Browsing by Subject "Craft"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Crafting objects, selves, links: the embodied production of relational exchange in performances of craft in the United States
    (2011-06) Glover, Jessie
    "Crafting Objects, Selves, Links" formulates an ethnographic analysis of craft practice in the contemporary United States. Using performance as an analytic frame, the author examines the ways that crafters use the productive gestures of craft to generate opportunities for relational contact, achievement, learning, buying and selling, and other forms of exchange. The manuscript is divided into four sites: craft in recognizable sites of performance, the performance of leisure craft in craft circles, craft sellng spaces formed by crafter entrepreneurs, and sites on the World Wide Web where crafters take action together.
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    Forgetting the Hand: Wedgwood, Sèvres, and the Industrial Fate of Skill
    (2020-07) Studelska, Dustin
    This dissertation explores how our modern perspective of skill developed from the 1760s to the 1840s in Western Europe. As industrial capitalism became bolstered by changes in design, business practice, international commerce, and mechanization, skill became conceptually jettisoned from the specific experiences of individual people, abstracted into industrial objects, economic categories, and physical force. This abstraction has subsequently caused a form of cultural forgetting in industrial modernity in which we, the heirs of this process, fail to appreciate the fundamental connection of skills to our essential humanity. Through the use of case studies of Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery in Stoke-on-Trent, England and the French Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Sèvres, each chapter illuminates skill’s historical complexity with relation to design, manufacture, management, industrial promotion, and technological development. This dissertation uses an analysis of private letters, printed pamphlets, royal correspondence, and ceramic objects themselves to examine the hand skills hidden within neoclassical ceramics, the skills of shrewdness utilized by Wedgwood and Sèvres, the debated notion of skill surrounding the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1786, and the cultural discourses on skill’s role in mechanical progress. This research draws on recent scholarly characterizations of “the mindful hand” and “artisanal epistemology,” but moves beyond them to argue that skill, and the people who embodied it, cannot be defined by categories of knowledge.
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    Innovation In Craft: A Mixed Methods Study on Pre-Cut Fabrics' Impact on Quiltmaking
    (2020-06) Pokorny, Colleen
    The purpose of this mixed methods study was to develop an understanding of how the innovation of pre-cut fabrics impacted the Under 45 Quilter’s processes, quilt designs, and connections to the historical craft of quiltmaking. The effect of pre-cut fabrics on contemporary quiltmaking has been a neglected area of scholarly research. This research advanced the understanding of shifts in quiltmaking and the relationship between historical and contemporary practices of quiltmaking. A review of the literature discussed the impact of previous innovations on the evolution of quiltmaking. Background was provided on pre-cut fabrics, based on information from literature as well as interviews with industry professionals. Core values of quiltmaking were identified from the literature and categorized into three aspects specific to quiltmaking: processes, designs, and connections to the historical craft of quiltmaking. A mixed methods approach was used with multiple data sources, including interviews with 14 Under 45 Quilters, quilt photographs, five industry professional interviews, and participant observation. Data were analyzed through a grounded theory approach to find emergent themes on how pre-cut fabrics impacted quilters’ processes, designs, and connections to the historical craft. The themes identified were categorized under the three aspects of quiltmaking. Results showed that pre-cut fabrics were pivotal for the Under 45 Quilter’s sustained engagement in the craft of quiltmaking. Pre-cut fabrics redefined the traditional relationship with the fabric stash through purposeful buying and collectible eye candy. The Under 45 Quilter’s aesthetic preferences were affected by pre-cut fabrics, as seen through simpler quilt designs with a variety of fabrics. While the Under 45 Quilter found ways to be creative within the constraints of pre-cut fabrics, pre-cut fabrics were also limiting to design capabilities. The quilters’ selection of quilt designs and fabrics reflected the influence of pre-cut fabrics. Pre-cut fabrics contributed to a reworking of traditional patterns for contemporary techniques. Pre-cut fabrics also influenced how the Under 45 Quilter adopted quiltmaking. The interrelationships among the resulting themes of this study showed the scope of the effect pre-cut fabrics had on the Under 45 Quilter and quiltmaking. There was a shift towards efficient, quick completion, which caused changes to the aesthetics of quilt designs. Historical connections to traditional quilt designs potentially were being lost. For the Under 45 Quilter to maintain a historical connection to quilting, traditional designs needed to be presented in pre-cut fabric friendly techniques and modern colors. The findings of this study contributed to theory development on the relationship between innovations and quiltmaking. The study illustrated how pre-cut fabrics fit into the values and lifestyle of the Under 45 Quilter, and therefore impacted their quilt designs and connections to the historical craft of quiltmaking. The Under 45 Quilter was looking for solutions that accommodated their lives and allowed them to enjoy a creative and meaningful craft. Using pre-cuts, the Under 45 Quilter could quickly finish quilts, which helped sustain their engagement in the craft of quiltmaking.
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    Interior Impressions: Printed Material in the Nineteenth-Century American Home
    (2018-10) Michelon, Christina
    This dissertation considers how makers, especially women and children, were using mass-produced images clipped from periodicals, advertisements, and other printed sources to assert their own agency and individuality via collage-like practices in their homes during the nineteenth century. I use a wide array of “printcrafts” – my term for objects made from prints – that mediate between uniqueness and mass production, handicraft and industrialization, destruction and creation. My case studies include scrapbooks, decoupaged (print-covered) furniture, chromolithography, and board games. The project grapples with domestic craft’s relationship to affluent white femininity while using print to understand the relationship between the home, industrialization, and creativity in the modern era. By focusing on the ingenuity and “making” done by nineteenth-century homemakers, this project recovers an artistic past that has been overshadowed by more canon-driven studies of art and emphasizes the innovation and importance of centuries-old craft practices, such as collage, years before they were co-opted by twentieth-century avant-garde art movements.