Arts and crafts
What arts and crafts do you know?
Do crafts matter nowadays?
Look at the table and join the lines about each kind of craft/art together.
- The biggest challenge of origami is that it never stops.
- Origami is not only for leisure.
- Origami and physics work beautifully together.
True or False?
- Robert Lang used to work for NASA.
- Mathematics helps Robert to better understand how origami works.
- Robert is a mathematician.
- Most origami is folded from a single sheet of paper.
- You can cut and tear paper while making origami.
- Origami is Robert's recent passion.
- Robert made a career out of making origami.
- Modern origami is much less complicated than traditional.
- Robert loves solving origami problems.
- Historically, origami was ...
- As often as not origami is ...
- Additionally, origami can be ...
- Surprisingly, origami is also ...
- Obviously, this art will ...
- It empowers ... to ... creatively.
“Craft is more than just a way of making things; perhaps it’s a way of thinking.”
Machines are slowly creeping into every aspect of our lives, from how we communicate to how we work, along with a healthy debate over how much or how little we should resist. But there’s one area where we’ve all but surrendered to machines: what we consume. Virtually everything we buy is mass-produced.
Still, consumers are hungry for craft, even as it becomes a casualty of industrial production. Enterprising makers have earned millions on Etsy, big-box design retailers are sprinkling small-batch offerings into their stores, and DIY design is gaining steam. This leads me to wonder: Where does craft sit in a world where digitized, mechanized fabrication is becoming more sophisticated?
The Loewe Foundation–a private cultural organization that supports performing arts, visual arts, design, and architecture–is attempting to answer that question, too, with its annual Craft Prize, an award that celebrates excellence in craftsmanship. Co.Design asked a few of the designers who were recognized by Loewe about why they think craft matters. As the winner and a handful of finalists explain, craft’s role is far from obsolete: It ties us to our history, makes us more physically aware, and empowers us creatively.
“ARTISAN PRODUCTION IS ALWAYS PART OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT.”
Ernst Gamperl, a wood carver based in Germany, won the 2017 Loewe Craft Prize for Tree of Life 2, a sculptural vessel carved from a fallen tree.
-Why wood?
Wood is a living material. For me it is one of the most versatile, elegant, and beautiful natural materials and it is enormously diverse: Every timber requires a different treatment. Most timber also smells really good when you work with it.
-What’s your fabrication process like?
My works are made out of unseasoned logs of timber–mostly oak–with knots and splits. The very first–and most important step–is selecting the wood. I have a kind of dialogue with the material when I have to recognize the “hidden” object inside. Then I roughly square off a piece using a chainsaw before I turn the wood on a lathe. I create the rough external form, then I hollow it out, and then refine the outside even more. To finish the outside, I use unorthodox materials like lime, clay, vinegar, and other minerals.
-What role does craft play in the age of industrial production?
It is very important to deal with digital technologies, which have their place and their importance but certain impressions, the beauty, and uniqueness of things can never be realized without a craftsman who is able to dialogue with his material. Any product development is preceded by prototype manufacturing. In other words, artisan production is always part of industrial product development–the work at the computer is of primary importance, but craftmanship, manual work, will always remain.
-Does craft matter today?
Yes, of course. It requires and promotes entire human beings, and makes people more satisfied because they can see what they have created.
“IT EXPLORES THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE BEYOND THE VISUAL AND THE CEREBRAL.”
A visual artist based in Vancouver, Brendan Tang explores the tension of postmodernism through ceramic objects. His Manga Ormolu series are hybrids of traditional and contemporary ceramics.
-Why ceramics?
It is one of the most responsive materials I have ever worked with. There are very few materials that can match the range and diversity of fabricating that this material can. It can be hand formed, wheel thrown, slip cast, and now even 3D-printed. One of the major reasons this material is appealing to me is its ability to visually mimic many other materials. In my own work I have ceramics playing the role of metal, plastic, fleshy folds, and even ancient porcelain forms. This ability to imitate allows my imagination to really run wild.
-How did the Manga Ormolu series come about?
The work starts as conceptual ideas in my sketchbook. Once I have resolved the overall composition, I move to the potters wheel, where I make all the elements I will need in a piece. When the forms are leather hard, I construct the object by cutting and trimming the elements to fit together in much the same way a potter constructs a teapot. I also add illusionary pinches and folds to the vase forms–techniques I picked up from the special effects industry.
Once the form is complete and has been bisque fired, I mask off the vase form and airbrush the brightly colored glaze onto the robotic elements. After completing the brightly colored gradations and patterns on the robot parts, I move on to the painstaking process of painting the traditional blue and white elements on the pieces. These patterns cite various works from the Ming, Qing, and Yuan dynasty. The work is then put back in the kiln to be fired for a final time. Post-firing, the piece is finished by affixing the hardware elements that complete the robotic illusions of the work.
-Does craft still matter today?
It plays the same role it always has, which is to explore this human experience beyond the visual and the cerebral: to explore it though our hands.
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