FeaturedArticle Issue Fifteen

Teaching Historians with Tools: Toward a Subversive Pedagogy 

What if we could tell a different story, Seth C. Bruggeman asks. What if we looked for inspiration in craft and cognitive science and object theory? What if we could write a history of labor and embodied knowledge that shows how skill itself is a survival strategy, one that we all share because it is literally built into each of our bodies?

… Teaching Historians with Tools: Toward a Subversive Pedagogy 
FeaturedArticle Issue Fifteen

On Tool Embodiment

Jeff Peachey asks: What really goes on in an embodied state? Could it be reconstructed, or at least some the complexities described retrospectively? Here are some of the decisions and actions that become take place during the embodied activity of paring leather…

… On Tool Embodiment
FeaturedArticle editorial Issue Fourteen

Editorial #14: Craft, Teaching, and Knowledge

by guest editor Kate Devine

How is it that we come to know something or more particularly, how to do something? We may imbibe the words of others, learn by watching a skilled example, learn through our own trial and error, or discover something within ourselves. How then, do we pass on that knowledge? Through stories, through instruction, through play? It can be hard to teach something ‘you just know’. 

… Editorial #14: Craft, Teaching, and Knowledge
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s Bend

With a population today of just 275 people, Gee’s Bend is a small, isolated hamlet with a complex history. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama river, it was once a cotton plantation, originally established by Joseph Gee and then later owned by Mark Pettway. As direct descendants of the slaves and subsequent sharecroppers who worked on the land throughout the 19th and 20th Century, the majority of those who live in Gee’s Bend continue to share the Pettway name.[1]

… Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s Bend
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

Teaching Craft: a Silversmith’s Story

There are many aspects that one takes for granted when you’re a craftsperson. Drawing myself back to my first days holding a saw or understanding how pliers work, to the more complicated matter of how silver reacts under hammer and fire, I appreciate something that now comes naturally to me, but may not necessarily for others. I take care not to do the work for my students, using words to convey what to do. Sometimes it’s not easy with a craft that’s so tacit and engrained. 

… Teaching Craft: a Silversmith’s Story
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

“Embroidery is integral to our being”: the role of Arabic tatreez in knowing who you are and where you are from

Embroidery is about making visible. It is the adornment of cloth to add meaning and value. As such, it is about identity – making a claim about who you are, and displaying that for others to see. This is both personal and political, and nowhere is this more true than in the modern Middle East.

… “Embroidery is integral to our being”: the role of Arabic tatreez in knowing who you are and where you are from
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

An Epistemics of Touch: The Conglomerate Tactile Trash Object Project

Touch has made its way into our everyday turns of phrase; it has dissolved into our vocabulary, the way we relate to the world around us. Both in this abstract sense and literally, often in the form of banal and daily gestures, touch is an invisible and inescapable part of our day-to-day. Such is the ubiquity of touch that we can choose to ignore its importance, until it is brought into question.

… An Epistemics of Touch: The Conglomerate Tactile Trash Object Project
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen textiles

“Put your hand up if you’re wearing something knitted!” 

Figures 1 and 2. Elinor at a Homemade knitting machine workshop for children. Image: Elnaz Yazdani 

Are you wearing something knitted today? Given the broad array of knitted fabrics on the market and the recent lockdown trend for comfort dressing, we’d say it’s very likely – but did you know your clothes were knitted? We have been involved with either teaching about or creating knitting on knitting machines for over 15 years and we often forget that once upon a time we didn’t know that so much of our clothing was knitted.

… “Put your hand up if you’re wearing something knitted!” 
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

Meet Nilupa Yasmin: the Artist Using Craft and Photography to Weave Together Communities

Nilupa Yasmin in front of a section of her work Grow me a Waterlilly, 2017.

Existing on the tentative line between the mediums of photography and applied craft, lens-based artist and educator Nilupa Yasmin’s work is an intricate reconstruction of both art forms. As she pieces together personal stories from the different communities that she encounters, her work is in a constant state of unravelling, where she continues to discover her place within the warp of the world. Focusing on the two strands of community and self, her woven photographic work delicately displays that one cannot exist without the other. 

… Meet Nilupa Yasmin: the Artist Using Craft and Photography to Weave Together Communities
FeaturedArticle Interviews issue thirteen wearable art

Stitching over history, memory and collective joy – Stephanie Francis-Shanahan’s living sculptures

A blazer and a skirt flutter in the wind at Pett Level beach in Hastings. On it are pictures of a man and a woman, across time, sown into the fabric and glazed with glue. Words travel through the garment in embroidery and the pink tulle skirt reads: my own darling (image right). As an image, it presents a ghostly figure, embodied by the movement in the wind and the stories woven into the textile. 

… Stitching over history, memory and collective joy – Stephanie Francis-Shanahan’s living sculptures
FeaturedArticle issue thirteen textiles wearable art

Wrapped up in a fairy tale: Jessie M. King and the production of wearable designs

Although Scottish artist, designer and teacher Jessie M. King (1875-1949) is probably most celebrated for her delicate and often whimsical illustrative work, this short article will focus on her clothing designs and dissemination of knowledge via her how-to-publication How Cinderella went to the Ball (1924).  

… Wrapped up in a fairy tale: Jessie M. King and the production of wearable designs
FeaturedArticle issue thirteen Practice Based wearable art

Anne von Freyburg: Turning wearables into art


Anne von Freyburg recycles wearable materials to refashion 17th century Dutch paintings. Her mantra is “I paint with materials” and she deftly manipulates fabrics into images by embroidering onto canvas. Celebrating embellishment as a tool of self-expression, these ‘paintings’ use the visual cues of fashion to suggest art is more than just a decorative object.

… Anne von Freyburg: Turning wearables into art
Article

Updates: Dissident Woolf, repair, and stylish homes

Each week, the Decorating Dissidence team send out a weekly newsletter! All our subscribers receive exclusive insights into the world of craft, making and design via reviews and interviews with contemporary makers, artists and curators. For paid subscribers, expect exclusive Q&As with craftmakers, curators, and creatives from around the world; plus a monthly download filled with recommendations and reading!

… Updates: Dissident Woolf, repair, and stylish homes
Interviews

Behind the Scenes: The Sleepers Quilt

This September, The Women’s Art Collection opens a new exhibition: The Sleepers. Exploring the politics of rest, the collection brings together a century of works across a variety of mediums: paintings, prints and textiles. At the heart of the exhibition is a collaborative quilt, created with women from the Cambridge Women’s Resource Centre and artist Cait Moreton-Lisle, which stitches together themes of rest, resistance, and care. Below, we go behind the scenes of quiltmaking with assistant curator Laura Moseley (who also champions craft as the founder of Common Threads Press) to talk about how the quilt is both a physical symbol of comfort and a platform for collective creativity…

… Behind the Scenes: The Sleepers Quilt
Interviews textiles

🪡 Unfolding, Unpicking, Repairing: an Interview with Delaine Le Bas

This summer, Delaine Le Bas took over the vast main gallery of Glasgow’s Tramway to create an immersive, richly textured world where multiple voices and visions collide. A space of protest, peace, pain, and communion, Le Bas’ Delainia: 17071965, Unfolding challenges the narratives that underpin our society and culture, confronting viewers with questions about their own complicity in power and prejudice that oppress marginalised communities. A slogan scrawled on the gallery wall warns ‘Beware Linguistic Engineering’, a sentiment that echoes through the exhibition, as Le Bas interrogates myths, stereotypes, and the exclusionary nature of the word.

… 🪡 Unfolding, Unpicking, Repairing: an Interview with Delaine Le Bas
Article

Updates: Exhibitions, modernist makers, and what we’re reading

Each week, the Decorating Dissidence team send out a weekly newsletter on Substack! Our subscribers receive exclusive insights into the world of craft, making and design via reviews and interviews with contemporary makers, artists and curators.

Each month, we share a comprehensive roundup of the most compelling exhibitions, exciting opportunities, and latest releases that are at the forefront of the craft-and-art intersection – so you can stay up-to-date on the dynamic world of craft from the UK and beyond. We also bring you our monthly Modernist Maker Digest, delving into the stories of twentieth-century makers and their influence today.

We set up our newsletter as a subscription model, to help us fund some of the costs of running our DIY project and, in time, to commission guest writers. We hope you can join us – free or paid!

Subscribe here

Here’s what we shared in April:

THE MONTH IN CRAFT

Featuring Yinka Shonibare, Sukaina Kubba,
Craft Show, Leilah Babirye plus an opportunity round up!

INTERVIEW: FRASER TAYLOR

Club culture, creative collaboration & the possibilities of printed textiles
in 1970s & 80s Glasgow and London…

REVIEW: ELLEN LESPERANCE

Our guest reviewer, Laura Moseley, untangles material histories of Greenham Common at Ellen Lesperance: Stay in the Centre of No-Man’s Land

MODERNIST MAKER DIGEST 008:
RUTH ASAWA

Weaving form out of thin air…