Open Section — call for papers
From issue #6 (2014), craft + design enquiry will include an Open Section. Contributors to the Open Section may submit papers
exploring any aspect of contemporary craft and design. All papers in the Open
Section are peer reviewed and selected for publication in accordance with
established craft + design enquiry procedures.
The submission process is outlined above.
Themed Section — call for papers
Landscape, Place and Identity
in Craft and Design
Guest edited by Kay
Lawrence AM
craft + design enquiry welcomes Kay
Lawrence as the Guest editor of issue #7 (2015). Kay provides this outline and
invites submissions on the theme — Landscape, Place and Identity:
The words used to describe the physical
environment and our relationship to it, are always nuanced. The concept of
‘place’ refers to a particular portion of space that may or may not be occupied
by people, while also encompassing the idea of dwelling, of living in a
particular place. The word ‘landscape’, on the other hand, suggests a slightly
different relationship of humankind to the environment. Derived from the 16th
century Dutch word ‘landschap’,[i]
signifying a unit of human occupation, that is, places shaped by human
intervention and use, the contemporary meaning of landscape, ‘natural or
imaginary scenery as seen in a broad view’, conceives this relationship in
terms of human vision, of looking at
a landscape rather than dwelling in a
place. These words posit different relationships to the environment; landscapes
encompassed by the gaze or places known through the intimacy of bodily sensation.
Both words are culturally inflected. Our understanding of both landscapes and
places is shaped by sensory experience as well as by memory and myth, and are
thus bound up with complex questions about human identity.
If we accept that ‘identity’ is not a
given, but constructed in response to an intricate array of social, cultural,
economic and physical forces, then how we think of ourselves as individuals,
communities or even nations, will be shaped in part by the places and
landscapes where we live, and mediated through language. ‘Language’ here is
interpreted broadly to refer to the codified systems of representation used in
the practices of craft and design as well as written and oral language.
Craft and design practice, even when
speculative, is engaged with the physical world, as practitioners work with its
visual, material, spatial and temporal qualities to create objects and environments.
Recently Glenn Adamson advocated the usefulness of considering craft as process
as well as product. Craft is ‘an approach, an attitude or an action … a way of
doing things’.[ii]
So craft and design in this context can also be considered as processes underpinned by particular ways
of thinking and making.
This issue of craft + design enquiry invites papers that explore and reflect upon
these ideas about landscape, place and identity in relation to both Indigenous
and non-Indigenous craft and design practice in Australia and globally. Or, to
put it another way, writers might wish to consider how craft and design practitioners
have employed the visual, material, spatial and temporal processes of their
disciplines to interrogate questions of identity in relation to concepts of
place and landscape.
These questions are further elaborated
below.
The Western landscape tradition is
predominantly graphic and, although craft can be pictorial (like woven
tapestry), craft also affords meaning through the actual materials used. How
does craft reflect or interrogate ideas of landscape (or place) through the use
of its physical substance; plant, sand, clay, timber and rock?
Representations of landscape can take on
ideological ramifications in the formation of identity. In white Australia, for
example, the land has been variously constructed in the popular imagination as
beneficent or lacking, dangerous and hostile, sometimes with gendered
connotations as a nurturing or devouring mother. The concept of ‘wilderness’
has also been used to construct an understanding of the natural environment as
untouched by people, separating humankind from the natural world and effacing
the long history of Australia as a peopled land cared for and shaped by its
Indigenous inhabitants. Writers might wish to consider how such tropes of
landscape or place have been employed in craft and design to formulate or
question concepts of identity, whether individual, community or national.
In Australia, the term ‘country’, with
its many associated meanings that pertain to territory, nationhood and the
rural, has taken on additional meaning to signify ‘traditional, Indigenous land
and sea with its embedded cultural values relating to the dreamtime’.[iii]
The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose tells of Indigenous elder, Daly Pulkara
from the Victoria River district in far north Australia, speaking sadly and
heavily of ‘wild’ country; country that bears the devastation of misuse and
neglect of the introduced pastoral industry. He compares ‘wild’ to ‘quiet’
country ‘in which all the care of generations of people is evident to those who
know how to see it’.[iv]
While craft practices have historically been used to express human connection
to place through use of traditional processes and local materials, writers
might also wish to consider how the idea of human obligation to place, implicit in Indigenous use of the word
‘country’, is being addressed in contemporary craft and design.
craft
+ design enquiry #7, invites papers reflecting upon
these questions from practitioners, researchers and scholars across the broad
field of contemporary craft and design practice and theory.
Kay
Lawrence AM is a visual artist and writer and
Adjunct Professor in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the
University of South Australia. She has an internationally recognised textiles
practice with work held in many public collections including the National
Gallery of Australia. Through her art-making she critically engages with
matters of personal and community identity in relation to place, exploring ideas
of loss and connection through a practice centred on hand-making and grounded
in the materiality and meanings of textiles. She has completed a number of
significant commissions for public spaces, and was made a member of the Order
of Australia (AM) in 1989 for her work designing and coordinating the making of
The Parliament House Embroidery. Her
scholarly writing on contemporary textiles practice has been
published by Berg Publishers, Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Melbourne
University Press.
Contributors to the Themed Section of c+de#7 should follow the Steps to submitting a paper for c+de#7.
Submissions close on 30 June 2014.
