This is a transcript of a gallery talk presented to Arrowmont Board members, staff, and guests on Saturday, October 19, 2019.

Thank you so much to Arrowmont for inviting me to jury this show and to come here in person to speak with you, and to Kelsey for organizing this. Just as important as fostering the careers of these early career makers under 35, I want to thank Arrowmont for having the foresight to also offer this opportunity to a team of early career jurors. Just as we need new makers to make the work of the future, we need new curators and writers and administrators to build the creative infrastructures to support them and to bring the work to new audiences. I greatly appreciate the opportunity.

My background is in contemporary craft, specifically jewelry/metals – I earned an MFA from Kent State in Jewelry/Metals/Enameling – but directly after grad school I was fortunate to start working at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. The residency hosts around 70 artists a year for five weeks at a time – artists of all disciplines: painters, sculptors, installation artists, digital media artists, filmmakers, activist artists, dancers, sound artists, writers, performance artists, and everything in between. And that experience has really expanded for me the definition of what an “artist” is and what “artistic practice” can mean.

But in that expanse of contemporary art, I’m consistently drawn to work that engages with a tradition of materials and process, a basis of skill, and a connection to the hand – even when that engagement is purposefully rejecting one or more of those things. This is because I enjoy work that I can connect to and that I know a diverse audience can connect to as well. When someone recognizes a woodworking technique used to make the table they grew up eating dinner on, or notices the same stitch they watched their grandmother make with her hands, or imagines how they would feel donning that necklace and strutting down the street – there’s an entry point, a welcome mat to invite the viewer into the piece and sit with it for a while in intimate conversation.

The only thing I love more than contemporary craftwork is contemporary craftwork by fresh voices in the field – that moment when I’m strolling through an exhibition, or, these days, scrolling through my Instagram feed, and see new work for the first time. It’s that, “Ooo, what is this?!” feeling. Jurying this show was a lot of that, so I really enjoyed the entire process.

Looking at the work by these 35 artists under 35, you’ll notice a lot of play with material. I think that’s because crafts artists typically start their education learning about material – what it is, where it comes from, how it’s been used in the past, how to manipulate it, and the hand skills and tools you use to do so – so they are particularly adept at messing with it. The artists in this show did a fantastic job messing with materials. There’s work that imitates one material with another, such as Holly Ross’s crumpled cardboard boxes articulated in clay; work that takes ordinary objects and transforms them into extraordinary forms, such as Lenáe Zirnheld’s futuristic brooches made from plastic dental flossers; you’ll see work that pushes the physical and structural limits of the material, such as Shiyuan Xu’s complex and delicate porcelain paper clay sculptures; and work that renders the medium used unrecognizable, such as Dani Guillen’s infected wound textiles.

Aesthetically, the work ranges from Lauren Eckert’s sci-fi video game-esque adornment, to Clay Leonard’s seductively sleek cups, to Lyndee Deal’s 90s-pop-teen aesthetic tablewares, to the frenetic, intuitive texture of Danielle Lasker’s stop sign. 

The work truly bridges the gap, demonstrating a range of engagement with traditional craft from reverently adjacent to it to questioning and expanding its supposed boundaries, and that’s how I want to address the work I’ll show you up on the screen today.

I’ll start by discussing a piece I feel converses closely and humorously with its traditional roots: Colin Pezzano’s Bandaids. First, these pieces display excellent craftsmanship and mastery of material – the tiny inlay work uses the natural grain of the wood as line drawing. Conceptually, Pezzano presents us with three cracked boards that he’s addressed with his own version of a traditional wood joinery technique. Butterfly joints have been used for literally thousands of years to join two adjacent boards or to repair or stabilize cracks. Pezzano’s joints adopt the form of a bandaid. I particularly enjoyed these pieces because his wooden bandaids likely bring a smile to every woodworker’s face – because they recognize the pun that a butterfly joint is essentially a “bandaid” for the wood – and because it tells the non-woodworker viewer exactly what the purpose of this kind of joint is. Pezzano achieves both an inside joke and a didactic tool in one piece. I love this as a representation of two of the most prominent characteristics of the crafts field, two things I love most about it – the camaraderie of a small community you can geek out with about things like wooden bandaids, and the devotion the community has to education, such as here at Arrowmont.

Next, I will focus on a piece that stands somewhere in the middle of this range of engagement with traditional craft: Emily Baker’s Tarsal Tunnel. Baker uses one of craft’s most ancient materials – iron. Her sculpture makes this very hard material look stretched and twisted, but that isn’t actually why I was so drawn to this piece. As someone with a metals background, I’ve seen work that makes hard metal look soft, and her linear, draping forms are familiar in the blacksmithing canon.

I was drawn to Baker’s work because typically when I see linear ironwork, it’s forged. Though it may not be immediately obvious to the untrained eye, Baker’s piece is cast. In fact, she goes so far as to leave some of the casting material on the finished piece, which will eventually cause it to rust. As with Pezzano’s work, I enjoy the didactic quality of this – subtly showing the viewer how it was made. But I also love Baker’s boldness in this choice. Anyone in the metals community – including the authors of the 2017 book CAST: Art and Objects, Jen Townsend and Renée Zettle-Sterling – will tell you that casting has a stigma in the metals community. It’s something like, “Those who can’t fabricate or forge, cast.” But what Townsend and Zettle-Sterling champion in their book and what I see Baker expressing with her work, is that any process that leads to a desired outcome is valid, and that we need to challenge these biases within our disciplines in order to open up doors for expression, whether it’s putting beads on a piece of jewelry or acrylic paint on ceramics.

This leads me to the final piece I’ll speak about: Jenny Reed’s Feast Week. For me, Reed’s frenzied, raw aesthetic pushes craft’s boundaries exactly where they need to be pushed. She gives us something between a ceramic object or collection of objects, a painting with basic 2-point perspective, a wall-mounted relief sculpture, and an Americana cultural diptych. She rejects traditions of precise handwork, consistency between 2D and 3D representation, symmetry, order, and surface treatment. She embraces messiness and the mundane. I love the promise this piece surely keeps to shock a craft traditionalist to believe it would be included in a craft exhibition, and to shock someone in the “Fine Art” field to believe it was made by a ceramicist.

I believe it is through blurring lines in this way that we grow as a field, provide access to new and exciting voices, and reach ever-diversifying audiences. The more we expand and question our boundaries, bring craftwork into the Art mainstream, and bring the Art mainstream into craft, the stronger we all become. This isn’t at all to say that we reject tradition or skill or craft, but that there’s room for it all, and it can exist on a spectrum instead of contained inside separate boxes.

I hope this exhibition assures the traditionalists out there that young artists are still invigorated to learn exquisite craftsmanship and converse closely with tradition, and the rebels out there that there are young artists breaking boundaries and provoking meaningful evolution. Bridging the Gap is both a broad cross-section and a drop in the bucket of the craftwork being made today visibly, or invisibly, in the US and around the world. I hope that this show inspires new perspectives and contributes to the ever-expanding and limitless language and expression of the contemporary craft field.

Thank you.