CRAFT!

The deep dive into materials and crafts that the students in the CRAFT! Master’s Programme devote themselves to during their two years of studies takes a form of criticality that is not theoretically oriented, but in which the encounter with a material in itself formulates a critical and non-textual approach. In this year’s CRAFT! students, we see approaches that dissolve distinctions between the materiality and the doing body that are formulated during an industrial production apparatus and which also include other bodies in a broader social context. In several degree projects, methods, motifs and ornamentation are examined that approach a wider biological and organic point of departure and which put our human bodies in dialogue with nature just as nature and not only as a linguistically distanced concept. In parallel with this is an examination of how ornamentation can be in dialogue with both its history and with a contemporary era that is still characterised by a modernistic post-industrial view of ornamentation and rational functional concepts. We are also presented with proposals on how play and pure joy can become a method for interacting with material and performative aspects of things beyond established agreements in a commercially oriented notion of the relationship between human and object.

In the students’ work, we get to explore a multitude of perspectives in which the dialogue with the material often dissolves dualistic and distancing approaches between material, body and place. With a starting point in the potential of crafts, we can slowly begin to heal the deep fissure that has appeared in the wake of exploitation in relation to what we call nature, and all the materials that in dialogue with each other already create conditions for each other’s existence. Perhaps there can also be a place for humans in this dialogue. We just need to find the language. Crafts can offer such a language and in this year’s Degree Exhibition, the students in CRAFT! provide examples of how this could be done.

Anders Ljungberg
Professor in Craft specialising in jewellery and corpus