Unfinished business: Craft and revivification
Mae Finlayson and Karen Hall
Mae Finlayson, All my love, Anon. (stretched doily) (detail), 2013, yarn, pins and embroidery hoop, dimensions variable
Photo: Mae Finlayson
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Abstract
Reactivating incomplete and discarded domestic craft projects is an
exploration of how such objects can mediate between presence and
absence. Contemporary creative work that gathers and reclaims the
unfinished projects acknowledges, extends and plays with their rich
materiality as well as the dormant stories embedded within them. Using
unfinished objects can be a way of speaking to loss and absence, and an
assertion of the presence of other voices in the act of repurposing. A
material dialogue, created through the trace of the hand and the
repetitive labour of crafting, emphasises the potential within these
discarded objects. The tension between the implied presence of the first
maker and the displacement of the past through revivification is the
entry point to nostalgia, a label that implies both being out of place
as well as out of time. While nostalgia is often seen as an innately
conservative practice, functioning as a reductive stand-in for the
richness of the past, we take up Svetlana Boym’s (2001) argument that
the impossible longing of reflective nostalgia can be productive,
humorous and utopian. This essay explores the interplay of past and
present in the process of finding, remaking and repurposing. Read full paper
Abstract from: Unfinished business: Craft and revivification
Full paper published in craft+design enquiry: issue 6 Issue 6 2014, Craft.Material.Memory
craft, unfinished, trace, materials, nostalgia
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