Journal of Modern Craft
Vol. 17, No. 1. 2024
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.
MA in Folklore Thesis
Olive (Fink) Risch and the Cross Country Weavers: An Archival and Ethnographic Study
2022
Under the direction of Gabrielle Berlinger, (advisor) and Bernard Herman, Patricia Sawin, and Namita Gupta Wiggers (committee members)
Abstract: Studies on group and transmission often omit the affective dimensions which imbue the process of community formation, maintenance, and continuity with purpose and pleasure. This case study on Olive (Fink) Risch’s involvement with the national, mail-based Cross Country Weavers from 1962 until at least 1967 provides an apt opportunity to mend this oversight. By applying collaborative ethnographic methodologies to her archival collection, this essay identifies seven qualities of relationality—reciprocity, presence, belonging, veneration, narration, stewardship, and remembrance—which indicate the co-constitutive processes of social connection and weaving scholarship. Furthermore, the wide geographic distance between group participants provides an example of effective distanced-learning practices, certainly relevant now due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
