Where art meets craft

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This article was published 31/07/2017 (3012 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whether it’s yarn-bombing craftivists creating radical public-knitting projects, Indigenous artists using traditional beading to explore urgent contemporary issues or artists illustrating complex mathematical ideas with crochet, it seems clear that the old distinctions between craft and art have completely blown up.

In Manitoba, these expanded possibilities are getting a new home with C2, a centre for craft that will open later this summer in the Exchange District. A joint venture involving the Manitoba Craft Council and the Manitoba Crafts Museum and Library, the new 3,000-plus square-foot venue will combine gallery, shop, library, museum and workshop spaces to showcase both historical and contemporary craft.

At this month’s First Fridays Art Talk/Art Walk, we’ll talk with Manitoba artists Seema Goel and Jessica Hodgson about new ways of working with craft materials and craft techniques, and why many 21st-century artists — and audiences — are drawn to traditional materials, old-school skills and handmade objects.

“I think it’s partly about the importance of having skills, things that are developed and taught over a long period of time,” Hodgson suggests. “Especially in a world that’s so quick.”

“I like the concept that it takes 10,000 hours to master something.”

It’s also a different way of looking at value, Goel suggests. In our age of mass-produced goods, “when you can buy a porcelain plate at IKEA for two bucks,” it says something to invest in a hand-thrown plate or cup made by a local craftsperson.

Goel, a sculptor and writer who works in time-honoured techniques like glassblowing and wool-felting, as well as video projection, animation, digital interfaces and taxidermy mice, often makes pieces that bridge art and science. With a science degree from McGill and a masters of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, Goel is the artist-in-residence at the University of Manitoba’s faculty of science.

Hodgson, who graduated from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art, often uses pottery vessels — some functional and some fabulously non-functional — to examine ideas about food, land and sustainability.

“I would say I’m a ceramic artist and painter,” Hodgson explains. “But I do describe ceramics as a craft because it’s so technical.”

For both artists, the connection between materials and concept has to be organic.

Goel starts with an idea and then figures out the best way to embody that idea in form. “I’m really interested in the things around me, so the stuff I do is very much an attempt to connect back to the rest of the world,” she says. “I’m particularly interested in the human relationship to nature and to animals.”

In 2016, Goel collaborated with robotics experts and other artists on Murmur, which used felted alpaca and sheep’s wool, combined with motion sensors, to create big snorfling, sighing pods. Participants could enter into these womb-like structures (“Napping is always an option,”), lured by the warm, fuzzy associations of wool.

Using craft materials in a large-scale techno-savvy contemporary art piece can confuse people, Goel admits. “Sometimes that confusion can be a good place,” she says. “It lets people go in without feeling, ‘Oh, it’s art, I have to know something.’ It lets them play.”

Hodgson, who grew up in the small farming community of Hartney, is very much concerned with food — how it’s grown, processed and distributed and how that has changed drastically in recent decades. In her Stratum series, Hodgson has crafted cups, mugs and platters in an earthy, rough red clay, which she associates with “the natural, the local and the real.” This base is then covered with pure white porcelain, a slinky, seductive surface that represents “the mysterious layer of chemicals, control and deception that seems to be veiling our entire food structure today.”

As Hodgson’s work suggests, functional objects can have more than one function. They can serve up your food, and they can make you think about that food. That’s where craft meets art.

We’ll be discussing art and craft, art and science, and a whole lot more with Jessica Hodgson and Seema Goel at Friday’s Art Talk at the Free Press News Café at 6 p.m. Call 204-697-7069 or email wfpnewscafe@gmail.com to reserve tickets, which are $20.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca