Soil and Life in the Field of Craft Studies

Abstract

This Statement of Practice speaks to my role as the Program Coordinator for the MA in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina from 2018 to 2020. I share how I initially connected to the program and how the program’s pedagogical frameworks and expansive community continue to influence my scholarly and artistic practices. Inspired by the writings of Anni Albers, Hernán Díaz, Gertrude Stein and Pablo Neruda, I focus on the networks of relationships which made the program unique. Through my own experiences as an administrator, weaver, folklorist, and current PhD student, I show that craft is grounded within an ecology of historical, contemporary, and potential future relationships which are made tangible though material objects, enlivened by stories, and find resonance though teaching, learning, writing, and curatorial opportunities, as demonstrated by the MA in Critical Craft Studies program.

Keywords:

• higher education
• craft
• weaving
• material culture
• folklore
• networks
• community
• Art, and education administration

Notes

1 Anni Albers, On Weaving (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1965), 15, emphasis added.

2 Hernán Díaz, In the Distance (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017), 62.

3 Anjula Razdan, “Unearthing the Craftscape,” American Craft (Summer 2021): 44.

4 Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things (Boston: Little Brown, 1994), 127.

5 Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (New York: Christine Burgin, New Directions, 2014), 19.

6 Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 272.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Burke

Danielle Burke is an artist and folklorist. She studies textiles, craft pedagogy, and artist communities; her studio practice focuses primarily on the structure and storytelling potential of woven cloth. She is currently a PhD student in Design Studies (history) within the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.