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 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! * * *

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? * * *

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. *

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).

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.