Intersecting Discourses: Inflecting Craft and Heritage
My Session Status
This session proposes an examination and discussion of possible intersections of the narratives of craft and heritage with the goal of exploring the economic, social and cultural sustainability of craft practices. Questions that might be addressed include:
● How do heritage narratives inflect the production, marketing and consumption of craft objects?
● Are heritage narratives that privilege traditional craft skills and the idea of functionality incommensurable with contemporary craft practices and objects?
● Can North American and Western European professional craft practices along with their attendant narratives find a relevant place within heritage studies?
Sub Sessions
This paper will reveal the power games within the field of heritage conservation in Røros, Norway. A closer examination of the “reconstruction” of an outhouse building at Kaffestuggu courtyard was performed by using the methodological and theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu. His notion of structuration and the awareness that social structures are always incompletely solidified, in struggle and tension between one another, and therefore constantly changing, helped to clarify the reason...
In 2014, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery curated an exhibition of crafts and objects called “Hunting for Lost Crafts.” The exhibition was built around heritage items from the collections of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery and the Highland Folk Museum and focused on crafts prevalent at one time or another in the Scottish Highlands associated with pursuits such as hunting, shooting, and fishing, which were once essential life skills but are now recreational sports. The exhibition also high...
This paper will explore the intersection of performativity and heritage discourse that is evident in the production narratives of Australian creative artists who made handicraft objects commemorating the 2015 Anzac centenary. This centenary marks the landing of troops at Gallipoli from the Australian and New Zealand armed forces during World War I, a moment considered foundational in the birth of the Australian nation and the development of Australian identity. In 2015, rural agricultural ...
This paper will explore the case of Horezu pottery in relationship with craft continuity, history, and heritage. Through an ethnographic study of this craft practice, I will investigate the ways in which heritage narratives inflect the production, marketing, and consumption of craft objects. I will argue that heritage practices have a profound influence on the process of making, the resulting artifact, but also on the identities of the craft practitioners. In 2012, a Romanian pott...
The paper will deal with questions concerning heritagization processes in the field of craft and sloyd in a Swedish context, and how hierarchal structures concerning textile techniques were established at the end of the nineteenth century. How and why some techniques were selected and others not, to be part of a cultural heritage will be discussed using the technique of crocheting as a point of departure. Aesthetic considerations that were made, and common concepts that still are used when...
“Its thatched cabins and rude village crosses framed in the setting of reproductions of structures statelier even in their ruins will recall earlier scenes to many Irish-Americans” (New York Times, 7 May 1893, 17). This observation by the widely-circulated American newspaper encapsulates one aspect of the Donegal Industrial Fund’s Irish Village constructed to advertise and sell hand-crafted objects made by Irish women and men to visitors to the World’s Fair. Alice Rowland Hart (18...
The recent closure of the Museum of Contemporary Craft (February 2016) in Portland, Oregon once again raises the question regarding the future of craft. It follows the closing of the Canadian Craft and Design Museum (Vancouver, 2004) and the renaming of the American Craft Museum into the Museum of Art and Design (New York, 2002), not to mention the erosion of craft practices in postsecondary programs. Craft seems to have become a dirty word. In his essay, “How Envy Killed the Crafts Moveme...