Welcome to MAI 8: Feminist Craft

Dearest MAI Readers,

As 2021 draws to an end, we bring you our special issue on Feminist Craft. Much has been written lately about the exclusive and exclusionary status of so-called artistic canons. However, less has been said about the reappraisal of women’s craft as an art form. At MAI, it seems to us that the evident ‘purposiveness’ of much of what has been traditionally deemed as the direct product of ‘women’s work’ has occluded careful consideration of its status as art. In this light, Kant’s dictum that art is that beautiful thing which evinces ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ and which can only be calmly appraised via a disinterested appeal to universality seems resolutely patriarchal.

Exploring the relationship female practitioners have with their work, our authors show that craft practice, whether in the professional realm or as a hobby, is not only functional. It often becomes an essential source of leisure, liberating income or aesthetic pleasure. Quietly it resists those patriarchal claims to universality and frequently helps redefine women’s sense of ‘otherness’. In other words, female craftwork is often a smaller-scale, localised or domestic production that empowers communities and individuals.

The articles and interviews included within this issue recognise women’s craft as an art form that foregrounds creativity as a fundamental act of reparation, care, love, and gratitude. To craft, for many of the artists interviewed here, is primarily an ethical gesture that renders palpable the physical connection between the artist and their artefact, between our inner mental states and materiality, between the self and gendered identity. Craft, as an art form, is reconceived as a subversive and potentially political tool that opens up sites of contestation that demand we also rethink the very terms by which we consider notions such as art, the canon, the space of exhibition, and the role of the artist (as an always implicitly gendered subject). Moreover, many of these discussions propel ethical considerations of the materiality of ‘art making’, our deeper connections to the natural world, and the detrimental impact we are having on it. For us, this issue elucidates manifold ways in which women’s craft can be read as an art form: whether as explicitly feminist or engaging with theories of new materialism, ecology, hapticity and phenomenology.

To commission, select and prepare these winter readings for you, we worked with a brilliant guest editor and a craftswoman herself, Isabelle McNeill from the University of Cambridge. We are incredibly grateful for her input and the many hours of labour she spent on this issue. Similarly, we’d like to thank our in-house editor, Houman Sadri, who helped us edit many copies of these articles. Most of all, we thank our authors for sharing their experiences and analyses of craft practices from the western culture and beyond.

We realise that this year has continued to be very challenging for many of us, so we wish you not only a happy, healthy and restful festive season, whether you are celebrating or not, but also a brighter 2022. Here in the Northern hemisphere, the Winter Solstice is approaching—a time of the year that reminds us that the days will eventually grow longer and that we must create, holding light within the dark. So hold on! Create and appreciate the craft around you—perhaps the best available remedy for the darkness, particularly now, when the pandemic feels like some never-ending global nightmare.

Let our authors inspire your activities on those dark and cold evenings. Happy reading and happy making!

With solidarity and gratitude,

Anna Backman Rogers & Anna Misiak.

(Gothenburg, Sweden & Falmouth, UK)