In the opening of Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community, Jenni Sorkin leads with a new take on this tussle between two forms to argue that it was ‘modern craft and not modern art that spearheaded nonhierarchical and participatory experiences’. A sentiment we at Decorating Dissidence can get behind.
… Review: Live Form by Jenni Sorkin
Augusta Savage’s classical sculpture humanised the Black experience during the prevalent Harlem Renaissance era.
… Augusta Savage: Continuing a legacy
As I approach 60, I feel comfortable working from ideas based on my interior perspective. The validation of others does not bother me too much – I like to be part of the conversation but otherwise I make what I feel like doing and that gives me pleasure.
… Community in Clay: Rosamund Coady
I could connect to people whom I a priori had nothing in common with, simply because we were potters. We spoke the same language, the language of clay, which went beyond the borders within which we had been born.
… A Life Journey Through Clay
Queer(ing) Craft is guest edited by Daniel Fountain.
… Editorial 8: Queer(ing) Craft
Living Beyond Limits (20 October 2018 – 3 February 2019) at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art was a queer re-exploration of its art collection. Assistant Curator Helen Welford and I (Claire Mead) invited members of local LGBTQIA+ communities to co-curate and queer it with us. Based on their choices of objects to be displayed, co-curators wrote interpretation labels based on their own personal experiences and thoughts around queerness...
… Crafting Queer Spaces: Living Beyond Limits
Matt Gale’s work examines systems and relationships, exploring unusual or unexpected pairings of partners as a means to reference the queerness of the natural world – that actually nature is far less binary than we might imagine.
… Practice-Based: On Smocking, Science and Sex
I stand in cold stacks. My hands run over the pale green boxes scored with pencil marks. I rummage. A syllabus, a letter and tangled endings. An under-stairs cupboard filled with pornography. S&M dyke night flyers with tea in the living room. Email trails: reaching out, and toward something…
… Practice-Based: Quilting the Lesbian Archive, Sarah-Joy Ford
Adejoke Tugbiyele (b.1977, New York, USA) is an award-winning, queer, black artist. Her work often comments on human rights issues around the world, and her own identity as a queer woman of Nigerian descent. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York where she continues to make artwork and engage in advocacy projects.
… Adejoke Tugbiyele’s Hybrid Forms and Second-Skins
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This well-known aphorism can be easily applied to Lot Kessels’ Charleston Doll’s House, a miniaturised rendering of the historic East-Sussex home associated with the Bloomsbury Group (Fig. 1).
… The Charleston Doll’s House: “A home for whoever you want to be.”
LJ Roberts (b.1980) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is known for large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages and sculpture. Their work investigates the overlaps of queer and trans politics, alternative kinships, narrative, and material deviance. Daniel Fountain speaks to LJ here about the relationships between craft, identity and queer theory, and how this manifests itself in their practice.
… LJ Roberts’ Queer Epics
Our spotlight this month is the emerging mixed-media artist Osgood (Oz) Bender who uses craft and material processes as a foundation to explore concepts of body modification.
… Spotlight: Oz Bender’s Deconstructive Craft
My current body of work examines witch trials and witch-persecution, in European history, and as a metaphorical lens through which to explore some of the fears and prejudices of our own time.
… Anne Jackson: The Witchcraft Series
Following a timeline from the Ice Age Venuses of the Paleolithic, the goddesses of Minoan, Ancient Egyptian, Old Norse and Ancient Greek cultures of the Neolithic Bronze Age to the present day Jane observed the diminution of the female in the human story. Her response was to create a series of textile sculptures.
… Jane Fairhurst: Wands, Fetishes for Uncertain Times & Women’s Work
As I settled into my new routine, I began to explore the country, visiting Loch Lomond and the Hebrides, the Highlands and Orkney. While I felt such joy in each new place, I still had trouble connecting to the place-specific energy of the land. And so, I developed A Doorway In as a way to reflect upon my relation to this new place and also to experience more deeply the land around me.
… A Doorway In: My Own Way In
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