded innovations in “making do” in (adapting to) new realities? 

At Ichigo-Ichie, the gathering of practitioners from various traditions reflects the shared dynamism of craft’s thinking-doing and diasporic making do in new contexts. 

Makeshift Collective’s tearoom structures are loose pavilion forms with two design functions: to recreate key elements of traditional tearooms, and to include wheelchair access to the space (especially in the Japanese tearoom where participants follow a set of rules) that, because of its observance to historical continuity, is often unfriendly to multiple mobilities. 

Additionally, Mika’s abundant green arrangements are an unorthodox addition to the Japanese tearoom’s orthodox styling, while the sculpture garden is more suggestive than material, formed through a few thoughtfully placed pieces to demarcate transitional space. Satoshi’s and Helen’s ceramics also directly engage with local conditions of making. Satoshi’s chawans are personal riffs on standard bowl forms: he makes do with the clay he can access and the kiln he fires with, elements materially embedded in the geography of Canada that impact how he can produce chawan. 

To borrow Momo’s words again, the “inappropriateness” of Ichigo-Ichie generates space for experimentation and exploration. The limitations of site and the event’s presence at Nuit Blanche produce the freedom to adapt and revise, to make do through their own practices of thinking-doing. In Satoshi’s words, “What’s crucial is the balance between self-interest and consideration for others. Certainly, history is long and significant, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that tatami mats or kimono are always required. What truly matters is affection, in my opinion.” 

And at Ichigo-Ichie, affection abounds. Practitioners engage lovingly with their craft, working through and against tradition to forge new conditions for encounter that they too are curious about. Whether engaging through genealogies of gesture and ritual, intimacy with tea and its growers, or adaptive making and experimentation, there is embodied knowing through language, land, and history that Momo, Satoshi, Mika, Helen, Susanna, Tracy, and Carina work through.

Brown argues that “however materially stable objects may seem, they are, let us say, different things in different scenes” [^8]—in other words, objects take on different meanings and functions in different cultures and contexts, creating enough variation and incongruence to be considered different things entirely. Similarly, Adamson argues that “[h]itting a nail with a hammer may be an identical action no matter when and where it occurs, but both the experience and motivations involved in the hammering are always historically contingent.” [^9] Tea-ware can be an ordinary vessel or an aesthetic art piece depending on how it was made or where it is used. It can take on an “oriental” aesthetic as a foreign cultural object, or represent a “tradition” entwined with personal cultural identity. In the Nuit Blanche project, tea-ware becomes a narrative subject, while participants are the details in its stories. When Helen shares that ichi-go ichi-e is a part of her personal journey to practice a traditional East Asian art form in Canada, or Momo desires to be flexible with her tea practice “because we are in Canada,” the context in which they think-do their craft is a necessary condition of creation. 

Tea practice bears the burden of hyper-visual markers of tradition and authenticity. The practice itself is both banal and charged, fractured by, but also produced through, complex global flows of imperial history, capital, and labour. “Different things in different scenes” encapsulates some of the tension and, also, the impetus for brewing tea at Nuit Blanche. Tea and its ceremony are different things in Canada than in Japan or in Taiwan. Things shift in the public space versus the private space. Things hover differently in the registers of leisure, commercial, or art contexts. 

To be a diasporic subject is to make do with being different things in different scenes. The reality of being disembedded already marks an evolving relationship between and among things: relations cast and recast between places of origins and arrivals, belonging and alienness, the customary and the makeshift. 

Ichigo-Ichie is borne from the act of making do through collective crafting. Their resonant ways of doing, whether in the rehearsed familiarity of Momo’s steps, the technical precision that produces the aromas of Susanna’s tea brew, or the skilful hands of Satoshi or Helen, accumulate a critical mass of various praxes connected to both here and elsewhere. They make possible the singularity of the ichi-go ichi-e encounter. Here, other relational possibilities, however brief, are crafted. 


 
 
 
 
●●
_The print version incorrectly identifies Carina Fung as the practitioner in the Taiwanese tearoom, where it should have specified Tracy Wei. Carina assisted in the Japanese tearoom. The online version has been updated with these details, as well as a missing paragraph._


[^1]: Glenn Adamson, _Thinking Through Craft_ (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 75.
[^2]: Ibid., 6.
[^3]: Ibid., 4.
[^4]: Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” _Critical Inquiry_ 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 4, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344258 
[^5]: Ibid.
[^6]: Ibid., 5.
[^7]: Ibid.
[^8]: Ibid., 9. 
[^9]: Adamson, 75.

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Ceramics

Food

Public art

In her feature on the Nuit Blanche tea installation Ichigo-Ichie (2022), Jasmine Gui writes about diasporic adaptations and the evolving relationship between people and objects as they travel from their origins.


Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea

Amanda Shore is a white-settler arts worker, critic, and curator based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS). 


Before we come to know economic value, we encounter sentimental value. Around the age of six, children begin to experience the “endowment effect,” where they place additional value on objects that they own, simply because they’re theirs. [^1] This childhood tendency to collect, cherish, and covet belongings is rarely valued as an emerging curatorial practice, perhaps because it relies so heavily on sentimentality and the unguarded materialistic attraction toward trinkets, toys, and craft objects. It’s the same object attachment that comes when losing a loved one and grasping on too tightly to a part of them. To be sentimental is to be moved a little too much, to abandon taste-making and embrace the familiar impulse to hold an object close. For many, sentimental collecting can be a way of saying to Death, “Please, not yet.” 

What happens when the act of sentimental craft-collecting moves out of domestic spaces and becomes a curatorial driver in a gallery space? Many curators would have you believe that sentimentality has no place in their work, and the Clement Greenberg fan club would be horrified that I’m even asking the question. Novelist John Gardner defines sentimentality as “causeless emotion” and “false feeling,” which he considers to be an artistic failure, and which Kantians believe to be a moral failure. [^2] Robert C. Solomon states that for Kant, “[t]o call someone a ‘sentimentalist’ in ethics is to dismiss both the person and his or her views from serious consideration, adding, perhaps a disdainful chortle and an implicit accusation of terminal silliness.” [^3] It’s hard not to imagine this chortling, Kantian academic as a harmless cartoon villain, but in all seriousness, this school of thought considers kitsch to be dangerous. [^4] Their critiques of sentimentality soon become sermons that demonize overindulgence among Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, femme, fat, trans, poor, Disabled bodies. Queer excess, Black joy, gender nonconformity, and feminine hysteria soon become “terminal silliness.” 

I asked Anishinaabe curator Franchesca Hebert-Spence whether sentimentality shows up in her curatorial practice. Responding with a resounding yes, she wondered whether sentimentality could be a way of resisting the Euro-Western art notion that “things are only worth making if they’re exceptional.” This desire to move away from elite taste-making involves redefining the craft curator—not to mention redefining what the curator considers “worth making.” As the curator of Beading Symposium: Ziigimineshin Winnipeg 2020, and a self-proclaimed “social beader,” Hebert-Spence creates maker spaces as much as exhibitions in gallery spaces. Curating gatherings around beading tables involves protecting and increasing access to these quiet spaces of cultural production. 

My most vivid encounter with sentimentality in the gallery space took place in October 2021 at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, where the non-juried exhibition “For the Love of Sandra Alfoldy” commemorated the recent passing of the beloved scholar and curator of Canadian craft. All submissions from friends, family, and community members were accepted by curator Julie Hollenbach. In keeping with the sacred tenant of kitsch, “more is more,” the exhibition featured quilts, ceramics, video performances, jewellery, poetry, stitched portraits of Sandra, and student essays from Sandra’s NSCAD classes with her handwritten feedback. The moustache-twirling Kantian philosophers may not consider a non-juried commemorative community exhibition to be a particularly serious curatorial venture, but by inviting anyone to submit whatever made them feel connected to Sandra, Hollenbach assembled a collection of sentimental objects that captured the joys, challenges, and power dynamics of the fine-craft industry. When Hebert-Spence spoke about resisting exceptionality, I imagined that she would value unfinished sketches, imperfect ceramic seconds, or worn textiles as anti-exceptional objects. But resisting exceptionalism does not mean striving for imperfection; it is the process of removing the value we place on perfection, in the interest of liberation. By forgoing curatorial selection and encouraging artists to share in earnest, Hollenbach offered a rare and honest encounter with the craft discipline as a whole. 

As two Halifax-based curators and NSCAD alumni, Hollenbach and I are both lucky enough to have been mentored by Sandra, and witnessed her incomparable talent as an educator, thinker, and speaker. Her 1997 master’s thesis acknowledged modernism’s lack of interest in craft [^5] and her book _Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada_ (2005) is credited as the first book-length study of craft in Canada. Janice Helland describes Sandra as “Canada’s most dynamic and engaging craft historian,” and in 2002 she became the first academically appointed craft historian in Canada. [^6] Hollenbach describes how Sandra’s research was dismissed in grad school by her male colleagues, and she entered the field of art history at a time when craft was not considered a part of it. 

After her year-long struggle with cancer, Sandra died in February 2019 at the age of 49, and the craft community across the country and internationally took an enormous hit. Leading up to her death, Hollenbach was finishing her PhD, filling in periodically for Sandra’s classes during treatment, and cocurating the Walter Ostrom retrospective at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia with Shannon Parker and Sandra. Hollenbach felt that there should be some kind of celebration, “to bring people together where they could express their gratitude and share the impact Sandra had on them as an educator, mentor, friend, and colleague.” With support from NSCAD’s newly created Alfoldy Craft Institute and the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Hollenbach began the multi-year process of creating an exhibition that was virtual at first in 2020, then installed at the Anna in 2021. 

Hollenbach’s role didn’t involve selecting artworks, and initially she thought of this work as service rather than curation. “Service is a way that I move through grief,” she says. Considering this project years later, she realized, “This is the way I curate, this is serious and important work.” Her own queer curatorial methodology is influenced by Gayatri Gopinath, who writes, “To ‘care for’ is also to ‘care about’; thus the project of queer curation, as I understand it, is the obligation to impart that ‘caring about’ to others.” [^7] It is an act of queer desire to curate archives of seemingly insignificant objects, and find the “promiscuous intimacies of our past histories as they continue to structure our everyday present, and determine our futures.” [^8] Hollenbach relinquishes control over the historical narrative being collectively created in the exhibition, and says, “In caring for the care of objects, I also feel myself caring for the care of artists.” It felt right to put herself to work in service of a community in mourning. She said to me with ease, “You know, craft is work.” 

Each artwork in the exhibition was coupled with a text panel with an anecdote about Sandra written by the maker, and these devotionals defied the conventions of exhibition text by being unapologetically sentimental. Laura Jean Forrester submitted a ceramic panel of a vase of flowers, calling Sandra “an incredible vessel of life, love, and knowledge.” There were artists defying the conventions of fine craft, and others celebrating the systems of knowledge that uphold the discipline. There were fragile works and others that had withstood wear. There were satirical nods to historical figures, and there were questionable elements of chinoiserie. There were precious materials, and there were pompoms and hot glue. By being non-juried, this exhibition revealed the truth of the craft discipline— all its joys, and some of its baggage. It was like flipping through a craft history textbook and encountering all the ups and downs at once. It presented a comprehensive survey of the field with the vivid clarity that biennials aspire toward. Rather than creating a narrative about the state of craft, Hollenbach put her trust in the audience to find their own patterns, subplots, and characters in Sandra’s ongoing legacy. 

Sandra became known for her research on “craft-washing” and capitalism’s appropriation of the words “handmade” and “artisanal” to describe mass-produced products. When a new dystopian artisanal product of late capitalism would hit the market, students would eagerly interrupt her lectures to tell her about it. She taught critical theory in a way that encouraged students to look for it everywhere, and in turn they looked for her everywhere. In the text panels of the exhibition, artists wrote, “I know Sandra would get this project” and “I believe Sandra would have been tickled to see” the work. The exhibition enacted (with equal parts melodrama and sincerity) the feeling of moving through life wondering what the person you lost would think of you now. 

By welcoming all contributors, the show was an outpouring; it created a space for each artist to candidly expose their take on craft history in a moment of immense loss. There were artists who reinforced imperial histories of ceramics, who approached placemaking from the perspective of whiteness, or who poked fun at complex historical figures in a way that flattened their complexity. To see the full truth of the craft sector we must be unafraid to encounter it all at once, in its excess, and its extraordinary failures. “Excess” emotion is a cycle, a journey to emotional regulation. We need to move through sentimentality in the same way that we must move through grief as a collective action, to arrive at a place of love. 

In 2014, poet Bruce Bond pinpointed what he felt was so cruel about sentimentality. He said, “[T]he sentimental artist fetishizes both literal objects and people as objects. Sentimentality cherishes memorabilia, idols, places, and occasions in order to feel not just love, but the sense that love has been turned into an object.” [^9] I understand that this is supposed to sound immoral and perverse, but in the realm of craft I can’t imagine a greater triumph than turning love into an object. It takes a level of artistic bravery to craft objects of affection without fear of cliché. Hebert-Spence is not afraid to talk about love, saying, “Indigenous artists are talking about love, and also complicating these notions of romantic love.” It takes fearlessness to speak candidly about love, and to face the risks and rewards that come from letting a little too much feeling into the gallery space. 

[^1]: Christian Jarrett, “The Psychology of Stuff and Things,” _The Psychologist_, August 13, 2013, https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/psychology-stuff-and-things
[^2]: Mary Ruefle, “On Sentimentality,” in _Madness, Rack, and Honey_ (New York: Wave Books, 2012), 35. 
[^3]: Robert C. Solomon, “On Kitsch and Sentimentality,” _The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_ 49, no. 1 (1991): 2-3. 
[^4]: Hermann Broch calls the producer of kitsch “an ethically base being, a malefactor who profoundly desires evil.” Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch” in _Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste_, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1968). 
[^5]: Sandra Alfoldy, “Theory and Craft: A Case Study of the Kootenay Christmas Faire” (master’s thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 1997).
[^6]: Janice Helland, “Sandra Alfoldy (August 1, 1969–February 24, 2019): A Reflection,” _The Journal of Modern Craft_ 12, no. 2 (May 4, 2019): 141–142. 
[^7]: Gayatri Gopinath, _Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 4. 
[^8]: Ibid, 7. 
[^9]: Bruce Bond, “The Wind in the Fire: Sentimentality and the Movement of the Mind,” _The Georgia Review_ 68, no. 1 (2014): 115. 

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Death

Amanda Shore reflects on the commemorative exhibition “For the Love of Sandra Alfoldy” (2020–2021), which was dedicated to the beloved mentor and eminent Canadian craft scholar. Shore explores how the show created a space that might hold fuller truths about craft histories, its joys and baggage, in a moment of immense loss, and asks what happens when feeling enters the curatorial realm.

Love Made Object

Javier Fuentes Martinez is a graduate student in Library and Information Science at Western University. 


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Colonialism

Migration

Javier Fuentes Martinez’s sweeping feature explores how Latinx identities are stitched together by the movement of objects and people. The writer critiques how art and tourism markets, museum collections, and colonial classification treats Indigeneity, to make the case for more expansive Latinx art discourses in Canada.

Mercado de Artesanías: Crafting Latinx Identity

Letter

##### Dear _C Magazine_, 

I am writing to share some thoughts on codes, one definition of which I see as a metaphor for the invisible structures that orient our experience by way of language, communication, and the visual field. We perform ourselves according to codes at every turn. Where do we exist amongst these past and future forces? 

I hope that codes—reinscribed, repurposed, and reconceived—can foment new ways of being. While they relay instructions, rules, and laws that govern us silently, they are always evolving based on varied collective and individual subjectivities. I am reminded of psychoanalyst Bruce Fink’s exploration of language and subjectivity. If we consider language to be a kind of code that constitutes our conscious life, Fink suggests that rather than completely dictate who and how we should be, there is still room for subjectivity since language is always changing. In between, beyond, and amongst all these codes is where we find our sense of selves, as we constantly mediate competing texts while simultaneously remaining partially exterior to them. 

I find comfort in the notion that though rules, laws, and codes are ubiquitous and often pernicious, they can’t entirely subsume us, because they are more like an operative mechanism rather than a final destination. 

##### Warmly, 
##### Marcus Prasad 

●●

##### Dear _C_, 

Matt Nish-Lapidus’s “Joyful, Poetic Microworlds” included a discussion of Seymour Papert’s (one of Logo’s primary creators) imagined future as a place where “people would use computers to create their own ‘microworlds’ that [could help] them express themselves and extend their ways of knowing and interacting with the world.” I thought about how personal each of our creations would look, as if we were holding a mirror to the invisible worlds within us. While the reality of a microworld still feels abstract in many ways, I can imagine the immense freedom and clarity the concept offers. What would your microworld look like? How would microworlds change the way we experience each other? 

Language often falls short in expressing one’s experiences. Words attempt to preserve meaning, but it is always through fixed definitions. The malleability of code feels promising against the rigidity of language, and the imagination feels like a promising catalyst for the expansion of human expression. There is something powerful about these imagined futures. Rather than fear the unknown, weaponize it, or avoid it, Nish-Lapidus’s text urges us to embrace the incredibly poetic ways it can all turn out. 

##### Thank you, 
##### Vanessa Maria


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Letters reflecting on issue 155 “Codes.”

Letters

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Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Reviews Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working toward equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling making, writing, curating, collaborating, and performing. lambert is currently a PhD Researcher at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, in Artistic Practice in Visual, Applied, and Spatial Arts. Their research focuses on mapping collaborative movements with craft through a developed methodology of cruising. They have published, curated, exhibited, and been collected internationally. 


The nude as a subject needs to be constantly engaged with to confront its always-shifting conventions, which has been accelerated by the onslaught of social media. We are bombarded with idealized bodies and products to get us one step closer to a desired perfection in a never-ending cycle of consumption. Whether bodily ideals are based in Eurocentric standards, various goalposts of desirability, or otherwise, perfection is always moving away from us. 

The work of Trevor Novak directly questions bodily ideals. Novak often presents figures in the nude that reference historical depictions in classical European paintings and ceramic figurines. These figures may be in the buff but are not the buffed marble perfection of Grecian statues served up in museums and pop culture. Small imperfections in smooth surfaces or extra bits of material remain present. These bodies come in many shapes and sizes in surrealist predicaments and colours that open space to delaminate from reality. This work does not attempt to supersede and claim dominance, but challenges bodily ideals to shatter them. A new map is not inscribed; instead, an invitation to wander and form our own desire lines is proposed. There is a potential of queerness here, something palpable if one is looking for it. A suggested direction toward a horizon, as theorist José Esteban Muñoz describes queerness. Something never in the here and now, but something we move toward, always in a state of becoming. [^1] 

In Novak’s practice, clay acts not only as a material to represent the body, but as matter and method that requires the movement and entanglement of Novak’s own body to produce the work. Trained as a ceramist, Novak is not tied to art vs. craft conversations, a discourse many find exhausted and exhausting. To me, craft has become a way to see systems of extraction, land, labour, abuse, bod(y/ ies), economy, use, power, and waste. Craft, in this way, leaves institutional material silos and becomes more nimble. 

As with many artists using an institutionally traditional craft material, the COVID-19 pandemic limited Novak’s access to necessary tools and equipment often located in shared communal space. As he explored other ways of grappling with the figure, his practice extended into digital works along the same investigations, using the elasticity and metaphors of the word “craft” to continue to craft bodily depictions. These digital bodies perpetuate the questioning of the fixedness of a/the bod(y/ ies) we inhabit and are surrounded by, adding a rich facet to his oeuvre. Concept is at the steering wheel and is fuelled by necessity, picking up material hitchhikers as it drives on. 

In _The Body in Contemporary Art_, Sally O’Reilly points to efforts to step away from modernisms’ dispassionate connection to body, instead turning to “imbuing imagery with human content and connecting art to lived experience [...] [T]he figure has become acknowledged as a social, emotional, fallible entity rather than a formal focus or token of utopian ideologies.”[^2] I would argue the intended meaning of “utopian” in this quote is through the specificity of the historical, white, cisgender, heteronormative, heteropatriarchal, capitalistic gaze. Novak’s work can be read as utopian if viewed outside of such a gaze. The nude in his practice still represents, or plays with, the cliché of the classically vulnerable figure, but with an edge of abjection. Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg tie vulnerability to abjection, saying, “this connection only becomes feasible when vulnerability is understood, not as an intrinsic quality of any group or a ‘weakness,’ but as a tension between subjugation and resistance, embedded both in societal and psychic structures.” [^3] Novak’s work resists societal structures of perfection and offers us another possibility. Positing characters in emotive states of joy, celebration, sadness, and contemplation as single beings and as collective gatherings, they offer a meditation on the complexity of humanness. 

[^1]: José Esteban Muñoz, _Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity_ (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
[^2]: Sally O’Reilly, _The Body in Contemporary Art_ (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 18. 
[^3]: Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg, “Vulnerability as a Political Language,” in _The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-Racist Media Cultures_ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 1–26. 


Curator

Trevor Novak is a visual artist whose practice is focused on sculptural and digital creations that reflect the real and imagined worlds he lives in. Trevor graduated from Sheridan College and NSCAD, and lives in Halifax. His work can be found in commercial galleries and private collections across Canada. 


Artist

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Body

Guest curated by matt lambert, Trevor Novak’s artist project features ceramic and digital figures in surrealist predicaments to explore the classic nude subject in cheerfully abject poses.

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_Exploratory Touch_ by Trevor Novak: Text

Review

Francesca Bennett has supported artists’ practices on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations since 2003. Informed by her work in collections, archives, and administration, her curatorial and writing practices are centred on the extension of personal transformative encounters with objects towards their multitudes of social relations. 


##### _C Magazine_ congratulates Francesca Bennett, winner of the 2023 C New Critics Award. We also extend congratulations to this year's runner-up, Julia Trojanowski. Now in its 14th consecutive year, this program gives _C Magazine_ the opportunity to identify, support, and promote the work of promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. _C_ sincerely thanks all those who applied, as well as the jurors of this year’s award: Tiana Reid, Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, and Joy Xiang. Measures were taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remained unknown to adjudicators.
 
On the day that we visit his exhibition, we chant “sold, sold, sold” at the red-stickered real-estate signs on almost every block, an exasperated exhilaration that is exhausted when a red-stickered real-estate sign announces our arrival at dreams comma delta—a gallery that we are visiting for the first time, and now probably the last. I am reminded how, just the day before, an automated HR rejection directed me to _move on_. And how, exactly five years before the day that we visit his exhibition, my empty apartment echoed _move on_, and in the days afterward, my drooping false shamrock bloomed—_read the room_, I thought foolishly, furious in my grief at nastic movements and turgor pressure. And how—some 32 years before the day that we visit his exhibition—my unbalanced ratio of organ to body was explained perhaps too calmly, and _I grasped my fragile body every day_ that summer, saying _don’t move_ to my moon-shaped blood cells, frantic that they had mutinied in my spleen zero, or five, or 19 minutes ago— 20 minutes would have been too long, understand. 

All of this to say, that on the day that we visit Woojae’s exhibition, Christian [Vistan] explains that dreams comma delta used to be the bedroom of their landlord, and that their landlord will be their landlord for less than two months more—or 87,600 minutes, counting down. We _take_ or _share_ almost 50 of those minutes on that Saturday morning. Me, surreptitiously touching the false worms, their unfired-clay bodies shaped and hollowed into a bell-ended beaded curtain at the window and curved into a solitary segmented horseshoe on the no-longer-sky-blue, no-longer-luxurious tufted carpet of its era. I grin at the lucky ends abutting the wall, reminded how, just less than seven years after that long-ago summer—somewhere around 3,500,000 minutes later—_the threat of the convex in the little loop_ became a _cutting_, and on the day that we visit his exhibition, the Phobos and Deimos orbiting my healed body— all 4.2 to 5.4 million per microlitre—no longer live up to their names. 

All this while my partner—curled over his tiny glowing screen—is on a video call with a _mutual_ friend, pointing out the green shoots of Woojae’s mugwort plant, the metal rim of his water collector in the side yard, the white eggshells and the white paper coffee cup and the brown curls of worm-shaped mugwort incense inside them, the white-papered, bell-wrapped speakers shrieking the sounds of mole crickets. Later I’ll learn that their “shovel-like forelimbs [are] highly developed for burrowing,” that they sing from “burrow[s] that [open] out into the air in the shape of exponential horn[s],” and that “[their] song is loud enough to make the ground vibrate [...] [and] can be heard up to 600 metres away,” and I’ll wonder who I was listening to exactly five months earlier when I wrote a note to myself on my phone that says “labour is like sound it is always present,” but right then their friend’s baby cries, ending the teleportation. 

All of this to say, that nine months before the day that we visit his exhibition, at the moment that Woojae’s phone pinged with the signal that looped around our planet and burst, we were with him—like the worms are now—_breaking bread_. And the day before that day, I was promising him that one day I would write about his practice, as an act of _friendship_, like we all have always done for each other—_criticism be damned_—because _mutualism_ is the only sustainable symbiosis. Besides, my name means _freedom_, so it must also mean _friendship_—I take them as _mutual_, as _feelings_ and _facts_. 

So, on the day that we visit his exhibition, we curl over the worm bin that Woojae shaped with his hands from coconut coir and paper pulp, the same materials that are mixed into the soil—a concave bowl holding its own _body_. When Christian opens the lid and their fingers split the soil, I see plainly that these earthworms are _living_—the red wigglers breathe through the fragile skins of their own curling bodies. There are other worms, too—_volunteers, hangers-on_, or maybe _companions_, we wonder aloud—white and tiny and hidden in plain sight, and I am lovingly reminded of the thinning translucent ends of 콩나물 that I pick off one by one with the crescent moon of my thumbnail for my partner’s grandmother’s 초승달-shaped dumplings, a TLC made invisible, mixed with translucent noodles in the pork. Later I’ll learn that parasitic worms are called helminths, and that anthelminthics—like wormwood, a cousin of Woojae’s mugworts—expel them, or at least used to, before anthelminthic resistance caught on. And, in disbelief, I’ll learn that helminthic therapy invites worms into the body—a calling on _old friends_ for last-ditch cleansing that is strangely like and unlike what we do when we _move on_. When she was _dying_, my partner once told me, his grandmother ate the nourishing protein paste of ground-up worms—I don’t know what kind. 
	
But on the day that we visit Woojae’s exhibition, the mixed soil smells like what I want a sommelier to understand as _fact_ when I tell them the _feeling_ that I want to drink, so that no one recommends Chianti to me ever again, and Christian tells us that the smell changes, that sometimes it’s musty like a basement apartment—_haha_. They close the lid and light one of the worms of Woojae’s 쑥뜸—a word that starts, to my ear, too close to 숙 (宿) to tell the difference between _healing_ and _staying_—and we curl ourselves around the low table to read Woojae’s coiling text. His writing voice is also his speaking voice and when he reads it’s also his reading voice—_yeah, ooh_, we three agree. We read, “I hold very soft things between very hard things for a very short time,” and Woojae is talking about his tongue between his teeth to say the “th” in “earthworm.” When I read that sentence later on, it sounds like _don’t move_, like how on that Saturday, the curl of smoke rounds the curl of the worm making a curl of ash—its own _casting_—and we stay a bit longer, in this “room for dreams minus bed on traditional Musqueam and Tsawwassen land.” 

All of this to say that I will return, two weeks later, when Woojae will read his text aloud to a roomful of us, and I’ll bring the decaf coffee thermos that was a gift from a friend—whose matching regular coffee thermos may still be in her home that she left for a _home_, 307 driving minutes away—to fill with rich compost tea that will nourish the flowers of my steadfast _Oxalis triangularis_. I’ll decide to make good on my promise, to make _feelings_ into _facts_, and I read _art criticism, again_, but I worry that if a review is “a formal assesment or examination of something with the possibility or intention of instituting a change, if necessary,” then this might not be a review of an exhibition. 

At the same time that I learn about the helminths, I learn that the composting worms are epigean—they live close to the surface, like us. Like us, they can be moved from one bedroom to the next. Like them, we are displaced by shovels in the earth. On the day that we visit his exhibition, we already know this, we chant “sold, sold, sold” all the red-stickered way home—exhausted, exasperated, exhilarated, _alive_. 
    
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dreams comma delta, run and cocurated by Christian Vistan and Aubin Soonhwan Kwon, was a room for artist projects and exhibitions located inside Vistan’s family home in Delta, BC. 

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“With a heart that sings the stars, I will love all things dying” ran from April to 21 May 2023 at dreams comma delta, Delta, BC.

Header

C Mag

Issue 156

Craft

Credits

Related Events

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Craft

Explore Issue by Images

Features

The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar

Marking Time Spent Absurdly

Weaving Through the Binary: Qualeasha Wood's Textile Inheritances

Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea

Love Made Object

Mercado de Artesanías: Crafting Latinx Identity

Artist Projects

Exploratory Touch by Trevor Novak: Text

Columns

Composition: – GILD – Dedicated to V.T.G.N.R.S.M

One Thing: This File Cannot Be Found

Tilling: The Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice: In Conversation with Luther Konadu

Reviews

“With a heart that sings the stars, I will love all things dying” — Woojae Kim

“Allom! Amatai! Allom!” — Yee I-Lann

“I want you to know that I am hiding something from you / since what I might be is uncontainable” — Kosisochukwu Nnebe

The Mystery of the Twisted Fantasy — Alvin Luong

“Invisible Fish” — Simranpreet Anand, Roxanne Charles, Joni Cheung, Paige Pettibon, Nash'mene'ta'naht Atheana Picha, Susan Point, Pudlo Pudlat, Manuel Axel Strain, Leslie Wells

“Little We, Have Little, We Give!” — Rosa Aiello, Sophie Lee, FAUN TV (François Pisapia), Julia Scher, FLUK, greater form (invited by Cittipunkt Teens)

“up front w/” — Robin Arseneault, Nathan Eugene Carson, Mark Dicey, Marigold Santos

“landless heirloom” — Eve Tagny

“Entre les lignes – Writing Mountains” — Nour Bishouty, Kuh Del Rosario, Joyce Joumaa, Anahita Norouzi, La Société des archives affectives (Fiona Annis and Véronique La Perrière M.), Hajra Waheed, Leila Zelli