A Joyful Feast: The Student Publication of the MA in Critical Craft Studies Class of 2022

MA in Critical Craft Studies Vol.

Sam Ford

Rena Tom

Kae Lorentz

Miriam Devlin

Kat Gordon

Dio Brooks

Chenoa Baker

Anne Lawson

Maru López

Tom Martin

Jeffrey A. Keith

Deborah Valoma

Lexie Harvey Joni Van Bockel

Beryl Perron-Feller

Michelle Millar Fisher

Namita Gupta Wiggers

Jen Delos Reyes

Jennifer Hand

Laurin Guthrie

Jill DiMassimo

Kerianne Quick

Faythe Levine

Pablo Helguera

Darrah Bowden

Judith Leemann

Lauren Sinner

matt lambert

Sarah Margolis-Pineo

Heather Stewart Harvey

Zaida Adriana Goveo Balmaseda

Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Mara Holt Skov

Scott Braun

Michael Hatch

Amy Meissner

Brian Conlan

Tina Wiltsie

Cyle Metzger

literally and mentally. To kick off our inaugural residency that July 2018, Ben Lignel served an amuse-bouche in the form of “Shrimp,” by Francis Ponge, and I invited everyone to our first shared meal by reading aloud Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Table.”

A table, Neruda reminds us, serves many functions. It is at a table that we write, plan revolutions, hold space for love and death, and watch sunbeams travel throughout a day. The table is where we share food and wine, laughter, and truth. “Tables are trustworthy: titanic quadrupeds,” he writes, “they sustain our hopes and our daily life.”

I asked too much of the various four-legged tables in my home during these past two years of the pandemic. No matter what corner or side I chose, all the tables re mained in the same space: my home. I dreamt of feasts. In these dreams, the tables are generous and long, and the people who sit close to one another smile and laugh. This proximity feels uncanny. I often wake up just as some delicious platter is being placed in front of me.

This summer, in July 2022, we can gather once again. It is bittersweet. This gathering marks the first time the graduating Class of 2022 will feast together at the same table. And, too, it marks the end of the program, as Warren Wilson College has an nounced its pending closure.

So as you spread this zine across your table, or hold it in your hands, take notice of the table near you. Con sider the conditions that brought the zine into your world. Unlike Neruda, I do not believe that “The table is already set.” We are too hungry to let this feast end. So while those who created the zine gathered in person only once to feast at the same table, this zine carries their conviviality and community far into the future, to many tables still to be set. * * *

Colophon The MA in Critical Craft Studies celebrates the graduation of the 2022 cohort with A Joyful Feast – Craft in Moments of Pause Conceived as part of the Materials Lab course, this editorial project was developed by the graduating cohort during semesters III and IV.

Published by MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, North Carolina

Program director Namita Gupta Wiggers Program coordinator Jessie Shires

Proofreader Nathalie Mornu Illustrator Joni Van Bockel Designer Ben Lignel (lay-out and titles)

Editors Sara Clugage & Kate Hawes

Printer Lucky Risograph, New York first and a half printed edition September 2022 ISBN 978-1-7351592-2-5

This publication has been typeset using mostly Euripides, by Tanvi Sharma, and Authentic Sans, by Christina Janus and Desmond Wong. If you are interested in supporting and recognizing the work of female and BIPOC font designers, consider these resources: https://www.design-research. be/by-womxn/ and https://library.typographica.org/black-type-designers-foundry-owners

Welcome to the feast!

As the materials for The Joyful Feast are sent off to our printers, Dio and June, in Oakland, CA, my cohort has still never met in person. During our two years in the MA in Critical Craft Studies program, we have been connecting in the grid of Zoom, through the chat feed of Discord, over the phone, and in each other’s written pages.

My cohorts and I have been imagining what bumping elbows around a table might feel like. A feast where we fill ourselves and become full together; where we handle a shared utensil and taste the flavors of a sauce, comparing notes; a feast where we can lean back in chairs with our whole bodies, reach across someone else’s space for a second helping, and let our voices layer themselves in the chaos of cross-talk, not worrying about unmuting our mics; and where we might feel together the slow turn of day to night in one time zone.

A feast is a pause from what has come before, a break in the stream of a life. It can be a rest and an opportunity, a celebration, and a resistance to going on in the same way as before. Some contributors to The Joyful Feast think in the pandemic pause, while others collect their thoughts in the stillness when a recorder is stopped, or during the time alone in front of a mirror before work. In these pages, we assemble our thought-scraps, our mundane snacks, and our craft-directed hungers. This feast has been prepared with a full heart and a desire to nourish others at a time when our program is faced with displacement. This fact makes the food we feast on taste better, the presence of others savored more deeply, and the call for a riotous celebration seem like the right thing to do.

In this zine are traces of the 2022 cohort’s craft scholarship— chewed on, left to simmer, and tossed around between us for the last two years. Kat Gordon makes new stitches in the gaps of an already existing knit garment, flashes of color that bring a different future. Maru López gathers a bricolage of clothing and jewelry before leaving the house, considering the movements of earrings and the memories in a repurposed sofa covering. Kae Lorentz critically examines the craft of making up her face as she fluffs olive green along her lower lash line and peachy terracotta around her temples. Lexie Harvey explores craft in the extraordinary time and space of a Renaissance festival where blacksmiths carry heavy loads of coal and anvils to create temporary infrastructures and shared good times. Laurin Guthrie, a weaver and natural dyer, sits in conversation with a potter and a painter-urban farmer, theorizing on craft as living a life in deep relationship to materials and communities. Joni Van Bockel imagines nonhuman craft with handmade drawings that populate the zine’s margins. For me, craft theory starts with the fluidity of wet wood that is a mercurial thing that shape-shifts as it is made into a chair.

The class of 2023 extends fanciful invitations to you, our reader: to notice the ground you rest on, to take a stance about the ontology of donut holes, to arrive early and stay late at the feast. Faculty in the program offer tasty kernels to munch on—a futuristic story of what might be missing in learning through imitation alone; a philosophical take on eating as ethics and goblets as pauses in the flow of time; an oral history that stops and starts, revealing that redemption and opening is possible even when carved in stone; and a meditation on the tools used in the making of this zine. The 2022 cohort are accompanied by their plus-1s, who bring recipes for broken bread, a pill for relief and laughter, a community-made tallis for a friend, and the latent potential of small things. Alumni, mentors, teachers, and friends along the way post their fleeting encounters with not-yet-realized projects, utopian longings, and unanswered questions in the “missed connections” section; they are like menu items to be turned over and thought with at the feast.

Sit back, pass the pepper, relax, and enjoy! * * *

Kate Hawes AKA Dr. Pye N. Cone

My earrings hang on the rim of a green plastic berry basket that sits on a wooden shelf. Next to it an old crystal ice cream dish holds a few other pairs. When I’m getting dressed, picking my earrings is the last thing I do. If I’m in a hurry, I pick the cardboard gold-painted hoops I made some years ago. If I have time to consider where I’m going and what I’m wearing, I try on a few pairs and peer at the mirror. I choose carefully. I gravitate toward bigger pairs that move as I talk but are light and comfortable to wear. I pause, then decide. The purple wood pair that my friend gifted me at a street fair, the spider-wire pair my mom brought me from a trip, the clear turquoise resin silver ones I made as a sample. Feeling their different weights in my hand, I imagine them touching my neck and moving next to my face. Cold metal, the warmth of a wooden bead, the shimmer that catches the light.

Ideally, I take two hours to get ready. Not that I need two hours, for sure I could do it in less. Perhaps half an hour. Fifteen minutes, if need be. But those hours give me the space to slow down, to take time, to make it almost a ritual. On the days I need to go to work I get up very early. To brew coffee. To sit and stare at the wall while the coffee brews. To play with my cat. To read. Then I take about an hour to get dressed. On days I’m meeting friends—gathering in a house to eat, to laugh, to imagine, to talk about revolution, to talk about craft and what we are making and what we are thinking of making—those days I blast music. I bake some dessert. And then while that is in the oven, I go rummage through my closet. To get ready. To prepare for gathering. This is a time apart from the routine of running from thing to thing. A quiet pause for myself.

about craft and what we are making and

As I get ready, I gather my thoughts. In sewing, gathering refers to bunching up a strip of fabric to create volume. The pulling of a loose, long-stitched thread is what creates the gather. By bunching the length of the strip, it can fit in a smaller space, like the seam in the curve of the arm in a bodice. A flat strip of fabric becomes something else. A full and voluminous skirt, or a wide balloon sleeve. I think of gath ering with others, gathering and bunching up with my friends. As we sit close to gether, our conversations fill me up along with the delicious food we all share. I will need to wear something comfortable to sit on the floor, or maybe something warm to be outside in the garden. This time to get ready allows me a space to quietly be present. It is a moment that could be hurried, but I joyfully indulge in it, touching textures and reveling in the colors of objects that ignite my memory. The shirts that were my mother’s. My grandma’s green sweater. The jean jacket I’ve had since college, the pants I made from a strip of sofa covering. Then I turn to the green plastic basket and choose the earrings. I am ready to go.

The bricolage that has become my way of dressing is an essential part of how I perform my identity. The contraposition of textures, the clashing of colors and patterns are my play at linking and layering styles and fashion influences. Bricolage comes from the French verb bricoler, which means to tinker. In the 1960s it was used to describe artists who used assemblage techniques with whatever material they had around. For art historian Anne Dezeuze, artists who approach their materials as bricoleurs work through the tensions of producing within a consumerist society and a rapid cycle of buying and discarding objects. 1 For some people, this process of bricolage is an everyday reality—they incorporate discarded objects into their aesthetics out of necessity. I approach bricolage as play, using the word in a loose sense to refer to the assemblage of an outfit. The pieces of clothing and jewelry become my materials.

This approach is similar to how I construct some of my jewelry. I assemble pieces through layers of discarded material, pieces of fabric, and metal forms that I solder together. Cardboard from packaging boxes that I paint and seal with resin. Plastic fruit mesh that I sew around metal frames and embroider with beads from bags full of knickknacks found at the thrift store. The construction of these pieces involves play and the freedom to experiment with my materials as I cut shapes in cardboard or bundle red mesh around metal forms. I try to transmit that playfulness to the people I imagine will wear them. How will they feel as they interact with a piece on their body? How will they interact with others as they wear it? Jewelry for me

Beryl Perron-Feller Maru López

has always conveyed the magic of a small kid dressing up. A space to use our imaginations to play out all our possible selves and invent who we are. There is a power in jewelry and all it can be.

In a recent interview for the podcast Jewelry Journey, jeweler and writer matt lambert says, “my drive is that I think jewelry is in one of the best theoretical positions to talk about a lot of difficult contemporary issues, craft in general but I think jewelry because it is so tied to the body.” 2 Jewelry not only intimately connects the object to the wearer, it connects the maker and the wearer. It connects the wearer with viewers. It is a connecting thread where maker, wearer, and viewer can gather together. A momentary connection between consuming, and producing. An earring can be a hitch in the timeline. A pause.

Taking a moment of pause is a rare thing for many of us. As we tackle the constant motion of daily life, slowing down sometimes seems impossible. Some might seek to pause as a way to recharge enough to jump back into motion. But as Jenny Odell says in her book How to Do Nothing, “The point of doing nothing as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.” 3 To savor and find joy in getting ready allows us to consider the countless possible small moments where we could slow down, stop, look at the hummingbird fly by, close our eyes to feel the sunshine. It is in the pauses where we breathe in and have opportunities to pay close attention to ourselves, the people we interact with, and the world we live in.

While I slowly choose what to wear, all these thoughts fall into the background as I pause to touch the cool metal and imagine the pieces on my body. Which earrings will tangle in my friends’ hair as I hug them? Which ones will make noise as I move my arms while I talk? Which new pieces do I want to take on a test run so I can ask for feedback from my friends? Which ones would I give as a gift? As I gather with my friends, the time spent in my room no longer seems isolated but an essential part of being there. A continuation. Getting ready for things big and small. Getting ready for different rhythms of being with ourselves, with others, and with the world. * * *

Come join our feast! Arrive early and stay late. Forget the small talk, let’s discuss how relating to our materials can help us relate to place. I am excited by the possibilities of using craft as a way to practice environmental stewardship. The embodied knowledge gained from developing skills like woodworking and natural dyeing can facilitate deeper engagement with the material world, and therefore lead to deeper bioregional awareness and relationships to nature.

The potential for recontextualizing our connections to place through craft processes lies in their transformational qualities; in the process of turning a material into an object, we can work toward further integrating ourselves into the natural systems and spaces around us.

Now let’s toast to the connections we make in moments of pause and dig in before our feast gets cold! * * *

3 Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2019), 9.

this volume: watch out for missed connections !!

At the beginning of a long-awaited feast—with sighs of accomplishment—we will wrest the work, preparation and composition and more, from process and pass it to completion. On the processes, completed, we can rest and feast. When we feast, let’s not do so to be done with it. What are we resting on? * * *

This is the ground under the fallen Fern Hollow Bridge, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2022.

Photo by Miriam Devlin

c Miriam Devlin

The hot shop floor is silent and still. An orange glow lines the door of the furnace, the incandescent heart of the glass studio, its oceanic roar muted, idle, inviting. Inside a nearby kiln, the previous day’s projects are a Schrödinger’s cabinet of potential.

A figure enters, torch in hand. She coaxes the glory hole pilot to a flicker, then ignites the rumble of the burner. Waiting, she lays out her tools, fills two handmade glasses with water and clinking ice, squats low to the concrete floor to sketch her plans in chalk. Her partner arrives, studies the sketch, prepares color for the task ahead.

The dance begins with a gather of glass—her partner opens the furnace door, shields her from the heat. They move from furnace to bench in choreography communicated with signals, gestures, care. As the project grows, the energy builds—a shared purpose from a singular vision. More hands are needed as the pressure mounts, to strategize and sweat, succeed and fail, together. Eyes sparkling, they invite you to join the fray.

Are you ready to play with fire? * * *

1. Exfoliate last night.

2. Stare into your own eyes in the mirror and freak out about your thesis. You’ve been working on a hyper-detailed 20-odd-page experimental archaeology section about eyeliner in the 1960s for six months now and the thought of having to take a photo of yourself in sub-perfect makeup awakens a vague sense of panic. You picked a hell of a research specialization for someone who hates being looked at. Attempt to regain the simple joy you once found in smearing colors all over your face.

3. Throw on some music. Whole albums and purpose-made playlists only, otherwise you’ll be sitting there flipping

to find the Perfect Song for half an hour instead of doing your makeup. Inevitably, you’re gonna decide on Força Bruta by Jorge Ben. Willfully refuse to unpack any of the themes of that album. Do a little wiggle to the opening guitar notes of “Oba, La Vem Ela.”

4. Slam all three of your hair-skin-andnails vitamins at once even if you’re supposed to space them out throughout the day. Visualize your hair phoofing out like a cartoon cat shaking off after getting wet. Manifest it.

5. Get ready to narrate your routine like you’re in a Vogue Beauty Secrets video and feel kind of weird about it. Think about pristine beige bathrooms and

and watch it gather around all your dry-skin flakes as you try to blend it out. Take a quick break from mumble-singing in order to swear loudly. You forgot to exfoliate last night. Sit there contemplating whether or not you should take the concealer off and start over. Decide that taking it off would interrupt your ~flow~.

17. Contemplate spiriting off to Miami for a weekend like you’ve got havingfun-in-Miami money. If you don’t see a sunbaked mid-mod beachside condo in the next three days you’re gonna get violent. Pause the music, go pour yourself some guava juice and drink the whole thing in silence with your makeup half-done. That’s basically the same vibe as a three-night stay in South Beach, right?

18. Using a standard blush brush, fluff either a peachy terracotta tone or—if you’re feeling especially zesty—a mustard yellow eyeshadow onto your temples and down to where your cheekbone meets your ear. Use a light hand and shoot for a big, floaty watercolor effect. Now’s a great time to use that expensive-brand blush that your one sticky-fingered friend brought you back from Marshall’s and you sanitized by dousing in vodka. That’s praxis, baby.

19. Dust the brush off on your forearm and use it to whisk some matte bronzer down the bridge of your nose and across the tops of your cheeks. You’ve been getting more sun lately and you can tell as much when you look in the mirror, but the thing is that now you don’t look like you’ve Gotten Some Sun insomuch as you just no longer look like you have a vitamin D deficiency.

20. Do your mascara now that you’ve done everything else in your general eye area. Otherwise you’ll run the risk of visibly getting eyeshadow and concealer all in your lashes. Briefly consider putting on false lashes, but think better of it.

21. Line your bottom lip with a cool-toned 1990s-ish brown, overdrawing the very bottom edge a bit and patting with a finger to soften. Line the top lip with a shade that matches your lip-

stick. Never spend more than 10 dollars on a lipliner. The ones at the beauty supply store are fine, I promise. Pick a lipstick that makes you feel smug when you whip it out of your handbag in a restaurant bathroom. Don’t be arsed with blotting it.

22. Pose for yourself in the mirror for a little while but quickly start to feel kind of weird about it. Why are you posing along to “Mulher Brasileira” when you are not, in fact, a mulher brasileira? Stop that. Flip the music and bathroom light off.

23. Arrange your weighted blanket and play video games on your laptop for the next five hours. Potion Craft is great for this. *

A photo of my messy, messy counter full of grody, grody beauty products.

Photo: Kae Lorentz.

And while there are times of intense work, there are also new forms of rest. Many think that seeds are not viable after a year, but I collect and save them. I store away my seeds for the next season in cold storage. I know in their deep rest the ability to grow and produce is still there. I want more deep seed rest in my life.

For 13 years I was involved in large-scale organizing work, serving as the director of an organization. It was work that was not sustainable and I burnt out. I have now shifted to doing work at the scale of my life. I am an urban farmer and it has helped me think about scale and time differently. I see the beauty and potential in much smaller things now, literally seeds.

Please deliver to:

Rosena Disery

The New York African Free School New York City

To think, Rosena, that your schoolwork was to take a shimmering silk thread and push it and pull it with just the right tension in just the right squares to craft a poem from silk and wool. And my schoolwork is to take your silk and wool poetry and deconstruct it back into letters and put them in just the right places, so others can see you making your poem of silk and wool and sweat. Like the silkworm once said, perhaps there’s an easier way.

Join me for a feast instead. Let’s leave our work in the basket tonight.

Yours, Jill

An invitation in flowers:

In these uncertain and often lonely times, you have toiled away in pursuit of knowledge. Mock orange—uncertainty. White poplar—time. Wormwood—absence. Sumac—splendid misery. Dogwood—continuance. Magnolia—persever- ance. Cherry—a good education.

We invite you to put down your work for an evening and join us at tonight’s feast, to sate your hunger, to spark your inspiration, and to convene around art and craft, good company, and good Hawthorn—hope.conversation.Buckbean—repose. Ebony— night. Mayflower—welcome. Oak—hospitality. Parsley—festivity. Fuschia—taste. Jonquil—hun- ger. Angelica—inspiration. Phlox—united hearts. Acanthus—art. Spider orchid—skill. Ivy—friend- ship. Goldenrod—encouragement.

We are eager for you to join us so that we may celebrate together!

Plum tree—keep your promises. Hazel—reconcili- ation. Lily of the valley—return of happiness.

Written from the dictionary in The Language of Flowers, edited by Miss Ildrewe (New York: Lee, Shepard and Dillingham, 1875).

Joanna Weiss

Tina Wiltsie Jill DiMassimo

Rena Tom

1 Achille C. Varzi, “The Magic of Holes,” in Ordinary Things and Their Extraordinary Meanings , ed. Giuseppina Marsico and Luca Tateo (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2019), 23.

I’m bringing a box of donuts to the feast. My current research focuses on absence, immateriality, and craft, so I was delighted to learn about Achille C. Varzi, who uses donuts to talk about the existence of holes.

Varzi reviews the ontology of holes, which contends that things can have holes but the hole itself is not “an entity in its own right.” 1 He then punctures this theory (sorry) because holes are like material objects: they can be seen and have form and history. At the same time, they don’t act like material objects; if a donut is not a donut without a hole, when you cut it in half, where does the hole go?

In my moments of pause, I dream about donuts and what they can teach me about craft. Do we really “make” immaterial objects, or are they byproducts of material manipulation? In more delicious terms, can a donut hole exist without a donut? Should I go to a bakery and complain that donut holes are poorly named? I invite you to the discussion—I’ll save a chocolate sprinkle for you.

TIONS

You are invited to join us on a regional tour of Japan through a multisensory celebration of tea and clay. Take in the comfort of a warm beverage, the subtleties of scent and flavor, and the physicality of each handmade vessel as you travel through our curated pairings of tea and craft.

Visit Tokoname, in Aichi Prefecture, and notice the slight grittiness of the unglazed iron-rich red clay. Enjoy the lightly sweet umami taste of fine gyokuro leaves grown in nearby Mie, brewed in a delicate shiboridashi to extract the maximum complexity of flavor.

Travel then to Uji, Kyoto, and feel the thick, foamy texture of bamboo-whisked matcha as the frothy beverage touches your lips. As you consume the tea, slowly, mindfully, give yourself space to get to know the handcrafted chawan.

Breathe in the light, floral scent of tamaryokucha from Kagoshima and taste the mellow, nutty flavor of hōjicha from Shizuoka. Admire the beauty of intricately painted porcelain from Arita and feel the weight and presence of thick stoneware from Shigaraki. Each pairing will open a portal to new localities through the regional diversity of Japan, transporting us away from our current lives, even if only for a moment.

Welcome! Would you like something to drink?

The empiricist philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, in his 1754 sations, proposes a thought experiment. Imagine a statue of a human being set in a room, a statue that can think but does not move. Imagine that she will acquire the faculties of sensation one by one, from the most distal to the most proximal. Which sense will be primary? Condillac thinks that the statue will smell before she hears, hear before she sees, then later taste, then feel. Before she moves or touches anything at all, she will have been awash in sensation. She will experience smells and sounds as if she were those smells and sounds, because how can she think of them as separate from herself when she doesn’t yet know the boundaries of her own body?

In fact, we feel long before we think. We are born empiricists, sliding into the world swamped in sensation. Our closely held ideas about mind-body division waft away, leaving us tethered to the earth. Drifting in the breeze, our minds could dis miss our bodies with a curt wave and turn to face the golden dawn, but instead we feel the light waves move among our skin cells, the dawn washing through us with a slight burn and a sweet aftertaste. A liquid surge of light.

Wine flows from glass to glass and sweeps us along in its stream. Michel Serres, philosophical champion of the collective, has recommended that we pool our re sources. Wine moves from bottle to mouth, but it pauses briefly first in that small cellar, the glass. “We need intermediate stockpiles. Small lakes of memory: goblets. No, time does not flow, quite. It is extremely rare to have a pure channel, a perfect corridor, with neither sidings nor bottlenecks.” 1 Let’s start with a drink, shall we?

making broken bread

∞ 1000g (graham flower) (or some other measurable quantity)

(plus the working of the soil, using clean hands made dirty, while sun gleams)

∞ ask after they who turns the mill; feed that body

when the urge strikes

∞ fill a pair of cupped hands with water & carry tentatively across a room decorated with obstacles know fear

∞ (repeat)

when the feeling is inescapable

∞ distill ocean’s living soup into salt brine dried on a ship’s hull, rocks ashore, or the same wood marked to record knowing

∞ *yeast lives on the flesh of all life-- sense oneself; cause an environment fit for survival which mimics one’s own health

* grow

dig a well; rely on it light flame using the connective spark of shared meaning & that woody memory, initials carved without & fat skimmed from bone to reveal ancestral shape and origin, an eternal sameness when all is glowing coax the incorporated form into being with gentle pressure & fold with inherent need repeat process across disciplines of the familial hand and time just until a historiography of knowing, putting up, preservation a helpful tool (yet not required) to produce consumable matter identifies itself; nurture this submit contents to flame divide and consume a matter of results

Dio Brooks

Sara Clugage

Tom Martin

For Emmanuel Levinas, ethics comes before metaphysics and food comes before sight. He takes Martin Heidegger to task for describing the world as a toolbox. Long before we codified a system of utensils for dining, we already had food to eat, and what is a utensil for except to separate your skin from the task of feeding? The separation soon becomes pointless as nourishment washes through your digestive track, melting into your body. Are you made of anything but food? The mind-body problem comes from our inclination to believe that we are not co-determinant with the substance of our bodies—we are what we eat, but surely we are not only that. Levinas says that when the thinking subject eats, “it is the absorption of the object, but also distance with regard to it.” 2 We are food, but we are also the being that consumes food; some frisson divides us from the world.

If Condillac’s statue thinks before it eats, Levinas’s subject eats before it thinks; we learn who we are by eating. As David Goldstein comments on Levinas, “Eating forms the basis of ethics because food teaches us about our complex relationship to objects, in preparation for an acknowledgment of other beings.” 3 Our relationship to objects, and in succession our relationship to other people, is found through our foundational relationship to eating. Were we to be unaffected by hunger, like Condillac’s statue, what would we feel? What would we know? When we see the face of another person, we know that they feel hunger just like we do—the face of the Other is the beginning of our reciprocal responsibility. For all of us who break bread for our companions—Levinas makes a meal of the etymology of “companion,” from the French com (with) and pain (bread)—we must take the bread out of our own mouths and give it to the other. The world asks nothing less of us.

I realize that this is an abrupt demand! Here, have a drink, please sit down. Be welcome. There’s no bread on this table yet, but we can get to know each other before we eat. Light is its most golden and diffuse at cocktail hour. A smooth, hospitable gradient. Let it roll through you like wine. * * *

The man at the counter of the coffee shop delicately tore the top off a packet of sugar and poured it directly into the center of his cup. Placing the empty packet on the counter, he opened another in precisely the same way, each movement of his arms and hands identical. His unblinking gaze followed the path of the little white packet from the basket on the counter to the space above the cup, then to its resting place atop the previous packet; his head, rather than his eyes, moved as he tracked the object, like some sort of 20th-century animatronic. 1

“You’re staring,” Emily chided me in a whisper.

“I’m allowed. We’re in public. No expectation of privacy.”

Emily was embarrassed that I had said this out loud, a refrain from our private conversations that felt more confrontational now, uttered within earshot of strangers. I hid my embarrassment by doubling down.

“I just think they’re fascinating.”

“Jesus, Tom, would you say that about someone who was different from you in some other way? Like, someone...”

I cut her off. We both knew where that thought was going, and that her intention was mainly to signal that she—unlike me, evidently—was not a “technophobe.”

1 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I) , trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2009), 180.

2 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 63.

3 David Goldstein, “Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating,” Gastronomica 10, no.

3 (2010): 34–44, doi:10.1525/gfc.2010.10.3.34.

Sonder explores the nebulas beyond. Simone Leigh’s Jug (2014), an unfired, thumbprinted Lizella clay jar, ignites my curiosity in the anonymous labor of Black couriers from the first African American collection in 1894 to today. How did they maneuver insurance, Jim Crow, and sundown towns?

—Chenoa Baker, intercessor and curious interlocutor

Not (Yet) To Be: A performance installation meant to help Kentuckians dealing with the employment effects of automation think about their future relationship with robots and their place in the future of work.

—Sam Ford

Wanted: project proposals with/in a new craft center being built on the horizon next to Paul Preciado’s apartment on Uranus. Submissions will be considered by the person(s) who write the queer version of bell hooks’ All About Love, by Alanis Morissette with Jagged Little Pill angst, and by all available willful subjects.

—matt lambert

Dear Cornelius #10 (my overhead projector): I long for the days when we used to perform paper theater together. Though you’ve burned my hands many times, I will always forgive you. I still have all our props, if you’ll take me back.

—Lauren Sinner

A list of domain names purchased in the last year that remain dormant on the web. Some are holding space for a future project, others are retaliatory, and at least one is the product of a boozy late-night lark. In order of acquisition: prototypingutopia.org; changeberkshireculture. org; highdesignpod.com; shophighdesign.com; centerforshakerstudies. org; quaaludetourism.com.shakermodern.com;

—Sarah Margolis-Pineo

A post-it that flutters to the studio floor regularly, always retrieved—“the inherent vitality of asymmetry requires participation in the experience of form—by suggesting, by directing the mind to

complete the incomplete”— finally goes missing. Seeking author, full text.

— Heather Stewart Harvey

Looking for: Land; rural, minimum 1 cuerda. Family constellation detective, being-becoming archaeologist of own family system, inward research. Retracing, decoding, detangling, un/re- weaving a blueprint/pattern from the network that gave, conditions, and sustains our life—honoring and mending what came before; nourishing what is yet to emerge.

— Zaida Adriana Goveo Balmaseda

From the digital dustbin of my desktop, here is the title of an essay that was supposed to get published but never did: The Past Is the Future: Toward Radical Indigeneity.

— Alpesh Kantilal Patel

7 Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement , chap. 7: Knapping Intentions and the Handmade Mind.

4 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , chap. 3: The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility.

5 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , chap. 2.3, The Dialectic of Objectification and Embodiment.

6 Heidegger, Being and Time , chap. 5a: The Existential Constitution of the “There.”

“No, they just have a fascinating way of moving around in the world, and I’m curious about it. That’s all. No judgment.”

The Android Act had recognized “artificial intelligences”—a passé term now, I was constantly being reminded—as equal in every cognitive, moral, and humane capacity to us so-called “biofolk.” And yet their carefully calculated movements still struck me as otherworldly, at least by human standards.

The sugar packet man turned away from the counter, walking toward the table next to us with slow, measured steps. His walk was like that of a lead-footed Fred Astaire, graceful flourishes accompanied by a heavy mechanical stomping. 2 These early models learned exclusively through imitation with no hardwired mechanism for feedback from the material world, 3 and this one had clearly been impressed by someone with quite a fancy walk.

This café was just like every other one in Camberwell now, with little tables lined up across a long bench at one wall, spaced so closely together that anyone in an old-fashioned body would feel severely outdated. Packet man politely squeezed in next to me on the bench seat, whispering a tiny “pardon me” barely audible above the whir of his hydraulics. He came to rest with his left hand roughly an inch from my thigh, which struck me as surprisingly flirtatious. “I’m sorry,” he said, noticing me glancing down. “Would you like me to move my hand?”

“It’s ... what?” I stammered, thinking this might somehow be turning into a confrontation. After a second of unblinking eye contact, the man took initiative on his own, lifting his hand as if it were an unfamiliar object. 4 The hand shifted onto his own thigh, closely approximating a relaxed pose.

Emily fumed at me silently from across the table, pleading with her eyes for me to stop making a scene—which, of course, I would later adamantly deny doing. Her expression broke with a jolt, however, at a minor cacophony from our neighbor’s table, where the ceramic coffee cup now lay overturned, its dainty handle still squeezed tightly between packet man’s pointer and thumb. His face showed a flat, neutral expression as he scanned the room, presumably calculating how one should react in such novel circumstances. 5 After a moment his eyes lit up in surprise, although his posture remained unchanged.

Several people around us whispered to one another, and packet man seemed keen to fit his behavior to the altered mood of the place, 6 leaning toward me slowly as if to share a secret.

“It has broken,” he whispered, oddly confident in the assertion.

“You broke it, ” I whispered back, still unsure if he was looking for a fight.

“It wasn’t right for my hand he replied, his crystal eyes locked with mine. * * *

See Folk, “Out There” (throughout).

Works cited

Aalten, Anna. “Listening to the Dancer’s Body.” In Embodying Sociology: Retrospect, Progress, and Prospects, edited by Chris Shilling. Sociological Review Monograph. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

Ingold, Tim. “Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011.

2 See Aalten, “Listening to the Dancer’s Body”; Potter, “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer.”

3 Downey, “‘Practice without Theory’: A Neuroanthropological Perspective on Embodied Learning”; Ingold, “Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill.”

1

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. 1972. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Downey, Greg. “‘Practice without Theory’: A Neuroanthropological Perspective on Embodied Learning.” In Making Knowledge, edited by Trevor Marchand. London: Wiley, 2010.

Folk, Kate. “Out There.” The New Yorker, March 16, 2020.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. 1927. Reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. 1945. Reprint, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2002.

Potter, Caroline. “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer.” Ethnos 73, no. 4 (December 2008): 444--65.

In November 2020, during the height of the pandemic, artist Theaster Gates posted on Instagram: “Remembering dinner parties. Grateful for vessels and gathering. I’ll always keep the infrastructure for good times.” The image was of a large, darkly stained wooden hutch, beautiful glass windows revealing a collection of mismatched plates, pots, bowls; differently sized cups stacked precariously; and pitchers, serving dishes, casseroles. Gates is a potter, among many other things, and I imagine that these are all dishes he’s made and kept. The number of plates in this cabinet would be enough to set a table for 30, 40 even. This image and his phrase, “the infrastructure for good times,” are things I often return to in my research into craft and social spaces.

Infrastructure: the physical and organizational structures needed for social activities. It’s a word often used to describe roads, buildings, plumbing, power lines— things built to support social activity. In my research, I look at street fairs, festivals, hootenannies, dinner parties, discos. I look at these moments, “good times,” and the ways that craft comes to life here. I look at Gates’s collection of dishware and think that if ever the chance of feeding a group of 40 people arises, he’s prepared.

In September 2021, I worked with my friend Tommy Carroll, a blacksmith, at the Maryland Renaissance Festival for three weeks. The Renaissance Festival is a contemporary craft fair that reimagines a medieval marketplace in a modern setting. White pop-up tents and folding tables, so ubiquitous a sight at the contemporary craft fair, are swapped out for something more permanent here. Festival time is time outside of time where people gather and take pleasure in their surroundings. It is a time to feast, to imbibe. To take joy in abundance. Extra-ordinary time. And yet, for Tommy and many other vendors I interviewed, this extraordinary time of feasting and abundance is in fact “everyday” and routine.

During the weekends, when the fair was open to the public, Tommy and his boothmates would operate the forge, giving demonstrations to visitors while I stumbled my way through selling their work, answering questions, and taking payment. This experience, along with conversations with Tommy and other vendors, gave me insight into the particular infrastructure of the Renaissance Festival. The following interview is taken from a longer conversation where I spoke to Tommy and his partner, Sam, who also works on the Renaissance Festival circuit. They were between festivals and in the middle of moving into a new house and workspace. Since they were between jobs and houses, the conversation turned to some of the particular ways they have confronted the limitations of the infrastructure typically afforded at the festival, how they’ve manipulated or added to it for their own benefit, and how, despite this difficult and burdensome labor, they still consider this work “good times.”

Tommy: Yeah, it’s an ongoing process. I screw up all the time because I’m, like, oh crap! Now I need to get onto the roof of our house and I left the 10-foot ladder at Maryland. Traveling with a lot of stuff gets exhausting. Traveling with a lot of heavy stuff gets exhausting. I brought way too much to Brevard, where my trailer was weighed down so much that I bought brand-new trailer tires before going and they already need to be replaced.

Sam: And also the back tires on his truck were angling out! We went to pull out of the vendor campground and I called him and I was, like, stop, your truck looks like it’s about to hit the ground! Something has to change. So we had to move a bunch of coal around.

p Lexie Harvey

Tommy: Yeah, it’s an attempt at making travel easier that’s constantly changing. But for Maryland, I bring all of my coal from North Carolina, just because I’ve learned there’s a lot less soot in it. I bought from Pennsylvania before and the coal was just, like, hard to crack into, smaller pellets, a lot more debris. It was a significant difference. So I just bring my own. I never thought I’d be coal picky, you know? I didn’t think that was a thing. But the coal is probably the biggest source of weight, and hassle, because I need to bring essentially two to three truckloads full of coal to Maryland over the course of the year just to be ready for the festival. We went through it all this past year.

Lexie: I remember you saying you were on your last bag and it was the first weekend of October.

Tommy: Well, I had some stored on my trailer, but that was the last bag in my shop. But we still went through everything. Even everything that was on my trailer, we went through it. Yeah, I built the forge and just left it in Maryland because it’s just so heavy and unwieldy that I’d just rather have two. That’s another thing I learned— make things easier on yourself. If you can afford to have a set, a shop, at Maryland and then one at home, do it. The anvil, my anvil, the one on the wooden platform, is too expensive to buy two, so I take that with me. The biggest one is like 250 pounds or something like that. It isn’t the nicest, so I want to get that to Maryland and just leave it there full time and not have to worry about it again.

Sam: How much does an anvil cost?

Tommy: My favorite anvil, the one I take with me everywhere, is $1,400. Some people were making fun of me at Brevard where they were, like, why are you locking up your stuff? You think someone’s going to steal your anvil? If they knew how much it cost they might.

Lexie: So you take multiple trips to Maryland throughout the year, and your family lives up there, right?

Tommy: Yeah, so far it’s worked out to where I’m going to Maryland anyways for a holiday or to visit or something, or my brother will come down to visit me and then will bring a truckload down. So it’s worked out, but it’s getting to the point where I think it’s going to be more, “this is a planned coal drop-off trip.” I used to ship artwork out to Arizona, and I did that for two or three years, and it was alright. It was successful. But one year I shipped almost everything out and nothing showed up for like, half the festival. It wasn’t until the post office found out that I had insured everything that they actually looked. It didn’t show up and it ended up back in Georgia, it was supposed to end up in Arizona, and so then once they knew how much the insurance was for, they went and found the box. It was insured for half the price it was worth, which was kind of nerve-wracking for me, but it was still insured for something like $5,000. It was like $250 to insure all that, so, just to ship it out there, it’s a lot. For Brad [Tommy’s apprentice] shipping blacksmith stuff to Maryland it’s a little different ’cause those items are not going to break. They’re all metal. There’s no bone carving or anything like that, so if he wanted to ship stuff out it would just be standard shipping rate, and that would be fine. But I stopped shipping stuff out to Arizona because it was more stress and money than I thought it was worth. * * *

Tommy Carroll stands and works at his forge in the Maryland Renaissance Festival while folks stand outside of his booth looking in. An anvil is in the front of the booth and has a small hand drawn chalk image of what Tommy is making so the audience can follow along.

Photo by Lexie Harvey

Where “made” stands for “arrived at”: the fumbling that moves me as I manufacture a contribution to this zine across different reproduction technologies. I realize, on the way, that “making do” does not adequately describe the motivation behind making my own tools—after all, I own a smartphone camera, a scalpel, many potatoes, an excessive amount of ink pads, and have easy access to mid-size companies that are happy to turn out any rubber stamp I might wish for in less than three days—but I do appreciate that the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, by Christine Ammer (2003, 1997) illustrates the expression “making do” with We’ll just have to make do with one potato apiece [c. 1900], thus bringing my errant thoughts about home-bound resourcefulness

in pandemic times—something of a tired magazine topic, these days—to a stop in front of the passing train of many (possibly) related topics: The second Irish potato famine and ensuing boycotts to assert the rights of tenant farmers; the weird fact that the two more obvious materials used to print this one-liner— potatoes and rubber—both originated south of the Mexican border; Spanish historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s digressive celebration (was it in Cuatro Manos?) of train drivers, teachers, and back-of-the-kitchen printers as the prime

movers of revolutionary insurgency; and, finally, the late 70s and early 80s mini-surge of feminist publications on how best to (re)write herstory from behind the printing wheel, including the following out-of-print book, which, like the publication you are currently holding as you devise your own tactics to navigate postTrump America, centers pleasure and self-determination: Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers, Publishers and Distributors (1981), by Eileen Cadman, Gail Chester, and Agnes Pivot. * * *

Laurin Guthrie Ben Lignel

Life Takes Time:

Earlier this month, I sat down (on Zoom) with Berkeley-based potter Niki Shelley and Atlanta-based painter and urban farmer Dianna Settles to talk about our new reading group. Niki and Dianna had invited me to read Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus with them and I asked them if we could start with a conversation about why we wanted to read that particular text, especially in the context of our making processes. 1 This may seem like a peculiar undertaking for three makers, but Niki, Dianna and I know each other first through our political communities. Niki and I met through related community space projects in Oakland, CA, and we were introduced to Dianna through our mutual friend Jessica Green, a weaver and the originator of the phrase I’ve borrowed for my title: “Real life takes time.”

Since this first conversation, we’ve been meeting regularly to discuss both the text and all of the other things that come up through our readings and conversation as we all make sense of the notoriously dense French philosophy text. From that first two-and-a-half-hour conversation—which, like any good conversation, meandered—I have pulled out a small fragment, a snippet that touched on something that is both central to why and how we meet and deeply connected to this publication’s themes of feasting, craft, and pause as refusal. What became clear as we talked, and what I hope to share with you, is the profundity of a long and considered relationship, whether with materials or in community. I wanted also to retain the flow and feeling of being in conversation: the tangents, the unfurling out and the looping back in, the thoughts only partially verbalized when you are in the flow of discussion. I hope you get the impression of sitting around a table or a fire with us, talking away, a cup of something in your hand, as I long for us all to be in the coming months.

Laurin: Dianna, you, your partner, and neighbors have this beautiful urban farm with flowers and vegetables. And the food y’all make is the most mind-blowing, ridiculous thing: You grow everything and ferment everything, it’s incredible. There’s so much about the ways that I think this vibe-entanglement of everything is connected and it feeds every other thing, and it’s not performative, it’s not for the benefit of the internet, it’s actually just that there’s space in this pause to fucking live life. And for me, that’s really what craft means: getting into that stuff of living, making life in this way, and refusing to go back to the way it was before the pause. Both of y’all are constantly on my mind because you’re both making work that gives a glimpse of how things might be, and how I want things to be. I was talking with Dena Beard a few years ago and she said this thing that stuck with me, about how if the function of art is to push the limit of what’s possible, to push the limit of the imaginary, too often you feel like, “This is it? This is the limit of what you can imagine?” 2 And it’s fucking devastating.

Dianna: I get so frustrated about that all the time! Making art feels in so many ways like the lowest-stakes version of creating, imagining another possibility. Just play with what this would look like or what this would feel like. I’m often disappointed by the interpretations that I see, “Oh, this is your ideal?” Everyone is still just trudging through things that bring absolutely no joy or meaning in any material way.

1 I am a textile artist and gardener.

2 Dena Beard is a curator, writer and the founder of The Lab (an experimental art and performance space in San Francisco, CA), as well as a friend of the conversants.

3 Rilke is Niki’s 5-year-old sometime-collaborator, an excellent artist in her own right and all-around awesome human.

4 Tad Spurgeon, Living Craft (Philadelphia, PA: Zoetrope, 2011).

5 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Niki: There’s a lot of that in craft as well. There’s so much craft that’s just, “Oh, you’re just over there making bowls” and, I mean, I’m making bowls too over here [laughs] but I’m also, you know, like crying at the same time. My politics are in a real state of flux right now. I was really politically engaged for a long time, and then after Rilke was born, I was very disillusioned with a lot of my community and realized that so much of it felt really performative and not like real community, in a weird, strange way. Talking about art being the lowest-stakes version of a thing you can do, there’s also this fair-weather mutual aid kind of stuff which also feels real low stakes. 3 A lot of the last couple years has been really thinking about, who is my community? How can I care for those people and support them? As opposed to, how can I perform my radical politics in a way that’s visible to everybody?

Dianna: Yeah, there’s often such a disconnect. One of the things that feels really beautiful about craft that goes along with this is this materiality to knowing something as deeply as you can. And that’s where all of these things really feel connected. I started building the panels that I paint on by myself a few years ago, partly out of necessity because panels are really expensive, but also I want to have a relationship to it. If I’m going to use a shitty panel, I’d rather use a shitty panel that I made than one I spent $90 on and I have no control over the way that it exists in the world, you know? And learning farming, it’s so many very, very hard-learned lessons, where it’s just failure after failure. There’s this book called Living Craft that talks about the ways that people are disconnected from the artwork that they make and how in paintings that were made in the 1500s, there’s a different quality in the materials. 4 It’s this very long set of how-tos, like clarify your linseed oil, all of these different processes. It feels really steeped in the same kind of vibes. Early on in the text, there’s this piece about painting from life—it reminds me of Pattern Language a little bit—in order to paint from life, life has to happen first. 5 That felt like such a beautiful thing; the things that we make are going to feel stale if it’s just in our head and we never get to actualize any of these means of interaction or experience it with other people. Those things are so important to feed into each other in order to have that deeper relation to our own craft, and our own way of being in the world.

Laurin: There’s something about the stakes of actually being involved and implicated in the processes of what you’re doing in the studio and in your community and in the world that is missing in a lot of politics, a lot of art, and a lot of craft. It’s about the way you interact with and have that material relationship and understanding with what you’re working on, but also that willingness to put some stake in the world that produces that thing. In bad drought years, we don’t get good fiber from the sheep because they’re too stressed and you get break points in the wool, so maybe you don’t get the stuff you thought you were gonna get. And for this kind of abstract idea of art and this disconnected, performative community, those uncontrolled outcomes are intolerable,

Photograph of Dianna Settles’ urban farm in Atlanta, Georgia, Dianna Settles, 2021

but actually having that stake in that relationship means there’s no alternative. You’ve put your lot in with this sheep so you’re gonna get what you’re gonna get.

Niki: I love what both of you are saying about really knowing something very deeply, and the material relationships that you have. Thinking about it in a political context, I’ve always advocated for the building of relationships and said that it’s not enough to just be in the same space together, we have to care about one another. It takes a really long time to build those intimate, caring relationships. And the same goes for your craft: making a real commitment to sticking it out, going through the various conflicts and failures and whatever, but learning from it, and continuing to commit to a community or a process, knowing that, eventually, you’re going to get somewhere. And it’s not just within radical political communities. I was hanging out with some parents of Rilke’s friends the other day, and one of them was like, “Well, you know, Occupy was a total failure.” And I was like, “Was it, though? I hear a lot of people critiquing capitalism these days, where do you think that came from?”

Dianna: I mean, so much of the world around us is doing everything possible to completely exhaust our attention spans anyway, keep us so overstimulated, it helps people forget about how much potential there is in these large moments of refusal and all of the things that stem from that. That’s what I’m thinking of in terms of the pause: the power that comes from saying no to something, and the room that makes for saying yes to other things. * * *

missed connections !!!

Missing: A five-week trip to Istanbul funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation to research knotted-lace traditions and to study Western Armenian at the Hrant Dink Foundation. Both communication systems were practiced by my foremothers in the Armenian-American diaspora as markers of identity, but have become endangered under the pressures of assimilation.

—Deborah Valoma

In a providential webinar, images from the Women’s Studio Workshop W.I.N.G.S.

Flying Objects event circa 1979 flashed across my screen,

a giant brassiere kite by Gayle Sasson and a hand drawn event flyer representing a copious trove of documentation in an archive I would like to visit someday. —Darrah

Bowden

You, sweeping past me, golden hour last Sunday. Me, blue lit by screen, registering you but unable, or unwilling, to look up. I know your hand was open even as mine was occupied, an occupation that turns me from you, pretends it wasn’t you who showed me this place.

—Judith Leeman

Seeking: humans who like to color outside the lines while simultaneously cutting out

perfect circles, to dig through boxes of unorganized papers while creating systems of organization, to connect dots between nonlinear ideas while adding glitter to everything. Willingness to take the long road to obscure destinations with lots of stops is a plus.

—Faythe Levine

Missing: My Memories. Space, time, and sensory experience compressed to the size of four walls for so many months. So little happened. So much happened. My memories have gone missing. Do you have them?

—Mara Holt Skov

Dear Doña Rosita: when I was in grade school in Mexico City, we all looked forward to the graduation trip during which we would travel with our teachers to Oaxaca after completing 6th grade. One of the highlights would be the barro negro (black clay) workshop, where we would see you make ceramic, as you are the most famous artisan of this beautiful craft. But shortly before we went on our trip you passed away and we never got to meet you in person. We did visit your workshop and saw your extraordinary works. It was there that I learned an important lesson: we often place great importance in the

person of the artist, but what truly matters is their work. Your work, like that of many other great artisans of the world, indeed lives on.

—Pablo Helguera

Missed exhibition: I worked on an exhibition proposal for several months and handed it in for consideration by my museum on March 1, 2020. It was called There Is No Planet B and foregrounded expansive contemporary craft practices that understand climate and sustainability in relation to labor, health, and ethics as much as materials and process. Then the world as we knew it effectively

ended. I am still waiting for a response to the proposal; we all now wait under the specter of, for some, mass famine and, for others, nuclear threat. What is craft in these times?

—Michelle Millar Fisher

Dear Forrest Bess, what do you think of the show of your work that Robert Gober put together at the Whitney? Was it everything you hoped a show with Betty Parsons would be? And what about what we’re saying about your work now? Are we getting it right?

—Cyle Metzger

More missed connections!

A few months into the pandemic, in an attempt to find something to do that did not involve endlessly scrolling news stories for information about the virus that I had somehow not seen before, I picked up my copy of Splendid Apparel: A Handbook of Embroidered Knits, by the esteemed Anna Zilboorg.1 The book had been sitting on my shelf since I bought it a year prior at a workshop, taught by Zilboorg herself, on twisted cable stitches. 2

Throughout the year since I had bought the book, I would occasionally glance at it as I rushed out the door to get to work or before crashing on the couch in an exhausted stupor after making dinner and getting the kid put to bed, all while continuing to send and answer emails and handle work-related crises. The desire to experiment with knitting and embroidery would be quickly forgotten as the next email made my phone vibrate in my hands, and I would only remember it when I saw the book on the shelf again, weeks or months later. The constant rush and lack of time to enjoy my life was not an experience that was isolated to me. Almost everyone I knew felt the pinch of financial precarity enough to commit to the hustle for almost every waking hour. Childless friends were working two or three jobs, while many friends with children were struggling to work only one job due to the cost of daycare. Even our crafting—what was supposed to be an enjoyable, relaxing hobby—was done with half an eye to selling if we could find the time to get to the craft fair or wrangle a commission from someone who had money to spare.

When I finally picked up Splendid Apparel off the shelf with the concrete intent to start a project, I had been working from home for just under six months, with no end in sight. I was finally realizing my life was not going to return to what it had been like in the “before times” (as my now seven-year-old apocalyptically calls the pre-pandemic period of his life). The bewildering, sudden changes to our collective daily lives due to the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd two miles from my house had settled into a constant, numbing anxiety that I tried to mask over for my children. Each day was the same, yet I struggled to find rhythms as we all waited for the return of “normal,” which must be coming any day, maybe as quickly as it had left, or possibly never. Writing about her experience in November of 2020, anthropologist Sarah Osterhoudt captured my feelings about the time perfectly, saying, “In these pandemic times, the days feel liminal.” 3

Existing between boundaries and thresholds, liminal space and time was an idea explored by anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner explains liminal moments as those in which one is “betwixt and between” 4 what Osterhoudt terms “more comfortable and recognizable states of the status quo.” 5 Liminal spaces and times are the strange places and moments we recognize in our bodies as being out of “ordinary” time and away from home space, like when one is standing in the empty quiet of a school hallway after everyone else has gone home. A liminal space is also found between Zilboorg’s twisted knit cables, which are simultaneously destructured, with an absence of stitches on the same level as the cables, and prestructured, having been designed to be part of the fabric as much as the cable stitches.

In Splendid Apparel, Zilboorg takes the playfulness of twisted cable stitches even further by using embroidery to create puddles and splashes of color and texture in the otherwise empty spaces between the twisted stitches. Although the em-

7 Tony Lesser Wolf, “Goldsmith, Silversmith, Art Smith,” Metalsmith , Fall 1987, 21.

8 Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 124.

Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 115.

broidery is on the same plane as the twisted cables, sitting on top of the knit fabric below, it is not inherently a part of the fabric. It is instead done after the garment is created. I started with the same socks I had knit during Zilboorg’s workshop a year prior and soon found myself in a meditative practice of filling in the spaces with tiny stitches of contrasting colors, which brought a new depth and richness to the cloth. Within an extensive, uncertain period of liminal time, I had chosen to explore a small, limited liminal space with my needle and thread.

I am hardly the first person to have made such a choice. In his excellent book, Creativity: The Perfect Crime, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit (an expert in existing and creating within the liminal space) explained both the draw and importance of the liminal state, what he called “the oft-neglected void”:

5 Osterhoudt, “The Pandemic and the Process of Becoming.”

6 Philippe Petit, Creativity: The Perfect Crime (New York: Riverhead, 2015), 26.

[T]he space between chaos and order gets my full attention … Why are we mesmerized when we look at the stars? Because of the space between them! Can music be in part defined by the void between the notes, as the supreme wire-walk proves dependent on the ever-so-brief suspension between the funambule’s [tightrope walker] step? Yes! 6

Crafters return again and again to the space between chaos and order, the betwixt and between, often creating new objects from materials that did not exist in those forms before. A clay block becomes a pot, or wool becomes a strand of yarn. As a knitter, I was often in a position of guiding yarn into new forms. I would joyfully engage with the periods when the yarn was no longer just a ball and not yet a garment, appreciating how the material of the yarn— the texture and color—engaged with the needles to create different garments with different properties based on how I manipulated the yarn within those between moments.

ric, knit at the same time, and often with the same yarn as the stitches they appear to dance on top of.

1 Anna Zilboorg and Alexis Xenakis, Splendid Apparel: A Handbook of Embroidered Knits (Sioux Falls: XRX, Inc, 2015).

3 Sarah Osterhoudt, “The Pandemic and the Process of Becoming,” SAPIENS , November 12, 2020, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/pandemic-liminal-state/.

4 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The

2 Twisted cable stitches are a style of knitting that creates an effect of connected stitches trailing up and down a garment, intersecting and coming apart to create patterns seemingly on top of the knit fabric below. In actuality, they are part of the fab -

This craft, however, was different from what I was used to. As I stitched within the spaces created between stitches, I created something new on top of an already completed garment. I worked within liminal spaces, stitching embroidery floss with a sewing needle between stitches that I had already created with a knitting needle. In describing his work using negative space, jeweler Art Smith said, “… I use [space] very accurately, very concretely… You can find it and make it tangible.” 7 This summed up the work I was doing. These new stitches, out of a different material, made the space tangible and, in doing so, changed the importance and hierarchy of the cabled stitches within the garment.

“Liminality,” Turner wrote, “is the realm … where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence.” 8 Just over a year into the pandemic, I realized I had had enough. I did not want my life to be one in which I was tied to my cell phone and computer, waiting for the next email to detail the next crisis—a crisis that would be created by the unfortunate intertwining of government bureaucracy and individual trauma. I would then need to provide inadequate support to help alleviate the harm already done. I was tired of not

Jennie Alexander called her book, Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood, “more than a how-to-manual and less than a learned treatise.” 1 It was first published in 1978 by Taunton Press, which publishes woodworking books, magazines, and videos that fall into the genre of “how-to” literature. There is a plainness to the language of both the chair—what she calls a post and rung chair or “a stick chair with a fiber seat”—and the book, which claims nothing more than to describe a process. Sentences like “Keep the rungs light and slender” or “Chop, don’t swing” 2 have a pared-down beauty that I can learn from. If Jennie Alexander’s book teaches me something more than how to make a chair, it is that poetry does not need something lofty to hang its hat on. It often comes from the most ordinary and mundane things: a wet log, the clamor of four chair legs dragged across the floor, a dash of pencil on wood.

Jennie Alexander was born in 1930 and lived in South Baltimore brick rowhouses all her life. 3 She was a divorce lawyer for many years and hated it. She describes herself in those years as “grandiose and self-motivated,” living in “a man’s body” in “a man’s world,” being what her father was: a lawyer. 4 Her father had wanted a big and manly son, and Jennie 5 failed at being what he wanted; she was small and female. 6 She taught herself music and played New Orleans jazz and be-bop in clubs. Later, she became curious about chairs and wood while lawyering in the 1960s. She visited a Shaker village in Maine and came home inspired to make a one-slat dining chair using 17th-century methods. She had a firewood dealer deliver some six-foot hickory logs to the pavement behind her rowhouse in Baltimore. She axed them up and turned her first pieces of wet wood on a lathe she bought from a neighbor. For the next 13 years Jennie built chairs from green wood in her backyard and basement—trying, failing, and learning from experience. 7

There is a pleasure in shaving green or wet wood. There is a crispness to how my tools slice its fibers that goes away once wood has dried. In wet wood the grain hasn’t ossified into the unforgiving paths of dry wood—the stiff spikes that feel more separate from each other, stuck in their positions, less bound to what’s around them. It may be that the water in the wood gives a feeling of cohesion. Water is fluid and attracts itself. Under my tool, wet wood feels pliant, more like flesh than stone.

Jennie wanted her chair to be a chair for anyone to build; she called it a “simple chair” made with the “simplest tools.” 8 Her book proposes a kind of democratic making, something anyone anywhere can do. Making a chair with green wood allows for more joy in the making and less need for expensive machines. Jennie’s tools fit on an old chair frame that could be one of her failures. She says, “You could get by with an ax, a saw, a drawknife, a whittling knife and a brace and bit.” 9 She makes a scraper from an old carbon-steel kitchen knife that takes shavings like curls of tissue paper.

I have tasted wet wood and I know that it tastes like earth when you saw it or cleave it. There is an aromatic burst of water-born particles that hits me in the back of my throat. It is juicy like an apple; driving an axe into its end might push droplets to the surface.

“Work while the wood is still wet.” 10 It is a refrain in her book. She reminds us that the moisture in wood is in a constant motion, even after the tree has been

The title is derived from a bumper sticker found in Jennie Alexander’s archives. This bumper sticker from the Corley Sawmill, in Chattanooga, TN, expresses Jennie’s feelings about wood. She signed many of her letters with the phrase “Wood is Wonderful,” handwritten in rhapsodic flourishes. (Courtesy of Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.)

12 Ibid., 23.

felled. Wood is hygroscopic, forever balancing itself with water in the surrounding air. 11 Its design is porous and open to the world. It has fiber for strength, but also as vessels that circulate water. “The vessels are long, hollow, fluid-conduction fibers that run vertically in the growing tree.” 12 The chair is built around the inevitable loss of moisture from wood, using the shrinkage that happens as it dries to make a strong chair.

13 Ibid., 116. 14 Ibid., 69. 15 Ibid., 81. 16 “Limber the slat before bending it.” Ibid., 96. 17 Ibid., 97.

“Green wood works easily and beautifully. And because of that we’re only going to have to use simple hand tools. There will be no power tools involved.” Anatol Polillo and ALP Productions, “Make a Chair from a Tree” (video), 1999, https://lostartpress. com/collections/dvds/products/video- make-a-chair-from-a-tree.

7 Ibid. 8

5 I will call Jennie Alexander “Jennie” in this essay because that was what she was called in the last 11 years of her life by the woodworking community. Using “Jennie” rather than the last name “Alexander” honors the fact that she was a transgender woman who lived in the gender assignment of her own choosing.

1 Jennie Alexander, Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood (Newtown, CT: Taunton Press, 1978), 12.

Wet wood is like a thing that has come in from the rain. It is full of weather. A piece of wet wood might have tufts of moss attached or delicate frills of lichen decorating its bark. It is cold in my hands. It feels heavy with the weight of water, water that is stopped in its tracks, cut from the vertical flow of earth to sky, sky to earth. It will never be this heavy again, weighted with the weather it has come in from.

Jennie makes extra rungs which must be dried before being driven into the vertical posts. It is this careful observance of moisture content in posts and rungs that makes the chair hold together. As it dries, the post wood, which is left wetter than the rungs, will grab tightly the more stable rung. Jennie plans for this symphony of wet and dry but knows there will be failures. Wood can split and distort as it dries. Circles become ovals; squares become diamonds. Moisture in wood follows unpredictable lines, not fixed to plotted points. She says, “Broken chairs should not just be thrown away—they are our best teachers.” 13

Each of the book’s black and white photographs is a portrait of some minute action. There is a close-up of a hand whittling wood in which the details of skin, thumbnail, and the tiny hairs on a finger are as present as the reflection of wood shavings in the mirror surface of the knife. Elsewhere, there is a picture of a common utility knife laid open in four acts, showing how the shape of a store-bought blade can be altered for the purpose at hand.

9 Alexander, Make a Chair , 37.

10 Ibid., 47.

11 Ibid., 101.

6 “My father and I never got along. He knew that when I was a child I wasn’t going to be manly, because I was little. And he sent me to the greatest doctors at Johns Hopkins. As a result, they hung a swing set in the passageway between the kitchen and dining room, and I was supposed to swing on it and stretch.” Uhl, “Meet the Author.”

Jennie’s chairmaking is a carefully timed and watched observance of water in wood, not an exact science. She heats her rungs over a hot-water pipe in the ceiling of her basement. “Before forming the tenons, be sure the rungs are drier than they will be during the life of the chair.” 14 Jennie uses sound rather than science to tell her when the right dryness has occurred. “When the posts have reached a stable weight, strike them together. They should make a sound between the dull thunk of tree-wet wood and the sharp ping of dry wood.” 15

2 Ibid., 56, 38.

Kara Uhl, “Meet the Author: Jennie Alexander,” Lost Art Press Blog , May 25, 2017, accessed April 10, 2021, https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/05/25/meet-the-author-jennie-alexander/.

3

4 Alana Madden, “029 Jennie Alexander: Women in Manual Work Oral Histories,” 2018, accessed April 14, 2021, https://vimeo.com/275457548.

I am relieved by her words; they tell me that I can make a chair intuitively. That there will be no math. I can listen for a tone change in the wood, watch for wood’s shrinkage, listen for dryness.

The chair’s back slats are thin, only three-sixteenths of an inch, so that they give under a body’s leaning weight. Jenny bends a straight stick of hickory with just the strength of her arm. She cuts the slats thin and “limbers” them—bending them back and forward in her hands. 16 Limbering loosens the grasp of fibers, stretches them for bending. She curves her slats without a form or press, but with the weight of her chest, some twine and sticks to coax a curve. It looks like she is stringing an instrument. It may sound complicated, she says, but “it is simple in the flesh.” 17

The post and rung chair from Jennie Alexander’s Make a Chair from a Tree . (Courtesy of Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.)

There is a picture of a spinning metal bit, blurred in a long exposure, that hovers above the dark hollow of a hole in a stick of wood. The caption says, “Drill the mortise tangent to the line that marks the seat plane.” Looking closely, I see that there is a line, a faint one just above the hole, and that this relationship, a circle that is tangent to a line, is the meaning of the photograph. The line is the thing to see. The line told the operator of the bit where to make a hole. The line was the prompt—the dash, the mark, the cue for where and when the circle would happen. The drilled hole, or mortise, meets the line and tries to kiss it with its outermost edge. It is this meeting described as “tangential,” as barely touching, that for me becomes more than the boring of a hole in the right place—it is a small rendering of someone trying to hit their mark, acting with intention. This accuracy in all the flux and change of wood. I see myself hovering and spinning like the drill bit in the space above the stick of wood where all things are incipient. * * *

COVID has altered reality. Two years in, Zoom and other video platforms are part of our lives. We are grateful for technology, but a screen of little faces in Zoom squares is hardly a substitute for the togethering we no longer do for birthdays, weddings, baby showers, and everything else.

I’m a Jewish textile artisan. My life is making things that are literally woven into Jewish lives, things that are worn and wrapped around ourselves in their creation. Yarmulkes, tichels, tallitot, chuppahs, and tachrichim are all things Jews can’t live, or die, without.

I didn’t believe there was a way to replace the personal connections we all took for granted in the Before Times, until suddenly it happened.

Tal Chaim, TC, is a beloved friend who’s 26 years old and terminally ill. TC holds incredible grace and radical acceptance, fueling the determination to live every moment with as much gratitude as they can. TC uses the word “joy” as a verb.

Last Wednesday, TC’s prognosis was changed from “multiple months” to “maybe a couple of weeks.” Plans were swiftly made for TC to discharge from the hospital in three days, on Saturday morning, and admit into hospice that afternoon. After leaving the hospital before entering hospice, TC planned to attend morning service at our synagogue—for the very last time.

I had already started making TC a tallis, a traditional Jewish shawl with knotted fringes on the corners worn for morning prayers, to give to them for their birthday a few months away. I was pretty sure I could get it all done to give to TC in a couple days when they were at synagogue.

Things were going well on Thursday evening as I dabbed the last bits of paint on the silk. Steeped in symbolism, Torah, and amazing color, it was one of the most

Photo by Anne Lawson

beautiful tallitot I had ever made. About 7:00 p.m., I tossed it into the dryer to shorten the steaming process, like I had done countless times before. At about 8:00 p.m., I casually pulled the tallis from the dryer and nearly fainted. It had snagged while tumbling and was shredded.

Rather than cry out in disbelief, I was overcome with laughter and the joyous realization that TC’s perfection is in their imperfections, and their timeline is tightly packed and rushed. Nothing different would do for TC, so I took a deep breath and got back to work.

10:00 p.m. My living room was covered in newsprint to catch the inevitable mess, my silk stretcher set up and a fresh piece of silk in my hand. I threw out one last prayer and began anew with only the tear-misted memory of what I had done previously in mind.

10:30 p.m. I was slapping and slopping paint all over the place with more abandon than I had ever dared before.

2:30 a.m. Friday morning. I set up fans to speed the drying.

4:00 a.m. I glared at my demonic dryer and tucked the painted silk into my steamer.

10:00 a.m. The silk was rinsed, dried, and pressed. Somehow at 11:30 a.m. the embroidered collar and corners were re-done and by noon on Friday, everything was sewn and the new tallis was done.

Hopped out to grab a friend who had jumped on a train at 6:00 a.m. with wool tzitzit strings they spun themselves from wool roving. We returned to my house by 12:45 p.m. It was then that the magic truly began.

1:00 p.m. Community members started coming to my West Philadelphia porch. Some alone, some in groups of two or three. Each embraced the tallis, whispered their love and grief and joy and sorrow and soul and prayers and tears into it. Then each made a special blessing and carefully tied a knot.

One after another, beloveds came. A few folks joined on Zoom, making a blessing and watching their knot be tied for them right close to the Zoom camera.

Somehow, before Shabbos fell at 5:43 p.m. on Friday, all the knots had been made, the corners finished and the tallis complete.

TC loves purple and stars, and the rainbow edging is all that TC is—a promise of G*d’s care and an uncountable diversity of who TC is. The collar has a Talmud quote declaring power in the knowledge of the sick upon their own bodies. And a three-wicked havdallah candle—painted crooked on purpose, because TC is not straight in stature or being—centers it all. This candle is lit just at the end of our Shabbos every week.

It burns in the moment when Jews cling to the last moments of the holiness of Sabbath, until we extinguish it in a cup of wine, our joy, to begin waiting for Shabbos again—much like we were all clinging to TC and each other.

And just like that, longing for the Before Times was extinguished with the sacredness of this community-created tallis, with some blessings said over Zoom. The tallis wrapped TC when they were called to Torah for the last time.

Tal Chaim died a few weeks later and was buried wearing traditional plain linen garments wrapped in their tallis. The last moments anyone saw of our beloved friend on earth, as they were placed into their casket, was the sacred glowing luminescence of their tallis tenderly embracing their physical remains as their soul reached for G*d. * * *

“It’s November 25, 1997, and this is Jeff Keith, interviewing my grandfather, Buddy Keith, in his kitchen, on Chestnut Street, in Bowling Green, Kentucky.”*

Buddy Keith recounts his life to me for the first time, sharing the essential details of our family’s unspoken history. He explains that his father had an affair. This led to the birth of a son, and that lightning bolt splintered our branch from the family tree. Buddy tells me about being among the first Allied troops to enter Rome, and describes a private tour of the Vatican. I imagine a young, battle-worn soldier from rural Kentucky standing alone in the Sistine Chapel. Buddy recalls a therapeutic leatherwork program that rescued him from shellshock, and then he talks about facing down alcoholism. He remembers returning home to become a tombstone salesman. The company has been in our family, he notes, since the mid19th century. He points out that my father is the fifth generation in the trade, and Buddy tells me that my great-grandfather’s second family is also in the business. I consider how odd it is that I don’t know them at all.

It’s March 3, 2020, when I hear that the first case of COVID-19 has been reported in Durham. I’m there, in that city, listening to Clarice Thorpe, the 87-year-old grand daughter of Will Love. She sits in her den and describes her affection for her grandpapa, who I had learned was the only Black person to record “Swannanoa Tunnel,” a song about the deadly work of incarcerated laborers who built a rail road tunnel near Warren Wilson College. Clarice has never heard the recording of her grandfather, so I play it for her. His voice fills the room, joining our interests. Afterward, Clarice opens up about family history and the state of society, sharing stories that unlock new understandings yet introduce further mysteries. She re counts the exact location of Will’s tombstone. Clarice has a brief coughing fit, and insists she doesn’t have COVID. Unaware of the society-wide pause about to take place, we talk into the night.

I review the control panel to make sure everything is recording. On July 18, 2020, I’m in my office for the first of what will be many online classes in the MACR pro gram, and I begin by describing the different meanings I find in the craftwork left behind by some of my maternal ancestors. The disease is rampaging as I get to know my students. They provide me with a helpful focus during a chaotic time. Over weeks, I encourage them to take up oral history, and they encourage me to purchase stone-carving equipment. As more time passes, we sort out how to do this despite shutdowns, spikes, and insurrections.

The phone rings on March 7, 2021, and lightning strikes again. Buddy Keith’s half-brother Roy, now 93, says hello to me for the first time, and asks me to turn on a recorder. The essay I had written about my oral history with my grandfather Buddy had made its way to Roy. He reveals that my great-grandfather was an al coholic, and that his second family suffered as a result. Then my great-grandfather found religion and got sober. At times in tears, Roy implores me to understand that my great-grandfather had three acts in his life, and that the last one was a beau tiful story of redemption. I ask Roy to describe the original Keith stone carvers. Listening, I think about the importance of writing, fast and slow. I imagine stone dust flying as my great-great-great-grandfather makes his first monument.

*This is an imaginary quote from the author’s first oral history. He didn’t write down the date or keep the tape. He has taken similar liberties throughout this short essay. Does something have to be

On October 17, 2021, there was a dedication ceremony for a monument to the