19.8.20 Sloppy craft and metal work
Patterson and Surette’s book, Sloppy craft, published in 2015, is subtitled Post disciplinarity and the crafts. It describes a relatively recent acknowledgement of a movement amongst craft practitioners and fine artists to use traditional craft skills without the expected ‘refined skill, mastery of technique and a striving for perfection’. These ‘unkempt’ and ‘haphazard’ ways of working can add conceptual meaning. (Patterson and Surette, 2015, p xxv)
Anne Wilson, who first coined this term in 2007, maintains that ‘sloppy’ is the ‘antithesis to what good craft should be.’ She goes on to say that combining the words ‘sloppy’ and ‘craft’ set up a ‘binary of opposites that …defies and possibly flips established hierarchies of value.’ She suggests that ‘the ubiquity of computer screens … digital media … and the availability of seemingly easy perfection that demands an opposite.’ She attributes this to the desire for ‘a more sensorial experience, materiality and the mark of the hand’ with the consequent ‘foible and imperfection, irregularity and ucertainty.’ (ibid p xxvi)
However, she goes on to express concern that the term ‘sloppy craft’ might engender a ‘false binary’, if high levels of craft skills and deliberate haphazard making are polarised.
I consider much of my knitted and stitched work to be ‘sloppy craft’. I have had many years’ experience, learning these traditional skills, and could choose to conform to the traditionally perfect finish in my work, but I find that subverting those expectations adds meaning. Although I used knitting patterns for years, I now find it much more satisfying to follow my own intuitive way of sculpting with my knitting. I have written more about that here.
I obviously have nowhere near the skill level at working with metal, which means I have some dissatisfaction with what I’m making, but I also see gesture in my novice attempts at creating form and welding. Is there such a thing as sloppy metalwork? Sloppy welding?
Metalwork obviously has its own stereotypical register of expectations. It seems to me that care, precision, perfection and finish are some of them, which are similar to those of knitting and stitch, similarly. With metal, however, there are obvious differences –metal is hard, so the tools required to work with it are harder to use physically and require all of my body at times, not just my hands. They’re also potentially more dangerous; I’ve been working with a band saw and molten metal.
There is an expectation, certainly in the world of embroidery, that it’s necessary to acquire a certain level of skill in a process before it can be subverted. I’m not sure I agree when it comes to Fine Art. I think that other factors come into play, including the materials used, colour, form, surface, manipulation and gesture, of course. All of these come into play as soon as I start to work with a new material; I bring a scaffold of skills in knitting and stitch and other areas to my work, as I bring myself. I think that these are transferrable skills.
I’ve decided that the gestural drawings in metal that I’ve created communicate something that a perfectly fabricated piece wouldn’t. They’re a visual record of my acquisition of new skills and show a history of the physicality of making and the marks of my body in that process. They’re rather wonky, and badly welded, which makes them potentially more fragile than one would expect of metal work. A bad weld for me becomes an inadequate join, a visible mend, so, I’ve left them unfinished, raw, blatant blobs of solidified molten metal. It’s another kind of drawing or mark making, the transformation of a line.
A number of people have said that my metal work looks as if I’m knitting with metal, and that is how it feels.
Patterson, E.C. and Surette, S. (eds) (2015) Sloppy craft: Postdisciplinarity and the crafts. New York & London: Bloomsbury
Patterson and Surette’s book, Sloppy craft, published in 2015, is subtitled Post disciplinarity and the crafts. It describes a relatively recent acknowledgement of a movement amongst craft practitioners and fine artists to use traditional craft skills without the expected ‘refined skill, mastery of technique and a striving for perfection’. These ‘unkempt’ and ‘haphazard’ ways of working can add conceptual meaning. (Patterson and Surette, 2015, p xxv)
Anne Wilson, who first coined this term in 2007, maintains that ‘sloppy’ is the ‘antithesis to what good craft should be.’ She goes on to say that combining the words ‘sloppy’ and ‘craft’ set up a ‘binary of opposites that …defies and possibly flips established hierarchies of value.’ She suggests that ‘the ubiquity of computer screens … digital media … and the availability of seemingly easy perfection that demands an opposite.’ She attributes this to the desire for ‘a more sensorial experience, materiality and the mark of the hand’ with the consequent ‘foible and imperfection, irregularity and ucertainty.’ (ibid p xxvi)
However, she goes on to express concern that the term ‘sloppy craft’ might engender a ‘false binary’, if high levels of craft skills and deliberate haphazard making are polarised.
I consider much of my knitted and stitched work to be ‘sloppy craft’. I have had many years’ experience, learning these traditional skills, and could choose to conform to the traditionally perfect finish in my work, but I find that subverting those expectations adds meaning. Although I used knitting patterns for years, I now find it much more satisfying to follow my own intuitive way of sculpting with my knitting. I have written more about that here.
I obviously have nowhere near the skill level at working with metal, which means I have some dissatisfaction with what I’m making, but I also see gesture in my novice attempts at creating form and welding. Is there such a thing as sloppy metalwork? Sloppy welding?
Metalwork obviously has its own stereotypical register of expectations. It seems to me that care, precision, perfection and finish are some of them, which are similar to those of knitting and stitch, similarly. With metal, however, there are obvious differences –metal is hard, so the tools required to work with it are harder to use physically and require all of my body at times, not just my hands. They’re also potentially more dangerous; I’ve been working with a band saw and molten metal.
There is an expectation, certainly in the world of embroidery, that it’s necessary to acquire a certain level of skill in a process before it can be subverted. I’m not sure I agree when it comes to Fine Art. I think that other factors come into play, including the materials used, colour, form, surface, manipulation and gesture, of course. All of these come into play as soon as I start to work with a new material; I bring a scaffold of skills in knitting and stitch and other areas to my work, as I bring myself. I think that these are transferrable skills.
I’ve decided that the gestural drawings in metal that I’ve created communicate something that a perfectly fabricated piece wouldn’t. They’re a visual record of my acquisition of new skills and show a history of the physicality of making and the marks of my body in that process. They’re rather wonky, and badly welded, which makes them potentially more fragile than one would expect of metal work. A bad weld for me becomes an inadequate join, a visible mend, so, I’ve left them unfinished, raw, blatant blobs of solidified molten metal. It’s another kind of drawing or mark making, the transformation of a line.
A number of people have said that my metal work looks as if I’m knitting with metal, and that is how it feels.
Patterson, E.C. and Surette, S. (eds) (2015) Sloppy craft: Postdisciplinarity and the crafts. New York & London: Bloomsbury
