MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture: Focus Issue Eight: Feminist Craft

Misiak, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7153-944X, McNeill, Isabelle, Backman Rogers, Anna and Sadri, Houman ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7736-2494 (2021) MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture: Focus Issue Eight: Feminist Craft. [Journal]

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Abstract / Summary

Exploring the relationship female practitioners have with their work, our authors show that craft practice, whether in the professional realm or as a hobby, is not only functional. It often becomes an essential source of leisure, liberating income or aesthetic pleasure. Quietly it resists those patriarchal claims to universality and frequently helps redefine women’s sense of ‘otherness’. In other words, female craftwork is often a smaller-scale, localised or domestic production that empowers communities and individuals.

The articles and interviews included within this issue recognise women’s craft as an art form that foregrounds creativity as a fundamental act of reparation, care, love, and gratitude. To craft, for many of the artists interviewed here, is primarily an ethical gesture that renders palpable the physical connection between the artist and their artefact, between our inner mental states and materiality, between the self and gendered identity. Craft, as an art form, is reconceived as a subversive and potentially political tool that opens up sites of contestation that demand we also rethink the very terms by which we consider notions such as art, the canon, the space of exhibition, and the role of the artist (as an always implicitly gendered subject). Moreover, many of these discussions propel ethical considerations of the materiality of ‘art making’, our deeper connections to the natural world, and the detrimental impact we are having on it. For us, this issue elucidates manifold ways in which women’s craft can be read as an art form: whether as explicitly feminist or engaging with theories of new materialism, ecology, hapticity and phenomenology.

Item Type:	Journal
ISSN:	2003-167x
Subjects:	Creative Art & Design Creative Art & Design > Fashion, Textiles & Costume Design Creative Art & Design > Fine Art
Courses by Department:	The School of Film & Television
Depositing User:	Anna Misiak
Date Deposited:	18 Dec 2024 11:19
Last Modified:	18 Dec 2024 11:19
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/5859

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