Craft and Heritage: Intersections in Critical Studies and Practice 9781350067585, 9781350067615, 9781350067608

Citation preview

CRAFT AND HERITAGE

ii

Craft and Heritage Intersections in Critical Studies and Practice Edited by Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 © Editorial content and introductions, Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson, 2022 © Individual chapters, their authors, 2022 Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Four (‘Surrounded’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. Photographed by Paul Mills. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Surette, Susan, editor. | Paterson, Elaine Cheasley, editor. Title: Craft and heritage : intersections in critical studies and practice / Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021023377 (print) | LCCN 2021023378 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350067585 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350067592 (epub) | ISBN 9781350067608 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Handicraft industries. | Cultural property. | Cultural policy. | Group identity. Classification: LCC HD9999.H362 C725 2021 (print) | LCC HD9999.H362 (ebook) | DDC 745.5–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023377 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023378 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6758-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6760-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-6759-2 Typeset by Integra Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory of our dear friend and colleague Dr Sandra Alfoldy (1969–2019) who inspired us both by paving the way. Her encouragement for this project has sustained us from its inception at an academic conference, in the lively round table discussions she moderated there, and over dinner, drinks and spas together. We hope she would be proud of this collection whose breadth and depth spans a field of scholarship she helped to shape.

vi

CONTENTS

Platesix Figuresxi Notes on Contributors xiv Acknowledgementsxix Introduction  Susan Surette1 Section I  Place and belonging  Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson21 1

Popular heritage: ‘Donegal Village’ at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893  Janice Helland23

2

Sopon Bezirdjian, craft, heritage and identity in Victorian Manchester  Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan39

3

Empire, nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics: Craft as a site of chronopolitical reproduction  Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương63

4

The unicorn and the ground hornbill: Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries  Brenda Schmahmann81

5

Latin American and Latin-Canadian textile practices: Art, activism and diasporic identity  Nuria Carton de Grammont and Maria Ezcurra95

Section II  Sustainability and resilience  Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson113 6

Blessed are the cheesemakers: A cultural history of cheese in early twentieth-century Ireland  Eleanor Flegg115

Contents

7

Piecing heritage in transition: The Lakota Sioux star quilt as a symbol of pan-Indigeneity  Lisa Binkley127

8

A cart before a horse: How the subfield of traditional workmanship is transforming the field of heritage conservation  Giedrė Jarulaitienė143

9

Becoming heritage smart – negotiating the dilemma of craft practice in a ceramic centre  Magdalena Buchczyk157

10 Postcolonial and global heritage narratives from communal and individual perspectives in Dumbara weaving – Sri Lanka  Chamithri Greru and Britta Kalkreuter171 Section III  Collections and cultural institutions  Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson187 11 Canadian women china painters: Artists and amateurs  Rachel Gotlieb189 12 Crafting civic engagement? How heritage lottery funding reframed Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village  Elaine Cheasley Paterson207 13 Craft as performance in China’s porcelain heritage capital  Maris Gillette221 14 Craft narratives from heritage sites in Buganda  Maureen Muwanga Senoga237 15 Hunting for Lost Crafts: The value of intangible cultural heritage in contemporary Scottish craft  Juliette MacDonald255 Index268

viii

PLATES

1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

Painted wall decorations by Sopon Bezirdjian, Beylerbeyi Palace, Istanbul (1865). Photo: Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan Biên Hoà hundred flowers vase c. late 1960s. Photo: Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương Nguyễn Quốc Chánh, Guerilla Mode, ceramics, 2017. Photo: Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry One (‘Setting Out’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry One (‘The Start of the Hunt’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photos: Paul Mills LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Two (‘The Drought’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Two (‘The Unicorn Dips His Horn into the Stream to Rid It of Poison’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photos: Paul Mills LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Three (‘Fleeing Across the River’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Three (‘The Unicorn Leaps the Stream’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photos: Paul Mills LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Four (‘Surrounded’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Four (‘The Unicorn Defends Himself ’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photo: Paul Mills LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Five (‘The Ground Hornbill is Killed and Carried Home’’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Six (‘The Unicorn Is Killed and Brought to the Castle’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photo: Paul Mills LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Six (‘Restoration’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Seven (‘The Unicorn in Captivity’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photo: Paul Mills Ruka, Sarabeth Triviño (2016–2017). Photo: Sarabeth Triviño Perra Egoista, Laura Acosta (2011–2013). Public textile installation and performance. Performed by Emilia Benitez, Photo: Daniel Ayala, Location: Parque Saavedra, La Plata, Argentina 2012 The Morning Milk, Dermod O Brien, Private collection. Photo: Anthony O Brien

Plates

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

x

AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde adjusts a blanket presented to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau following speeches at the Assembly of First Nations Special Chiefs Assembly in Gatineau, Tuesday, 8 December 2015. CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld Yellow Star Quilt, South Dakota State Historical Society. Courtesy of the Museum of the South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre SD The townscape of the historical centre in Røros. Photo: Giedrė Jarulaitienė The construction of the new outbuilding in the backyard. Photo: Giedrė Jarulaitienė The facade of a potter’s house decorated with plates. Photo: Magdalena Buchczyk Horezu plates and a selection of pigments in the potter’s studio. Photo: Magdalena Buchczyk A master artisan showing a blanket he made for his newborn child. Photo: Chamithri Greru The new designs developed by artisans. Photo: Chamithri Greru Dish with Dogwood flowers, Mary Ella Dignam, 1891, 2 x 23 cm, Gardiner Museum, Collection of Barbara and Peter-Sutton-Smith, G11.86. Photo: Gardiner Museum Small Pitcher, Florence Helena McGillivray, 13 x 11.5 x 8.2 cm, Gardiner Museum, Gift of Barbara M. Mitchell, G14.71. Photo: Gardiner Museum Detail of terracotta frieze, Compton Mortuary Chapel (1898), exterior. Photo: Elaine Paterson Interior gesso work, Compton Mortuary Chapel, Compton Potters’ Arts Guild, Surrey, England, 1899–1904. Photo: Elaine Paterson A potter performs potting at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2009. Photo: Maris Gillette A potter performs his craft for tourists at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum. Photo: Ping Lin, 2014 The Sanbao International Ceramic Art Center in 2004. Photo: Maris Gillette Kasubi Royal Tombs interior showing regalia: mats and baskets for the four kings buried inside Muzibu Azaala Mpanga. Photo: Remigius Kigongo Kasubi Royal Tombs interior showing regalia. Four baskets, one for each of the four kings inside Muzibu Azaala Mpanga. Photo: Remigius Kigongo Kasubi Royal Tombs roof interior constructed like a basket. Photo: Remigius Kigongo Indigo check tweed, Skye Weavers. Photo: Inverness Museum and Art Gallery Brawl, 2014, Kate MccGwire, mixed media with pheasant feathers in antique dome, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: JP Bland

FIGURES

1.1 The Irish village. Olympia 1888. Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, 7 July 1888, 8. Toronto Reference Library 1.2 Inside the Kells embroiderers’ cottage, Irish village, Olympia, 1888. Queen, 28 July 1888, 108. Toronto Reference Library 1.3 Donegal Industrial Fund at Chicago World’s Fair, Queen, 14 October 1893, 636. Toronto Reference Library 2.1 Holy Cross Armenian Church, Manchester (1870), architects: Royle & Bennett. Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan 2.2 Designs for ceilings (floral geometric, leaf geometric and woven pattern), pencil on paper, by Sopon Bezirdjian (no date). Image courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections 2.3 Designs for four chairs by Sopon Bezirdjian, pencil on paper (no date). Image courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections 2.4 Promotional calendar for Spicer Bros paper suppliers, Supplement to the Stationer, Printer and Fancy Trade’s Register (1897), designed by Sopon Bezirdjian, print (no date). Image courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections 2.5 Advertisement for ‘Royal Life Insurance’ by Sopon Bezirdjian, pencil on paper (no date). Image courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections 2.6 Design by Sopon Bezirdjian illustrated in Myra’s Journal (1 March 1889). Image courtesy of the British Library 2.7 ‘Turkish Design’ from Sopon Bézirdjian (Albert, Paris-Marseille, 1900). AGBU Nubar Library, Paris 2.8 Sketches of Ottoman motifs, including Iznik-style tulips, by Sopon Bezirdjian, pencil on paper. Image courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University, Special Collections 3.1 Biên Hoà vase with Angkor motifs c. 1960s. Photo: Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương 3.2 Nguyễn Trọng Lộc, Untitled, ceramic figurines, 2018. Photo: Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương 3.3 Nguyễn Quốc Chánh, Barefoot, ceramics, 2011. Photo: Nguyễn Quốc Chánh 4.1 Keiskamma Art Project, Intsikizi Tapestries (2016), third series on display in the gallery at 33 Twickenham Avenue, Auckland Park. Photo: Paul Mills, Kieskamma Art Project

27 27 29 42

45

46

47

47 48 53

54 66 76 77

81

Figures

 4.2 Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries (c. 1495–1505) in the Cloisters Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Paul Mills   4.3 Exhibition by the Keiskamma Art Project in Christ Church Hall at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2015. Four of the first series of Intsikizi Tapestries are on easel-like stands at the far side of the venue with the other two, on the same kind of stands, immediately on their left. Component panels of the second series are on the left wall. Photo: Sirion Robertson, Kieskamma Art Project  5.1 Meeting Point, Giorgia Volpe (2008–2016). Photo: Giorgia Volpe  5.2 Invisible, Maria Ezcurra (2005/2016). Photo: Maria Ezcurra  6.1 Mabel O Brien, Sean O’Sullivan. Photo: Eleanor Flegg   7.1 ‘Home of Chief Red Cloud, Pine Ridge Agency, S.D.’ Red Cloud’s wife is seated on the bed in their log house. The bed is covered with a star quilt, and a sword hangs on the wall. An American flag with forty stars hangs on the wall behind her. Red Cloud’s Wife Is Pretty Owl. From Indian War Views Album, History Nebraska, RG2845.PH119.5   7.2 Lakota Sioux Painted Buffalo Robe, 1875–1890, National Museum of the American Indian, 12/2158   7.3 War Bonnet, South Dakota State Historical Society. Courtesy of the Museum of the South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre SD   8.1 The main building of the local restaurant in Røros. Photo: Giedrė Jarulaitienė   8.2 The original cladding of the nearby outbuilding that has been copied. Photo: Giedrė Jarulaitienė   8.3 The traces of manual workmanship on the facade of the new outbuilding. Photo: Giedrė Jarulaitienė   9.1 Image of the contemporary pottery commission on the background of traditional pots. Photo: Magdalena Buchczyk   9.2 Studio wall covered with pottery diplomas. Photo: Magdalena Buchczyk 10.1 The landscape of Talagune, Sri Lanka. Photo: Chamithri Greru 10.2 A design drawn on paper by the artisan, Chaminda, that shows the pattern and the colour ways. Photo: Chamithri Greru 10.3 An old piece of work, said to be more than 100 years old, with traditional motifs. Photo: Chamithri Greru 11.1 Mary Ella Dignam, City of Toronto Archive, Fonds 531, Series 238, File 14 11.2 Jardinière (D&C France), attributed to Florence McGillivray, 21.5 x 22 cm. Private Collection, Estate of Kathleen Dummy. Photo: W. C. Allen 12.1 Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village, Compton, Surrey, UK (map drawing) 12.2 G. F. Watts, Portrait of Mary Watts (back view), 1887, oil on canvas, Watts Gallery Trust. At the 1892 Whitechapel exhibition, the note for this painting read: ‘A picture to show how much there is to be found even by those with only a back view.’ Photo: Watts Gallery

xii

82

83 102 106 116

129 130 131 150 151 152 158 165 173 175 178 193 199 207

209

Figures

12.3 Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village is situated at the junction of the North Downs Way and the Pilgrim’s Way, designated an ‘Area of Natural Outstanding Beauty’. Photo: Elaine Paterson 12.4 Restored Ceiling panels, Limnerslease, Compton, Surrey, UK. Photo: Elaine Paterson 12.5 Detail, Restored Ceiling panels, Limnerslease, Compton, Surrey, UK. Photo: Elaine Paterson 13.1 A trimmer at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2004. Photo: Maris Gillette 13.2 A craft ‘performer’ at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2016. Photo: Flickr, public domain 13.3 Tourists at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2016. Photo: Flickr, public domain 13.4 A craft ‘performer’ prepares to fire the wood-burning kiln, 2014. Photo: Ping Lin 13.5 A potter performing his craft at Sanbao, 2004. Photo: Maris Gillette 14.1 Kasubi Royal Tombs main building, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2001. Photo: Remigius Kigongo 14.2 Geographical location of Buganda and the counties. The Kasubi Royal Tombs Heritage Site is located in Kyadondo county. Courtesy of Venny Mary Nakazibwe 14.3 Baskets are made in different sizes. Photo: Joan Kekimuri 14.4 Bowl (ekibya) where medicinal herbs for the king were prepared. Photo: Joan Kekimuri 15.1 Sixareen: Laying on an aamos, Jen Deschenes. Photo: Jen Deschenes 15.2 Hunting for the Lost, Kevin Andrew Morris, 2013, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: Kevin Andrew Morris 15.3 Crochetdermy® Wild Boar Trophy, Shauna Richardson, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: Shauna Richardson

211 213 214 222 225 228 230 232 238

239 245 248 258 260 261

xiii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Lisa Binkley is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. Her research focuses on Indigenous and settler women’s needlework and textile production, during the long nineteenth century. She is the co-editor of Stitching the Self: Identity and the Needlearts (Bloomsbury Academic), which includes her chapter ‘Whig’s Defeat: Stitching Scottish Identities in Quebec’, and has a monograph forthcoming with University of British Columbia Press, Material Identities: Quilts in Canada and Their Makers. ‘To Each Her Own: A Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt as Feminist Resistance’ appears in Location/Dislocation: Transnational and Translocal Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1980 (Duke University Press, 2021). As a form of creative research, she practises stitching, spinning, weaving, embroidering and quilting objects similar to those she writes about. Magdalena Buchczyk is a social anthropologist and a Junior Professor in Social Anthropology at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Humboldt-Universität zu Germany. Her research focuses on the ethnographic exploration of material culture, museums, heritage and craft, with fieldwork in Germany, Poland, Romania and the UK. Her current project, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, explores the collections of the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) in Berlin, which has inherited a wide range of collections accumulated during its tumultuous history. Focusing on the everyday craft collections, this project uses interdisciplinary, ethnographic methods to reveal their changing meanings and significance today. She is also Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK and has previously worked at Goldsmith’s, UK and UCL, UK and has co-curated exhibitions at the Horniman Museum, Pilsudski Institute and Constance Howard Gallery in London, UK as well as Coexist Gallery in Bristol. Nuria Carton de Grammont is an art historian, curator and lecturer at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, specializing in Latin American and Latin Canadian contemporary art. She has held two postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for International Studies and Research and the Department of Geography at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where she also coordinated the Network of Studies on Latin America. She has published several articles on Latin American art in the magazines Artediseño, Oltreoceano. Rivista sulle migrazioni, The ALHIM Papers, Fractal, Esse arts + opinions, Inter, current art and Archée, and co-edited Politics, Culture and Economy in Popular Practices in the Americas (Peter Lang, 2016). As curator, she presented the Gilberto Esparza exhibition Plantas autofotosintéticas at Galerie UQAM, Canada (2017) and co-directed the installation of Objects Personnels/Personal Belongings/Objetos Personales for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada as part of the Connexions. Notre diversité artistique dialogue avec nos collections (2018–2019).

Notes on Contributors

Maria Ezcurra is an artist, educator, researcher and mother born in Argentina, raised in Mexico and currently living in Canada. She has participated in numerous exhibits worldwide, including the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Mexico the Carl Freedman Gallery in the UK, Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Canada the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada and a recent solo show at La Centrale, Montreal, Canada. Over the past fifteen years she has taught art in several universities and organizations in Mexico and Canada. She has also facilitated diverse community projects, including the co-development of art workshops for refugee children and families in Montreal. Maria has been an artist-in-residence at the RSBO Network and Shriners Hospital (linking art and health), Canada and in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, Montreal, Canada  where she currently coordinates several art and community initiatives. Her areas of research are collaborative and inclusive art practices, women’s (un)dressed body, gender-based violence, displacement, memory, identity and belonging. Eleanor Flegg is a design journalist, craft historian and writer of speculative fiction. She holds a PhD in craft history from the University of Northern Ireland (2012), Northern Ireland, is a columnist for the Irish Independent and the Irish Arts Review and co-edits the online craft journal ‘makebelieve.ie.’ Flegg is the great-granddaughter of Mabel O Brien. Maris Gillette is a sociocultural anthropologist and cultural historian who researches changing economic practices, social identities and material culture, primarily in modern China, but also the United States, UK and Sweden. She works regularly on collaborative action research initiatives with community institutions, including museums, media centres and municipal offices. Gillette is the author of China’s Porcelain Capital: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen (Bloomsbury 2016) and Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (Stanford 2000). She is Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Global Studies, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Rachel Gotlieb has curated over twenty exhibitions and published extensively on design, craft and ceramics. She teaches design history at Sheridan College, Canada in the Craft and Design programme, and is Adjunct Curator at the Gardiner Museum, Canada where she was previously Chief Curator and Interim Executive Director. Gotlieb was the founding curator of the Design Exchange, Canada and recently supervised the transfer of its permanent collection to the Canadian Museum of History, Canada and the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada. In 2017 and 2018 she served as the Theodore Randall Visiting International Chair in Art and Design at Alfred University in New York, USA and was awarded a Research Fellow Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. She is currently the Ruth Rippon Curator of Ceramics at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento USA. Chamithri Greru is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of the Arts UK and is currently working on a social design project related to food systems funded by the ESRC between the UK and India. Her research focus is on developing collaborative methods and tools to foster social innovation, local development and participation. During her xv

Notes on Contributors

PhD, she explored intersections between craft and design with a focus on participatory approaches to heritage management, with research carried out in Scotland, India and Sri Lanka. She has a practice background as a designer in the fashion and apparel sector. Janice Helland is Professor Emerita, Art History and Gender Studies, Queen’s University, Canada. She has published articles in journals such as Textile History, Costume, Journal of Design History and Journal of Modern Craft, among others. Her most recent singleauthored books include Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Commitment, Friendship, Pleasure (2000), and British and Irish Home Arts and Industries, 1880–1914: Marketing Craft, Making Fashion (2007); co-edited volumes include Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935 (2002), Local/Global: Women’s Art in the Nineteenth Century (2006), Craft, Space and Interior Design, 1855–2005 (2008), and Craft, Community and the Material Culture of Place and Politics, 19th-20th Century (2014). Her research remains focused upon the production, display and consumption of cottage crafts, and most recently she has contributed chapters about the relationship between suffrage and textile arts to Suffrage and Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Enterprise (Bloomsbury 2018) and Stitching the Self: Identity and the Needle Arts (Bloomsbury 2020). Giedrė Jarulaitienė is Cultural Historian and Heritage Manager from Vilnius Lithuania with a special interest in the application of historical building techniques and materials in the actual restoration of built wooden heritage. She conducted her doctoral research project at the Faculty of Architecture of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway on the role of traditional workmanship in the field of heritage conservation in historical urban environments of the Northern and Baltic regions in Europe. Her research focuses on the socio-economic and socio-historical analyses of the changing status of craftsmen in relation to the practical conservation of architectural and urban wooden heritage, and she participates in international research and educational projects, which are aimed at sharing this knowledge and experience. Britta Kalkreuter studied history of art, history and German at Cologne University, Germany and Trinity College, Dublin Ireland and gained a PhD in Architectural Heritage Studies from Cologne University. She taught cultural studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and is currently Associate Professor in Design Studies at Heriot-Watt University’s School of Textiles and Design in Scotland where she is also Associate Dean. Her research is interdisciplinary, as it connects design practice with heritage studies and explores material practices as well as making experiences; her research methods originate in the fields of anthropology, iconography and archive, and she values collaborative research. Lately, her particular focus has been on local production scenarios in global design economies. Juliette MacDonald writes on craft, heritage and design theory and practice. Her current research focuses on craft, design and material culture and their relationship with creativity, place and identity. She is co-editor of Styling Shanghai (Bloomsbury, 2019) and has contributed chapters, articles and reviews to various journals and books including Death in Modern Scotland, 1855–1955: Beliefs, Attitudes and Practices (Peter Lang, 2016) and Sloppy Craft: Post-disciplinarity and the Crafts (Bloomsbury, 2015). She holds the xvi

Notes on Contributors

position of Director, Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland/Shanghai College of Fashion, China and Innovation Partnership and is Personal Chair of Craft History and Theory at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland. She is co-founder of the Naked Craft Network, and a co-curator of Naked Craft, a touring exhibition across Canada and Scotland. Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương is Associate Professor in Asian languages and cultures, and Asian American studies at UCLA, USA where she teaches Vietnamese cultural studies at the undergraduate level and critical theory at the graduate level. She is working on a book project on how ideas of the human and progressive historiography are used to organize capitalist extraction and political violence affecting people in Vietnam and the diaspora, and how they respond through street protest, work, visual art, literature and commemoration. Her other research projects explore the politics of time in futurist visions from the colonial moment to the present in cultural works by Indochinese, Vietnamese, African American and other artists, writers and activists. She has spent several summers working with ceramic artists in Biên Hoà, Vietnam. Elaine Cheasley Paterson is Associate Dean, Academic and Professor of Craft Studies in the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. Her research concerns women’s cultural philanthropy in early twentieth-century British, Irish and Canadian craft guilds of the home arts movement and tracing a lineage from this historical material to the current resurgence in do-ityourself, maker culture and craftivist practices. She is also investigating education, settlement, social benevolence and imperial philanthropy in early twentieth-century Britain and Canada. Another significant research stream, emerging from her teaching, is centred around questions of skill, hybridity and pedagogy within a contemporary craft milieu. Some of her publications include Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ‘Crafting Empire: Intersections of Irish and Canadian Women’s History’, Journal of Canadian Art History (2014), ‘Our Lady of the Snows: Settlement, Empire and “the Children of Canada” in the Needlework of Mary Seton Watts’ in Stitching the Self (2020), and she co-edited a special issue ‘Identity, Craft, Marketing’ of the Journal of Canadian Art History (2019–2020). Brenda Schmahmann is Professor and the SARChI chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. An art historian whose work is focused on gender and the politics of public art, she also has specialist interest in community projects from southern Africa that focus on needlework practices. Editor of Material Matters: Appliqués by the Weya Women of Zimbabwe and Needlework by South African Collectives (2000), co-editor of Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910–1994 (2005) and Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents (2017), she is the author of Through the Looking Glass: Representations of Self by South African Women Artists (2004), Mapula: Embroidery and Empowerment in the Winterveld (2006), Picturing Change: Curating Visual Culture at Post-Apartheid Universities (2013) and The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihoods, which was launched in Johannesburg late in 2016. She has authored more than seventy scholarly articles or book chapters and many reviews. xvii

Notes on Contributors

Maureen Muwanga Senoga teaches Ceramics and Art Education in the Department of Art and Industrial Design-Faculty of Vocational Studies, Kyambogo University, Kampala, Uganda. A feminist and advocate for up and coming students, she is passionate about training art and design teachers and ceramic artists and has supervised student research in art and industrial design and vocational pedagogy. She contributed to the Nomination File of Bark Cloth Making Skills, UNESCO, and to Uganda Cultural Policy development with the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD) and UNESCO Uganda. During her doctoral studies, Senoga initiated an institutional and community partnership between York University, Canada and the National Uganda Museum, Uganda to document Uganda’s heritage sites and monuments. She has published collaboratively with Professor Mary Leigh Morbey and others; has refereed book chapters, journal articles and conference proceedings papers; and has made domestic and international scholarly presentations. Susan Surette teaches textile, ceramic and craft histories Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She has co-edited Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (2015) and a special edition of the Canadian Journal of Art History, ‘Identity, Craft and Marketing’, 2019–2020. She has contributed essays to journals and exhibition catalogues and given conference papers on Canadian ceramic muralists, as well as publishing essays on various aspects of Canadian craft and the glass sculptures of Judy Chicago. Aside from serving on various organizational committees for Canadian craft, she has also enjoyed a rich career as a craftsperson, initially working for thirteen years in fibres as a weaver and basket-maker, followed by ceramics until the present. She held a Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship at NSCAD University, Halifax, Canada. Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan is Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln, UK. Previously she was Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at Mardin Artuklu University in S/E Turkey. She has published on Armenian ethnicity architects working within the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, most notably Architects of Ottoman Constantinople: The Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture (IB Tauris, 2015), which looked at an extremely prolific dynasty that was responsible for considerably reshaping the Ottoman capital in a time of farreaching political, social and cultural change. More recently, she has turned her attention to Armenian migrants to Britain, including Armenian art dealers and their conceptions of Islamic and Armenian arts, as well as the Armenian craftsman Sopon Bezirdjian. Her work has featured in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and Études arméniennes contemporaines.

xviii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project builds upon conversations emerging from the 2016 International Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Montréal, Canada. As a point of departure for this edited volume, the international scope of this conference resulted in a richly diverse series of essays from scholars writing from many different geographic locations with international perspectives on both historical and contemporary case studies. We would like to thank the Association of Critical Heritage Studies for providing a space for this discussion. Subsequently, the editors invited scholars to round out the methodological approaches and subject matter. Susan Surette would like to acknowledge Postdoctoral Fellowship funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors would also like to thank Brenna Tuel, Jolee Brook Smith and Akycha Surette for their contributions to the editing process.

xx

INTRODUCTION

Susan Surette

Craft and Heritage addresses a gap within both critical craft and critical heritage studies by re-evaluating how tangible and intangible heritage practices and policies intersect with craft objects, processes and people. This collection of essays addresses how historical craft practices and objects have been key in defining a group’s heritages and explores the means through which contemporary craft practices and processes negotiate today’s heritage frameworks. The authors of these fifteen chapters emphasize the contested and interlocked spaces of current and historical craft practices within a heritage context, inflecting the roles that tangible and intangible heritage structures, concerns and programmes play in the production and reception of craft narratives and their effect upon craftspeople and attendant heritage policies. Cultural heritage scholar Russell Staiff argues that heritage discourse and practice are tightly interwoven with the theoretical legacy of the visual arts. He specifically mentions their shared concerns of formalism, iconography, aesthetics and modernism.1 Craft, too, is often seen through the lens of the visual arts and frequently subsumed by it.2 Indeed, craft’s materialities, preoccupation with the local, interest in handskill and process, emphasis on the improvisation of historic practices and concern with function invite an examination of its intersections with current heritage concerns. Because over the last three decades heritage has become increasingly concerned with ‘cultures, traditions and the “intangible,”’ the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) mandated, in 2003, the inclusion of craft practices as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH).3 Anthropological scholarship around craft has become especially interested in how writing about craft and craft making combine to ‘help people tell about themselves, their communities, their connections, and their classes’.4 As heritage scholar Kristin Kuutmas argues, this indicates that the dichotomy between tangible and intangible is ‘organizational and political … ; (an) institutional distinction … that needs to target spheres and areas of expertise’.5 Indeed, concerns with craft as ‘things’ cannot be severed easily from craft as ‘making’, where the physical and intellectual actions embedded within cultural values inform its emergence and final form. People tell their stories through making and how they consume and preserve crafted objects; the objects divulge the stories of their makers and owners and the societies in which they lived and live. In anthropological terms, agency is distributed among craft makers, materials, making and the final objects. Craft and Heritage’s edited collection of global case studies historically links both these disciplines to late-nineteenth-century issues emerging from industrialization and nation-building. International scholars from a variety of disciplines consider the intersections of craft and heritage practices, objects and discourses, and their implications in narrating the lives of their makers and patrons.

Craft and Heritage

Craft and heritage have long been entwined in nationalist, gendered, classist and ethnic agendas, especially through William Morris’s associations with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) and the Arts and Crafts Movement.6 Indigenous, settler, diasporic, colonial and decolonizing communities have often turned to tangible craft objects and intangible craft practices to define their political, social and cultural heritages; many now lobby for the public recognition that these objects, skills and practices play in helping their communities define and construct their own identities. A key task facing both heritage and craft today is to apply decolonizing practices when confronting their own histories.7 Likewise, the tourism industry, community and global involvement in sustainable craft productions linked to fair trade, and the possibilities of economic viability for craftspeople around the globe challenge any assumptions of a presumed separation between industrial practices and the making and marketing of handcrafted productions. Even while preserving many threatened craft practices, heritage policies and procedures must also tackle supporting their future cultural, environmental and economic sustainability. Although much has been written separately on both heritage and craft, the academic community has been slow to closely scrutinize their long-term relationship. This collection fills an observable gap in the literatures of both critical heritage and critical craft studies. Craft scholarship’s recent emphasis on the role of craft practices in contemporary fine art has all too often ignored those makers who interact with the heritage sector through so-called traditional or common practices, while national and international heritage policies struggle to consider how customary craft practices are not static, but alive through the agency of contemporary crafters. Several authors in this collection, such as Magdalena Buchczyk, Giedrė Jarulaitienė, Maris Gillette and Maureen Senoga, address how skilled craftspeople negotiate expectations placed on their practices and final works because of a heritage designation (whether authorized or informal) along with the requirements of economic survival. The consequences of institutional marginalization of craft practices also need to be addressed within current heritage and critical craft studies, as the sustainability of skills and livelihoods are at stake in many places around the globe. In the Global North, for example, many universities have removed craft-based post-secondary programmes and some museums have removed the term ‘craft’ from their names following a perception that craft can be subsumed under art and design. Often a country’s perceived fiscal, cultural and social prestige is not translated into support for common or living craft practices while its encouragement for modern or fine craft is historically less than that accorded to the so-called fine arts.8 For example, the American Craft Council that was founded on the premise of supporting modern craft only recently issued a limited ‘Rare Craft Fellowship Award’ to acknowledge ‘the maintenance and revival of traditional or rare crafts in America’.9 The American National Endowment for the Arts includes traditional craft practices within their National Heritage Fellowships that ‘recognize the recipients’ artistic excellence and support their continuing contributions to [the] nation’s traditional arts heritage’,10 but craft must compete with other categories that have also been subsumed under the category of ‘folk’, such as music, dancing and oral 2

Introduction

history. Canadian heritage crafts, often categorized as ‘folk’, are largely absent from national and provincial award lists that privilege the ‘fine’ crafts.11 In another structural approach, Australia’s crafts are separated from its heritage sector, and heritage crafts are also marginalized within the awards systems of its Art Council.12 In the UK the marginalization of the craft/heritage relationship is well expressed by the Heritage Crafts Association: ‘[T]raditional crafts are not recognised as either arts nor [sic] heritage so fall outside the remit of all current support and promotion bodies.’13 New Zealand, where craft and heritage fall within the purview of the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, is an exception to this marginal status for heritage craft; there heritage and customary arts receive awards alongside contemporary crafts.14 In this volume, Elaine Cheasley Paterson’s chapter explores the implications of shifting governmental structuring of the culture sector for small museums and galleries that look to heritage craft funding, while Magdalena Buchczyk analyses how ‘traditional’ and contemporary ceramic productions are impacted by fluctuating museum and heritage practices under different political regimes. UNESCO observes that ‘[t]raditional craftsmanship is certainly the most tangible manifestation of intangible cultural heritage’, pointing out that rather than focus on the craft object, ‘safeguarding attempts should instead concentrate on encouraging artisans to continue to produce craft and to pass their skills and knowledge onto others, particularly within their own communities’.15 While UNESCO’s ICH promotes ‘the skills and knowledge involved in craftsmanship rather than the craft products themselves’,16 the chapters in this volume illustrate how inseparable are the categories of craft skills, craft objects and craft makers, which are in constant dialogue and interdependent. When brought together, they foster the development of crucial narratives relevant for and to makers and consumers. For this reason, the marketing, consumption and safe-guarding of craft objects within the marketplace and through craft museum practices and policies need to be re-examined to take into account, and judiciously and critically assess, shifting values assigned to craft heritage. In a timely fashion, essays in this collection by Eleanor Flegg, Paterson, Rachel Gotlieb, Senoga and Gillette present a variety of viewpoints that shed light upon and question discursive structures and institutional systems that have an effect upon craft as heritage and heritage as craft. For both craft and heritage, the shifting structures of these intersecting fields have resulted in increased categorization, ordering and cataloguing arising from the dynamics and concerns of modernity, widespread insecurity due to the impacts of neoliberal economics and globalization, and mutual concerns for loss of skills and practices and the place of creativity.17 Today, craft finds itself at a critical juncture: often maligned as anti-modern, although arguably mistakenly; understood as not-so-fine within the art hierarchy, but inseparable from it; increasingly co-opted for contemporary art projects, a practice recently decried as a colonial gesture; effaced in favour of the terms ‘art’ and ‘design’ from several prominent museums that were conceived to highlight its materials and practices; labouring to maintain a presence in post-secondary institutions as a critical practice and approach; and struggling to be recognized as a creative industry within governmental initiatives.18 Both authorized and unauthorized heritage as well 3

Craft and Heritage

face daunting challenges despite being progressively more institutionalized at local, national and international levels. As Rodney Harrison, among others, argues, the tendency of heritage towards unfettered accumulation, its struggles to reconcile the past in the present for the future, its inherent tensions between official and unofficial, local and global, and its claims to universality present real conundrums.19 Despite a utopian ideal of both craft and heritage as universal terms and practices that had the potential to unite cultures when they were first institutionalized in the mid-twentieth century, both have been shown to have a variety of meanings specific to local cultures. Craft as a ‘thing’ is an important part of tangible cultural heritage, while as a process, it is a key component of intangible heritage. Seeking design inspiration and skills, designers and craftspeople have often mined heritage craft objects from their own cultures but have frequently turned as well to those from other cultures, an increasing tendency in terms of the globalization of the contemporary craft market. In an interesting turnaround, Brenda Schmahmann’s case study in this volume revolves around the co-opting of a major European textile artwork whose narrative structure is recycled to create a strong decolonizing narrative by South African textile artists. Today craft and heritage are still engaged in a dialogic relationship begun 150 years ago. Similar terminologies and assumptions are framed by their mutual coming-of-age in the nineteenth-century’s explosion of academic disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and art history. Concerns with the performance and concepts related to the handcrafted and heritage emerged simultaneously in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. They were linked by mutual preoccupations with the impact of rapid industrialization and urbanization as well as by the development of national identities based on common ethnicities expressed in, and generally referred to as, folk arts. Eurocentric colonial and imperialistic agendas assured these preoccupations were transported around the globe, unevenly affecting the craft productions and livelihoods of many different peoples.20 These colonial and imperial disruptions included stifling the availability of raw materials, perturbing local markets, erasing craft productions, and removing craft objects from their communities of origin that, when taken together, unsettled community knowledge transfer. This created an opportunity for the Global North to impose its Eurocentric design principles onto the tried and true common designs embedded in local cultures or to re-imagine them within a Eurocentric context. The physical removal of craft objects from Indigenous communities within the context of imperial expansion and colonial practices is currently under heightened investigation by professionals from many disciplines, and European and North American museums, especially, are being petitioned for the return of objects. Such concerns are particularly acute for Indigenous peoples in settler nations and former colonial nations. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) has compiled a database of cultural goods already inventoried in museum collections that serve as examples of objects ‘most vulnerable to illicit traffic’;21 this ‘Red list’, while moderately effective in preventing circulation, does not, however, address the objects already ensconced in collections that are now under scrutiny by their cultures of origin. Reclaiming and repatriating these crafted objects are important steps in decolonizing the museum and 4

Introduction

collecting practices to ensure the ‘repudiat[ion] of assigned colonial meanings and the privilege[ing] of Indigenous ones’.22 If the salvage paradigm was often invoked during European and Euro-American colonization to justify the removal of craft objects from their home cultures, the same fear of loss, this time originating from Indigenous cultures, serves as an impetus for museums to re-examine their collections and heed calls for redress. Indigenous stakeholders from former colonies and settler nations and scholars from a variety of disciplines, such as Heather Igloliorte (Art History), Laura Peers (Anthropology) and Karolina Kuprecht (Law), among others, have been active in working for change.23 France’s recent ‘Sarr-Savoy Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, Toward a New Relational Ethics’ is hopeful and its programme supporting repatriation has been hastened by the Black Lives Matter movement.24 In this volume the importance of the presence or absence of historic objects to Indigenous communities from settler nations and a former colony is alluded to in chapters by Lisa Binkley (North America) and Maureen Senoga (Africa); however, the repatriation of cultural objects as a pressing concern needs to rigorously tackled by scholars and activists from both craft and heritage. Heritage and craft as practices and fields of inquiry have been equally tied to fears of loss of skills, objects and values in industrialized and industrializing countries. They were both indispensable to the creation of modern national identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by nation builders who relied on a respect for historic objects and practices often evident in the vernacular and folk that were themselves framed by class and ethnicity.25 Nascent European countries actively relied upon these folk crafts, albeit filtered through the hands, eyes and marketing acumen of modern craft designers, to establish distinctive national aesthetics.26 Indeed, ICH is another designation of what was previously categorized as ‘folk’, a term marked by assumptions of class distinctions rooted within the Western hierarchies of art and one favouring the creation or maintenance of a nationally internal ‘other’.27 ‘Folk’ and ‘craft’ were both terms used by the Global North to position the cultural production and how-to knowledge of peoples who were not from industrialized nations as inferior; in the case of craft, it served as a foil for ‘Western’ art. Contemporary craftspeople working in heritage craft practices often struggle to overcome this positioning of ‘other’ in opposition to modern craft approaches. How craftspeople have negotiated this situation is examined in chapters by Jarulaitienė, Buchczyk, Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, Schmahmann, and Chamithri Greru and Britta Kalkreuter. One way to preserve the historical built environment during times of rapid urbanization and industrialization has been through the preservation of craft skills, and one way to develop craft skills has been through the maintenance of past practices and the conservation of the best buildings and objects produced by them. Exploring and recognizing the value of such past practices does not, however, exclude the creativity open to the craftsperson as they experience the interface between body, tool and material. In this volume Jarulaitienė points out how the French architect E. E. Violletle-Duc recognized this while restoring the medieval Gothic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1843. He ‘emphasized that a restoration architect should possess the knowledge 5

Craft and Heritage

of the working techniques of various historical building traditions as well as the ability to recognize the quality of building methods’ and that an on-site ‘sculptor should be free to rediscover, at the end of his chisel, this naïveté of past centuries’.28 Craft as doing, as the intangible, is inseparable from the raw materials, the tools, how they are wielded, and the physical, social and cultural body of the maker. But contrary to Viollet-le-Duc’s belief, this knowledge is not naive, as writers for this volume clearly demonstrate. Hard-won knowledge only gained through experience, practice and experimentation is discussed in several chapters including those by Flegg, Schmahmann, Buchczyk, Gotlieb, Jarulaitienė, Binkley and Senoga. A typical historical narrative in the English-speaking world traces the link between craft and heritage from the British art critic John Ruskin’s passion for workmanship in medieval architecture through to his influence on the craft practices and ideals of William Morris who was deeply implicated in the Arts and Crafts Movement as well as the SPAB. The 1877 SPAB Manifesto, considered one of the five most influential architectural conservation documents or manifestos (along with the Venice Charter), was written eleven years before the first Arts and Crafts exhibition was held, and throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries membership in the SPAB closely overlapped with that of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.29 British historian Alan Crawford carefully traced the many designers and architects who were connected to both organizations and who championed the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He observed that ‘SPAB and Arts and Crafts ideals converged on the building site. And out of this convergence came the most intimate phase of collaboration between the Society and the movement’.30 Like Viollet-le-Duc’s observation, the SPAB architects and workers were aware of the importance of hands-on knowledge, in other words, the acquisition of historical craft skills. While this approach was initially associated with the restoration of British country homes and small churches,31 within a short period of time the SPAB actively exported its ideals and practices to Europe, the Middle East and several British colonies.32 Nor were interiors neglected as SPAB architects commissioned decorative and functional objects from designers and makers who adhered to the Arts and Crafts Movement’s emphasis on the social, aesthetic and economic value of the handmade, vernacular or folk designs along with its preference for local materials and historic practices. So highly valued were the vernacular crafts of Britain and Ireland that several Arts and Crafts designers consulted local craftworkers to learn skills or hired them to execute designs derived from historical patterns and forms.33 Likewise, some designers turned to other cultures within the British Empire for inspiration, drawing from Indian, Asian and Middle Eastern objects and practices, an approach that today could be termed ‘cultural appropriation’.34 Janice Helland, Paterson and Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan all explore how craftspeople, designers and promoters harnessed cultural heritages and craft practices during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct the idea of empire, reveal its limitations and question its assumptions, while Greru and Kalkreuter discuss the residual impact of British imperialistic design interventions on current craft practices. Both craft and heritage continued to be institutionalized at local and regional levels throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but following the destruction 6

Introduction

incurred during the Second World War and subsequent decolonization movements, the importance heritage played in reinforcing national and cultural identities resulted in global recognition for tangible heritage. This was anchored within the modern idea of a universality that was understood to transcend cultural differences.35 In 1964, the year UNESCO adopted the landmark Venice Charter and articulated the mandate of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) regarding cultural site preservation, the United States called for a ‘World Heritage Trust’ to protect significant natural sites.36 That same year the UNESCO-affiliated World Crafts Council (WCC), inspired by the previously established American Craftsmen’s Council, was founded in New York with the aim to ‘promote fellowship, foster economic development through income generating craft related activities, organise exchange programmes, workshops, conferences, seminars, and exhibitions – and in general, to offer encouragement, help, and advice to the craftspersons of the world’.37 The WCC endorsed craft as a utopic ideal, a way to unite in harmony the peoples of the world despite their class, gender, social and cultural differences. In 1972, UNESCO adopted the World Heritage Convention that Harrison also argues relies on a concept of a universal type of heritage within ‘a postEnlightenment, modern, Euro-American context’.38 Using the work of heritage scholar Laurajane Smith, he points out how heritage is understood in narrow and specific ways through the lens of a Western European tradition.39 The aims and foci of craft and heritage institutions have reflected their ‘Western’ origins and philosophical approaches, including their views towards non-monumental heritage and non-Western craft. The ‘Western’ world’s embrace of ‘fine craft’ as a culturally hierarchized term was especially clear during the WCC’s exhibition In Praise of Hands held in 1974 in Toronto, Canada. Canadian craft historian Sandra Alfoldy analysed how display, craft demonstrations and the accompanying publication reinforced the centre/periphery binary that underscored many of the member countries’ institutional marginalization.40 Recently, the WCC has attempted to address this binary through their ‘network of creative craft cities worldwide’, an initiative that celebrates the excellence of an area’s particular craft practice(s) in order to encourage tourism and knowledge exchange among craft cities. To date, the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions, areas that were considered marginalized in the 1974 In Praise of Hands exhibition, now overwhelmingly dominate the craft cities map. The targeted crafts are categorized by their materiality and evaluated in terms of ‘a tradition of craft skills’ that are ‘well known both nationally and/or internationally for the quality and skill of craftsmanship’ and are ‘important economically to the people of the region’.41 While this initiative is useful, the geographic distribution of the successful ‘cities’ glaringly reveals a gap: the absence of representation from North America, Australia and New Zealand and most of Europe, areas dominated by the concept of ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ studio craft, rather than ‘traditional’ communitybased craft. This distribution suggests that the ideas of periphery and centre along with the accompanying craft hierarchies continue to be operative despite many attempts to deconstruct them. Taking into consideration the designation and management of the new WCC ‘creative craft cities’ programme, along with the participation of specific regions and productions and the absence of others, reveals the tensions contained within the 7

Craft and Heritage

broad term ‘craft’ itself. These tensions question its subcategories such as tourist and fine/ modern or traditional and contemporary; they test the limits of materialities as defining categories; they challenge the fallacy of ‘authenticity’, itself a designation that needs to be recognized as ‘a socially constructed value with a range of political and cultural reasons and consequences’.42 In a similar vein, a 1994 UNESCO report made clear that the World Heritage List contained its own biases that signalled partialities: geographically towards Europe, typologically towards religious buildings, chronologically towards the historic period and, in terms of class, towards elitism.43 Subsequent initiatives undertaken by UNESCO have attempted to address these heritage biases through expanding the list and through the inclusion of Intangible Cultural Heritage that favours non-Western models.44 While many countries are signatories of the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, it is important to recognize that several Anglophone countries such as the UK, along with the settler nations of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, have still not adopted it.45 Many essays in this collection seek to complicate this dichotomous structure of periphery and centre and its inherent frictions. The fields of heritage and craft are both concerned with the sustainability of skills and the economic viability of crafter communities, although this concern is expressed differently depending on cultural contexts. In many instances, countries in the Global North promote ‘modern’ studio fine craft practices as articulated in the mandates of craft councils who emphasize a formalized post-secondary education in craft materials and practices. On the other hand, less industrialized nations, when attempting to improve rural economies, often encourage so-called vernacular or ‘traditional’ crafts that rely on apprenticeships and other informal approaches for knowledge transmission. This dichotomy threatens to marginalize those craftspeople in the Global North who have acquired their knowledge through apprenticeships and family interactions and sometimes restricts those in the Global South from exploring new approaches to their craft. Heritage-focused and oftentimes heritage-designated craftspeople can find themselves juggling the importance of preserving historical skills and objects, where creativity is primarily based on improvising long-standing practices, with new uses for their products, new material resources and the possibility of new designs. In contrast, studio craft practices privilege innovation tied to a break with past practices.46 Chapters by Nguyễn-võ and Ezcurra and de Grammont address the struggles and the potential for powerful political statements that makers who engage with customary practices encounter when they meet the discursively shifting art/craft border. As cultural historian Susan Luckman rightly observes, it is crucial to bring craft ‘into dialogue with larger debates over sustainable production, cultural and creative industries, ethical living, good work and the place of the handmade and making in everyday life’.47 Many authors in this volume discuss cases where class, gender, race, cultural opportunities and expectations have determined how craftspeople struggle to resolve these tensions. Literature on heritage craft practices seems to regularly entail the use of the word ‘tradition’. ‘Tradition’ is certainly a tendentious term that is used widely in both craft and heritage and needs to be carefully scrutinized by both disciplines separately and together. The World Intellectual and Property Organization (WIPO), jointly with UNESCO, 8

Introduction

defines ‘tradition-based’ as ‘knowledge systems, creations, innovations and cultural expressions which have generally been transmitted from generation to generation, are generally regarded as pertaining to a particular people or territory, have generally been developed in a non-systematic way and are constantly evolving in response to a changing environment’.48 However, despite appearing twelve times on the ICH webpage, the words ‘traditional’ and ‘tradition’ are not defined.49 Recent cultural studies and decolonizing scholarship have highlighted the questionability of their usage along with that of the related terms ‘authentic’ and ‘authenticity’. The contentious usage of tradition was made clear to the New Zealand curator Sean Mallon when confronted with objections from Samoan poet Albert Wendt who called it a ‘terrible word’.50 Mallon explains that Wendt referred to the association of ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ with an ‘evolutionary linear progression from the past to the present, … a timelessness associated with the term’, which sets up an ultimate dichotomy between past and present where continuity of practices is contrasted with the innovations of the contemporary and where cultural diversity is ignored.51 In such cases ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ are often tied tightly to colonialist agendas. An association between ‘traditional craft’ and colonialism is also taken up by textile artist Aram Han Sifuentes who argues that the notion of the so-called timelessness of ‘traditional’ crafts must be rejected. She emphasizes that ‘[t]raditional crafts are not encapsulated in time’.52 But Mallon, among others, also reminds us that for some craftspeople, continuing a traditional practice is an important decolonizing strategy; for makers and their communities it can be key to reclaiming appropriated or suppressed procedures, objects, rituals, spaces and histories.53 In Sifuentes’s call to decolonize craft she further urges scholars, makers and historians to be very aware that ‘language has always been an instrumental tool in cultural colonization’.54 When ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ are employed, writers from both the craft and heritage worlds need to use them critically and thoughtfully because their application has concrete effects on the agency of craftspeople as they negotiate choices that have important consequences on how their work is received by a variety of audiences and consumers, and ultimately on their livelihoods. Nguyễn-võ engages with the problematic dynamics among craft, tradition and colonialism, positing ‘this relegation of craft to tradition in the context of the colony is a legacy of colonial chronopolitical enforcement of progressive time as an instrument of rule’. Important questions to keep at the forefront of any scholarship include: do craftspeople who engage in customary practices have freedoms to improvise on these and is there a perceived limit to such freedoms? Who controls these limits and what are the outcomes of such constraints and opportunities? In this volume Binkley, Schmahmann, and Nuria Carton de Grammont and Maria Ezcurra argue that historic practices can be effectively mustered to facilitate community identities and to acknowledge complex intercultural relations. However, as discussed in chapters by Buchczyk, Jarulaitienė, and Greru and Kalkreuter, the restrictive codifications of what is considered ‘traditional’ needs to be acknowledged and examined as well. ‘Craft’, like ‘heritage’, is a slippery term (a thing, an action, a descriptive). Its ambivalence has been evident since the height of the Arts and Crafts Movement and, especially since the mid-twentieth century, its increasing institutionalization has seen 9

Craft and Heritage

it subject to various definitions. Its progressively fractured subheadings – studio craft, vernacular craft, modern craft, fine craft, functional craft, folk craft, conceptual craft, tourist craft, home craft, industrial craft, hobby craft, among others – have all been analysed, defined and hierarchized within the field of craft, itself hierarchized within the fine arts. Heritage as well has become increasingly compartmentalized into cultural and natural, official and unofficial, tangible and intangible. The integration of portable craft objects into heritage discourse was formalized by UNESCO’s 1978 adoption of the Recommendation for the Protection of Moveable Cultural Property. The recommendation defined the sorts of objects to be considered, including those associated with the ‘crafts’ while also recognizing them as important for national identities and as ‘part of the common heritage of mankind’.55 UNESCO’s current ICH programme is based on a ‘growing awareness of the need to employ a broader anthropological notion of cultural heritage that encompasses intangibles … [including local know-how] associated with monuments and sites and as the social and cultural context within which they have been created’.56 In 2003 the heritage community’s interest in ‘traditional craftmanship’ (often subsumed under the banners of ‘folk’ or ‘vernacular’57) as a generationally transferable action was clearly articulated in Article 2 of UNESCO’s adoption of the Convention of the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.58 This was a response to the imperative from several countries and cultural communities to acknowledge nonWestern concepts of heritage and thus to move away from monumental architecture as a privileged category.59 Through this shift, selected craft skills, like certain designated historical craft objects, are now considered ‘authorized’, that is endorsed as globally, nationally and locally vital for economic development and the maintenance of group and national identities. Various controversies arising from the interactions of craftspeople with officially sanctioned ICH programmes at these three levels are addressed in chapters by Jarulaitienė and Buchczyk. Others, such as those by Juliette MacDonald, Binkley, Gotlieb and Greru and Kalkreuter, look at craft that is outside the purview of UNESCO, but still recognized at local and national levels as potent practices giving rise to culturally significant objects. Craft faces challenges as it struggles with the vast discursive territory it encompasses. UNESCO’s recognition of craft in its ‘traditional’ forms is associated frequently with the hunt for the ‘authentic’ and often struggles to accommodate improvisation as well as adaptive practices that have long been a characteristic of craft skill, much less innovation that aligns itself with modern and postmodern art practices, even while recycling socalled traditional expressions and skills. The complexities of this stimulating dynamic can pit customary craft practices against studio, fine, and modern craft but can also generate opportunities for exchanges and collaborations. The roles design and designers play within adaptations of heritage craft practices have been an important topic for anthropological textile historians who look closely at the economic, environmental and social consequences to craft communities that emerge when designers intervene in local productions. This is allied to concerns that ICH and the World Craft Council have with assuring the economic viability of the communities producing vernacular craft. While 10

Introduction

the economic precariousness of craft labour has been recognized since the nineteenth century, the current neoliberal economic climate has heightened awareness of this in all regions where makers struggle to navigate heritages of historic designs and processes with market variabilities. In this volume, Gillette, Schmahmann, Buchcyzk, Greru and Kalkreuter investigate the implications for craftspeople who are confronted with adapting to the economic opportunities and constraints resulting from the interventions of modern designers and the marketplace. Chapters by MacDonald, Schmahmann, and Carton de Grammont and Ezcurra raise awareness of how craftspeople create symbolic potency in their one-off works through referral to, or use of, customary practices. Within an historical context, Wharton-Durgaryan explores the dynamic cultural relationships that emerged when an immigrant designer struggled to integrate his work into nineteenth-century Britain’s imperial paradigm. Gender is a theme that cuts across many of the chapters, but one not specifically addressed and thus conforms to a recent observation about heritage studies: in an Anglo-American context, gender is a ‘niche topic’, ‘an extra layer of analysis’.60 However, as Laurajane Smith rightly argues, heritage is gendered in the way that it ‘is defined, understood and talked about, and, in turn, the way it reproduces and legitimizes gender identities and the social values that underpin them’.61 The discursive nature of gender in craft has long been recognized by craft practitioners and historians, especially those versed in feminist approaches, because craft materials and processes frequently have been, and are still, gendered. In the Global North, textiles have been linked to women’s home-based production; the designation amateur has been associated with gendered textile practices as well as with men’s home-based craft activities.62 Through these hierarchized categories, craft has been marginalized within Western art history in terms of skill, gender, creativity and aesthetics. However, as many craft practitioners recognize, this ‘othering’ offers up potent liminal spaces in art and politics, just as it has within heritage studies.63 In their chapters, Paterson, Helland, Schmahmann, Flegg, Gotlieb, Binkley, and Carton de Grammont and Ezcurra consider the specific power of women negotiating this othered space. Some of these authors take the approach of inserting women’s history and craft practice into heritage’s ‘male-centered story’,64 while others analyse the mechanisms which drive craft’s gender-based economic and social inclusions, exclusions and marginalization. In particular, Binkley and Schmahmann highlight how racialized and gendered practices are interconnected within settler nation heritage craft practices and illustrate how the designation ‘authentic’, so-often attached to heritage craft objects and practices, can be interrogated. In terms of women’s intersections with craft and heritage, philanthropy is an area that cannot be ignored and it, too, reaches across the sections of this compilation, often entwined with considerations of gender. Philanthropy was an important aspect of the principles of the late-nineteenth-century British and Irish Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA) that, while pre-dating the Arts and Crafts Movement, ‘has been referred to as [its] “philanthropic arm”’.65 Founded and organizationally dominated by privileged women, HAIA worked to improve the lives of rural and urban women and, in some cases, those of men. Arts and Crafts scholarship has just begun recognizing the 11

Craft and Heritage

key role played by the numerous philanthropic projects initiated by socially, culturally and economically secure women, several of whom were politically active.66 Men in the Arts and Craft Movement who were likewise engaged in philanthropic activities, such as Charles Ashbee who founded the renowned Guild and School of Handicraft, have been the subject of more long-term scholarship.67 Philanthropic ideals emigrated to the British colonies and North America where programmes to economically, socially and culturally ‘improve’ the lives of Indigenous and settler peoples were initiated in the late nineteenth century, even while the economic and cultural destitution Indigenous peoples experienced was a result of brutal colonial practices.68 Chapters in this volume by Helland, Binkley and Paterson explore the political and economic implications of philanthropic ideals in action during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, while Schmahmann considers a contemporary philanthropic project. The legacy of nineteenth-century colonialism is especially evident within the current neoliberal global economy; as Timothy Scrase argued in 2003, ‘the daily life of the Third World artisan remains one of struggle, poverty and exploitation’.69 Neoliberalism is, however, being confronted by governmental and non-governmental programmes, such as Fair Trade programmes that borrow from the philanthropic model, to help communities harness customary craft practices to the vagaries of global markets.70 UNESCO’s ICH programme and the WCC’s Craft Cities draw from the same philanthropic ideology of using craft to improve the lives of economically marginalized people. Rather than turning to an earlier paternalistic or colonial approach, UNESCO and the World Crafts Council emphasize local initiatives from craft communities where ideally the power lies with the skilled local practitioners. However, as Jarulaitienė explains in this collection, the imposed constraints of what constitutes an ‘authorized’ heritage approach as outlined by UNESCO experts can still come into conflict with local craftspeople. The fine line between the exploitation of and economical support for craft makers reminds us that philanthropy has always been entwined with the economic viability of the projects that combine market demands with concerns for the cultural and social sustainability of the craft communities.71 Schmahmann, Nguyễn-võ, and Greru and Kalkreuter discuss the complex arrangements that arise from so-called philanthropically inspired interventions, including economic benefits and political agency.

Structure of the book The authors contributing the fifteen interdisciplinary case studies to Craft and Heritage come from a variety of academic disciplines: art history, craft history, anthropology, education, cultural studies, heritage studies and studio arts. This compilation of a range of methodological approaches provides an opportunity for both disciplines of craft and heritage to engage in important discussions with the goal of exploring new solutions to historic and current problems. Craft and Heritage is divided into three thematic areas, each of which addresses a topic common to both critical craft and heritage studies and their practices: ‘Place and belonging’, ‘Sustainability and resilience’ and ‘Collections and 12

Introduction

cultural institutions’. Within each of these sections, the chronologically arranged essays have been chosen to examine these themes from a variety of temporal, geographical and methodological contexts. A brief editorial introduction prefacing the section draws out its core ideas, summarizes issues common among the five essays and clarifies their different approaches. The essays in the first section, ‘Place and belonging’, all speak to how diasporas, imperialistic practices and colonization influence the ways public and personal notions of heritage are negotiated by craft makers through their objects and practices and by the consuming public. ‘Sustainability and resilience’, the collection’s second section, turns its attention to how the interplay between historical/heritage and contemporary craft practices informs adjustments to craft processes and products adopted by makers whose goal is to assure their own economic and cultural survival. In the third section, ‘Collections and cultural institutions’, the essays address the power dynamics within, and analyse the strategies undertaken by a variety of cultural institutions dedicated to contextualizing craft heritage and marketing the work, skills and processes of craftspeople. The sections provide a framework for this collection; however, the reader should continue to be aware of the rich cross-fertilization among them through the interlocking ideas that have been outlined in the introduction. This volume casts a wide net for the consideration of the many intersections of craft and heritage with a view to generating meaningful, global dialogue between these two fields that emerge from various disciplinary homes. By working at the junction of the two, the essays in Craft and Heritage critically evaluate productive ways of drawing together questions of identity with labour, race, gender, manufacture, domesticity, philanthropy, function, aesthetics, institutional structures and many more. The variety of methodologies the authors have employed, including interviews, archival interrogations and formal, procedural and material analyses, showcase the disciplinary richness and scope of these inquiries. From the return to handmaking in industrial China to a Scottish bicycle-powered loom in Skye, the smashing of Vietnamese ceramics to the ceramic art collection of the Gardiner Museum in Canada, the mat-weaving of Ugandan women to the quilts crafted by Indigenous women of Turtle Island (North America), these essays create a tapestry of stories of makers, materials and places.

Notes 1

Russell Staiff, ‘Heritage and the Visual Arts’, in Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research, eds. Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, NY, 2015), 205–18.

2

See for example: Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) and Maria Elena Buszek, Extraordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

3

Rodney Harrison, ‘Intangible Heritage and Cultural Landscapes’, in Heritage: Critical Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 115.

13

Craft and Heritage 4

Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber, ‘Introduction: Taking Stock of Craft in Anthropology’, in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism, eds. Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 2.

5

Kristin Kuutma, ‘Concepts and Contingencies in Heritage Politics’, in Anthropological Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage, eds. Lourdes Arizpe and Cristina Amescua (New York: Springer, 2013), 4.

6

Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 19–20. For discussions regarding the integration of Arts and Crafts Movement ideals and practices into nationalist agendas see: Wendy Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe & America: Design for the Modern World (New York: Thames & Hudson in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2004); Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘The Irish Arts and Crafts Movement (1886–1925)’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook (1990/1991): 172–85.

7

For a discussion of such an approach, see Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

8

‘Fine craft’ is a term that emerged in the mid-twentieth century when some craft practitioners and institutions in the Global North decided that ‘actively identifying craft as “fine” was perceived as distinguishing it from non-professional objects that cluttered the field.’ At the same time, this new category also sought to separate itself from what was called ‘folkart’. Sandra Alfoldy, ‘Introduction’, in Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 2005), 4.

9

American Crafts Council, ‘Rare Craft Fellowship Ward’, https://www.craftcouncil.org/ resources-programs/acc-awards/rare-craft-fellowship-award. This award was given annually between 2013 and 2017 in association with the Balvenie.

10 National Endowment for the Arts, ‘NEA National Heritage Fellowships’, https://web.archive. org/web/20170212215557/https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage, accessed 18 November 2019. 11 See, for example, the $25,000 annual Saidye Bronfman Award for Fine Crafts, administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, which is one of the largest individual prizes for fine craft in Canada. In addition to the cash prize, works by the recipient are acquired by the Canadian Museum of History for its permanent collection. Canada Council for the Arts, ‘Saidye Bronfman Award’, https://saidyebronfmanaward.ca/the-award, accessed 18 November 2019. There is no similar traditional or heritage craft award in Canada. However, craft falls under the purview of the Canada Council for the Arts which reports to the Minister for Canadian Heritage. Canada Council for the Arts, ‘About Us’, https://canadacouncil.ca/about, accessed 31 July 2020. 12 Crafts are included within the mandate of Australia’s Council for the Arts which reports to the Minister for the Arts. Australia Council for the Arts, ‘Our Structure’, https://www. australiacouncil.gov.au/about/our-structure/ and Australia Council for the Arts, ‘Visual Arts and Craft Strategy’, https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/programs-and-resources/ visual-arts-and-craft-strategy-vacs/, accessed 31 July 2020. Heritage is located within the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. Australian Government: Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, https://www.environment.sa.gov. au/topics/heritage/sa-heritage-register, accessed 31 July 2020. 13 The Heritage Crafts Association, ‘What We Do’, https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/what-we-do/, accessed 31 July 2020. 14 Creative NZ, ‘Arts Pasifika Awards’, https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/results-of-our-work/ award-winners/arts-pasifika-awards; Manatu Taonga/Ministry for Culture and Heritage, ‘Creative New Zealand’, https://mch.govt.nz/funding-nz-culture/agencies-we-fund/artmusic-film/creative-new-zealand, accessed 31 July 2020. 14

Introduction 15 UNESCO, ‘About Intangible Cultural Heritage: Traditional craftsmanship’, https://ich. unesco.org/en/traditional-craftsmanship-00057, accessed 19 July 2019. 16 Ibid. 17 Harrison, Heritage, 27. Harrison applies this specifically to heritage, but the increased professionalization of craft management during the same time period and regarding the same political/economic/cultural regions suggests it is relevant to craft. See as well Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, ‘Precarity and Cultural Work: In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work’, Theory, Culture & Society 25, nos. 7–8 (2008): 3; Timothy J. Scrase, ‘Precarious Production: Globalisation and Artisan Labour in the Third World’, Third World Quarterly 24, no. 3 (June 2003): 449–61. 18 Tom Crook, ‘Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England’, Journal of Modern Craft 2, no. 1 (March 2009): 17–32. Aram Han Sifuentes, ‘Steps towards Decolonizing Craft’, Textile Society of America Newsletter 29, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 16–17. In 1956, The American Craftsmen’s Council opened the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, which changed its name in 2002 to Museum of Art and Design (MAD). American Craft Council, ‘Our History’, https:// craftcouncil.org/about-acc/our-history; Museum of Art and Design, ‘Museum History’, https://madmuseum.org/about/museum-history, accessed 10 January 2019. The British Crafts Centre was renamed Contemporary Applied Arts in 1987. Tanya Harrod, The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 1999), 434. For a discussion about craft’s fluctuation between art and design, see Garth Clark, ‘The Death of Craft: A Postmodern Post-mortem’, Crafts, no. 216 (Jan/Feb., 2009): 48–51; Susan Luckman and Nicola Thomas, ‘Crafting Economies: Contemporary Cultural Economies of the Handmade’, in Craft Economies, eds. Susan Luckman and Nicola Thomas (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 1–4; Julia Bennett, ‘Our Future Is in the Making: Trends in Craft Education, Practice and Policy’, in Craft Economies, eds. Susan Luckman and Nicola Thomas, 109–10. 19 Harrison, Heritage. 20 Roberta A. Mayer, ‘The Aesthetics of Lockwood de Forest: India, Craft, and Preservation’, Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 1–22; Robin Jones, ‘British Interventions in the Traditional Crafts of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), c. 1850–1930’, The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 3 (2008): 383–404. 21 ICOM: International Council of Museums, ‘Red List Database’, https://icom.museum/en/ resources/red-lists/. At present there are seventeen regionally or culturally based documents elaborating these at-risk kinds of objects. 22 Laura Peers, ‘Crossing Worlds’, in Object Lives and Global Histories in North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980, eds. Beverley Lemire, Laura Peers and Anne Whitelaw (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 2021), 78. Peers refers to Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, ‘Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America’, Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5–35. 23 See, for example: Heather Iglorliorte, ‘Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum’, Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 100–13; Laura Peers, ‘Museums and Source Communities: Reflections and Implications’, in Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe, eds. Wayne Modest, Nicholas Thomas, Doris Prlić & Claudia Augustat (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019); Karolina Kuprecht, Indigenous Peoples’ Cultural Property Claims: Repatriation and Beyond (New York and London: Springer, 2013). See as well Francoise Rivière, ed. Museum International: Return of Cultural Objects: The Athens Conference 61, no.1–2 (May 2009).

15

Craft and Heritage 24 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, November 2018); Anny Shaw, ‘Black Lives Matter Movement Is Speeding up Repatriation Efforts, Leading French Art Historian Says’, The Art Newspaper (21 October 2020 10:48 GMT), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ news/black-lives-matter-movement-is-speeding-up-repatriation-efforts. 25 For a discussion of the use of folk in building the Canadian nation, see Antonia Smith, ‘“Cement for the Canadian Mosaic”: Performing Canadian Citizenship in the Work of John Murray Gibbon’, in ‘Transnational Migration, Race, and Citizenship’, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 1, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 37–60; Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 1999). For an example of folk being used in the creation of the American nation, see Jane S. Becker, Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930– 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). An extreme case of this use can be found in Hitler’s Third Reich. See George L. Mosse, trans. Salvator Attanasio et al., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966). 26 There are many examples of this strategy. For further reading, Karen Livingstone, ‘Europe’, in Essential Arts and Crafts (London: V&A Publications, 2005), 63–81; Andrzej Szczerski, ‘The Arts and Crafts Movement. Internationalism and Vernacular Revival in Central Europe c1900’, in Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts, Vol. 4, ed. Grace Brockington (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 107–31. 27 Gerald L. Pocius, ‘The Government of Canada and Intangible Cultural Heritage: An Excursion into Federal Domestic Policies and the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention’, Ethnologies 36, no. 1–2 (2014): 63. For a discussion on the terminology of ‘folk’ versus intangible cultural heritage, see Janet Blake, ‘Preliminary Study into the Advisability of Developing a New Standard-Setting Instrument for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Traditional Cultural and Folklore’, Draft Version (International Round Table ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ – Working Definitions), (Piedmont, Italy, 14 to 1i March 2001, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2001). 28 Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Laussus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc, Projet de restauration de Notre-Dame de Paris: rapport adressé à M. le Ministre de la Justice et des Cultes … (Paris: Mme de Lacombe, 1843), 8. 29 John H. Stubbs, Time Honoured: A Global View of Architectural Conservation (Hoboken New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 136–7. Elizabeth Cumming, ‘Sources and Early Ideals’, in The Arts and Crafts Movement, eds. Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 26; Smith, Uses of Heritage, 19–20. 30 Alan Crawford, ‘Supper at Gatti’s: The SPAB and the Arts and Crafts Movement’, in From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, Studies in British Art 14, ed. Chris Miele (New Haven & London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; The Yale Centre for British Art, 2005), 114. 31 Crawford, ‘Supper at Gatti’s’, 114. 32 Frank S. Sharp, ‘Exporting the Revolution: The Work of the SPAB Outside Britain 1878–1914’, in From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Craft Cult of Authenticity, ed. Chris Miele, Studies in British Art 14, 187–212. 33 For a discussion of the many architects, designers and makers who created objects, see Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan, eds., The Arts and Crafts Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991); Crawford, ‘Supper at Gatti’s’, 119–21.

16

Introduction 34 Among those who were influenced by Japanese, Indian and Middle Eastern culture were William Morris, Christopher Dresser, William de Morgan and Walter Crane. 35 Sandra Alfoldy, ‘Global Peace through Craft: The Formation of the World Crafts Council’, Garland Magazine, 26 February 2019, https://garlandmag.com/loop/sandra-alfoldy/, accessed 26 July 2019. For more discussion see: Sandra Alfoldy, ‘The Dis/Unity of Craft: In Praise of Hands, Toronto, 1974’, in Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 2005), 159–99; Rodney Harrison, ‘Critical Heritage Studies and the Discursive Turn’, in Heritage: Critical Approaches, 110–12. 36 The Venice Charter is officially known as the International Charter on the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites. Harrison, Heritage, 62; UNESCO, ‘The World Heritage Convention: Brief History, https://whc.unesco.org/en/convention/, accessed 18 November 2019. 37 World Crafts Council, ‘About,’ https://www.wccinternational.org/about, accessed 18 November 2019. Aileen Osborn Webb took the first steps to form a national crafts organization in 1939, which became the American Craftsmen’s Cooperative Council in 1942 and after several mergers became the American Craftsmen’s Council in 1955. American Craft Council, ‘Our History’, https://craftcouncil.org/about-acc/our-history, 18 accessed November 2019. 38 UNESCO, ‘The World Heritage Convention: Brief History, https://whc.unesco.org/en/ convention/, accessed 18 November 2019; Harrison, Heritage, 42–3. 39 Ibid., 111. Harrison quotes Smith, Uses of Heritage, 99. 40 Alfoldy, Crafting Identity, 186. 41 World Crafts Council, ‘Craft Cities’, https://www.wccinternational.org/craft-cities, accessed 4 December 2019; World Crafts Council, ‘Designation of a WCC Craft City Guidelines’, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/ca0529_051bc98669204ad68a8b3f0fce2f8a32.pdf. 42 Smith, Uses of Heritage, 125. For more, see: Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkley: University of California Press, 1999); Nelson H.H. Graburn, ‘Authentic Inuit Art: Creation and Exclusion in the Canadian North, ’Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 2: 141–59. 43 Harrison, Heritage, 128. Harrison draws from UNESCO, WHC-94/CONF.003/INF.6 Expert Meeting on the ‘Global Strategy’ and Thematic Studies for a Representative World Heritage List, http://whc.unesco.org/archive/global94.htm#debut, accessed 8 November 2019. 44 Harrison, Heritage, 129–30. 45 Suzy Harrison, ‘The Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in England: A Comparative Exploration’, PhD dissertation (Nottingham Trent University, 2019), 4. 46 In the introduction to their book Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam discuss the difference between improvisation and innovation as different forms of creativity. They argue improvisation that is aligned with traditional practices is as creative as innovational practices that emerged with the fetishism of novelty: improvisation ‘characterizes creativity by way of its processes’ whereas innovation ‘characterizes creativity by way of its results’. Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam, ‘Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction’, in Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, eds. Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2007) 2–3. 47 Susan Luckman, Craft and the Creative Economy (Palgrave McMillan: Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2015), 8. 48 Quoted in Janet Blake, ‘Preliminary Study into the Advisability of Developing a New Standard-Setting Instrument for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, 17

Craft and Heritage Traditional Cultural and Folklore’, 65. See, for example, Matters Concerning Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, 26th (12th Extraordinary) Session, WIPO General Assembly, Geneva, 25 September–3 October 2000 and Synoptic report Intellectual Property Expectations of Traditional Knowledge Holders, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – Draft Report on Fact-Finding Missions on Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge (1998–1999). 49 Intangible Cultural Heritage, ‘Traditional Craftsmanship’, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, https://ich.unesco.org/en/traditionalcraftsmanship-00057, accessed 25 July 2019. 50 Albert Wendt quoted in Sean Mallon, ‘Against Tradition’, The Contemporary Pacific 22, no. 2 (2010): 2. At the time Wendt was a member of the Pacific Advisory Committee for the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongareewa (Te Papa). 51 Mallon, ‘Against Tradition’, 364, 65, 67. 52 Sifuentes, ‘Steps towards Decolonizing Craft’, 16. 53 Mallon, ‘Against Tradition’, 376. Similar discussions can be found regarding the First Nations craft practices in the United States and Canada, such as Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘“I Want to Call Their Names in Resistance”: Writing Aboriginal Women into Canadian Art History’, in Rethinking Professionalism: Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 (McGillQueens University Press, 2011), 235–326. 54 Sifuentes, ‘Steps towards Decolonizing Craft’, 17. 55 Records of the General Conference Twentieth Session, Paris, 24 October to 28 November 1978, Vol. I: Resolutions (Paris, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1979), 176–202, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000114032. page=176, accessed 26 August 2019. 56 Janet Blake, ‘Preliminary Study into the Advisability of Developing a New Standard-Setting Instrument for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (Traditional Cultural and Folklore)’, iv–v. 57 Pocius, ‘The Government of Canada and Intangible Cultural Heritage’, 63–92. 58 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: Intangible Cultural Heritage, ‘Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’, Paris, 2003, https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention, accessed 26 August 2019. 59 This process lasted almost two decades beginning in 1984 and finally resulting in the ICH programme of UNESCO. An important step in the process was a 1994 committee report signed by representatives from Canada, France, Australia, Germany and Brazil – ‘Report of the Expert Meeting on the “Global Strategies” and thematic studies for a representative World Heritage List’. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, ‘Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage: Eighteenth session, Phuket Thailand’, 12–17 November 1994, https://whc.unesco.org/archive/global94. htm, accessed 12 August 2020. However, the concerns that resulted in this process went much further back. In 1973 Bolivia had expressed concerns about the protection of folklore. This discussion was taken up during the following two decades, and in 1993 the Republic of Korea initiated the Living Human Treasures project. Noriko Aikawa, ‘An Historical Overview of the Preparation of the UNESCO International Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’, Museum International 56, nos. 1–2 (2004): 138, 39. 60 Ross J. Wilson, ‘The Tyranny of the Normal and the Importance of Being Liminal’, in Gender and Heritage: Performance, Place and Politics, eds. Wera Grahn and Ross J. Wilson (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 3.

18

Introduction 61 Laurajane Smith, ‘Heritage, Gender and Identity’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, eds. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Farnham UK and Burlington Vermont: Ashgate, 2008), 161. 62 For a recent discussion of amateur craft, see Stephen Knott, Amateur Craft: History and Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 63 Ross J. Wilson, ‘The Tyranny of the Normal and the Importance of the Liminal’, 3–14. Wilson points out how gender within heritage studies inhabits a liminal space. 64 Smith, ‘Heritage, Gender and Identity’, 159. 65 Janice Helland, ‘“Good Work and Clever Design”: Early Exhibitions of the Home Arts and Industries Association’, The Journal of Modern Craft 5, no. 3 (2012): 276. Helland attributes the expression to Avril Denton, ‘W.A.S. Benson: A Biography’, in W.A.S. Benson: Arts and Crafts Luminary and Pioneer of Modern Design, ed. Ian Hamerton (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1988), 57. 66 Helland, ‘Good Work and Clever Design’, 275–93. 67 C. R. Ashbee, ed., The Manual of the Guild and School of Handicraft: Being a Guide to County Councils and Technical Teachers (London, Paris and Melbourne: Cassell & Co., 1892). 68 Important ‘philanthropic’ organizations of the time founded by women to help improve the lives of immigrant, rural and Indigenous women include Canada’s Canadian Guild of Handicrafts,1906, that grew from Women’s Art Association of Canada’s Home Arts and Handicraft Committee, 1896; Boston’s Denison Settlement House, 1892; Chicago’s Hull House, 1889; and North Carolina’s Biltmore Estate Industries, 1901. McLeod, In Good Hands, 2; Martin Burgess Green, The Mount Vernon Street Warrens: A Boston Story, 1860– 1910 (Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York),102; Kelly H. L’Ecuyer, ‘Uplifting the Southern Highlander: Handcrafts at Biltmore Estate Industries’, Winterthur Portfolio 37, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2002): 123; Mary Ann Stankiewicz, ‘Art at Hull House, 1889–1901: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’, Woman’s Art Journal 10, no. 1 (Spring–Summer, 1989): 35–9. For a global perspective, see Helen Gilbert and Chris Tiffin, eds., Burden or Benefit? Imperial Benevolence and Its Legacies (Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2008). 69 Scrase, ‘Precarious Production’, 450. 70 For a discussion of the history of neoliberalism and its influence on the Free Trade Movement, see Mark Moberg and Sarah Lyon, ‘What’s Fair: The Paradox of Seeking Justice through Markets’, in Fair Trade and Social Justice, eds. Sarah Lyon and Mark Moberg (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 1–19. For a discussion regarding fair trade and gender, see Sarah Lyon, ‘A Market of Our Own: Women’s Livelihoods and Fair Trade Markets’, in Mark Moberg and Sarah Lyon, ‘What’s Fair: The Paradox of Seeking Justice through Markets’, 125–46. For a discussion regarding Indigeneity, see Patrick C. Wilson, ‘Fair Trade Craft Production and Indigenous Economies’, in Mark Moberg and Sarah Lyon, ‘What’s Fair: The Paradox of Seeking Justice through Markets’, 176–98. 71 Anthropologists and ethnographers have contributed much to scholarship around these interventions. See, for example, Susan Falls and Jessica Smith. ‘Branding Authenticity: Cambodian Ikat in Transnational Artisan Partnerships (TAPs)’, Journal of Design History 24, no. 3 (September 2011): 255–71.

19

20

SECTION I PLACE AND BELONGING

Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson

The focus on place, whether geographical and/or cultural, has been a recurring theme of both craft and heritage discourse and practice. Even while emphasizing the importance of local materials, designs and production methods, principles that have anchored and continue to secure national and regional identities, advocates of the Arts and Crafts Movement philosophy did not hesitate to complicate the notion of what was local by appropriating from other cultures, in many cases those that had fallen under the colonial gaze. Modern craft practices of the mid-twentieth century continued this appropriation. With the impetus for the notion of craft as a universal value and practice, modern craft practitioners in the Global North, like their counterparts in painting and sculpture, mined the cultures of the Global South and of Indigenous peoples for innovative designs and procedures. In the latter part of the century, increased globalization resulted in resistance from local cultures who worked to strengthen their own heritages in the face of these powerful international pressures. Examining craft as heritage and heritage as craft practices, the authors in this first section, ‘Place and belonging’, harness critical heritage concepts (migratory identity, personal heritage and national cultural heritage) to craft practices and products whose stories speak of the importance of a sense of place and belonging. The themes of empire, diaspora, colonizing and decolonizing practices and notions of ‘authenticity’ course through these five case studies from the late nineteenth century to the present day, bringing to light how craft and heritage work together as political and social agents. These essays address questions pertaining to the interconnections between geographic/political places and cultural, social and professional belonging. How do diasporic craftspeople negotiate their cultural heritages to establish themselves within their adopted communities? Is the notion of an ‘authentic’ craft practice or object relevant when considering global population movements? How is the interface of craft and heritage politicized in various historical moments? In ‘Popular heritage: “Donegal Village” at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893’, Janice Helland discusses how the Irish diaspora’s longing for home was both mitigated and politicized by the World Fair’s Donegal Village with its replicated ruins and handmade objects from Ireland. She understands ‘heritage’ as a nomadic term, where this crafted past offered Irish Americans recollections of home that equally suggested and helped create a ‘national cultural heritage’. Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan explores how a craftsman/ designer’s migratory status shaped his creative output in ‘Sopon Bezirdjian, craft, heritage and identity in Victorian Manchester’. A traveller between the royal courts of Turkey, Egypt and finally Victorian Britain, Bezirdjian’s culturally hybrid decorative art and craft

Craft and Heritage

designs subtly challenged the dominant British notions of ‘Oriental’ art. Cultural hybridity throughout multiple empires in Vietnam historicizes a discussion of global capital in Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương’s chapter, ‘Empire, nation, and Bien-Hòa Ceramics: Craft as a site of chronopolitical reproduction’. Nguyễn-võ examines how the Eurocentric linking of craft with tradition is ‘a legacy of colonial chronopolitical enforcement of progressive time as an instrument of rule’, arguing that onsite knowledge production and regional meaning making, as well as the re-appropriation of meanings, are tied to governmentally directed imperialist and decolonizing power dynamics. Brenda Schmahmann’s chapter, ‘The unicorn and the ground hornbill: Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries’ also challenges the notion of ‘authenticity’ in a postcolonial context. Schmahmann likens this tapestry series to a parody. The form of the tapestries made by the amaXhosa of South Africa has been adapted from the medieval European Unicorn tapestries to convey ‘the norms, values and practices of isiXhosa speakers operating in a contemporary South African context’, thereby disrupting the Eurocentric model for African craft and art and ensuring the dissemination of a local story while contributing to the economic viability of a rural community. In ‘Embroidering for change: Activist needlework in Latin America’ Nuria Carton de Grammont and Maria Ezcurra bring to the theme of place and belonging a contemporary discussion of diasporic craft, wherein Latin American gender politics challenge notions of authenticity within decolonizing cultures and migrant populations. They link examples of contemporary textile social activism in Canada adopted by women migrants fleeing violent regimes to their personal and cultural heritages of textile practices and political activism.

22

CHAPTER 1 POPULAR HERITAGE: ‘DONEGAL VILLAGE’ AT THE CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR, 1893

Janice Helland

Its thatched cabins and rude village crosses framed in the setting of reproductions of structures statelier even in their ruins will recall earlier scenes to many IrishAmericans.1 The observation by the widely circulated New York Times encapsulates an aspect of an Irish village constructed to advertise and sell hand-crafted objects made by Irish women and men to visitors to the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition.2 ‘Donegal Village’, as it was called by the New York Times, had been planned by Alice Rowland Hart (1848 –1931) under the auspices of her London-based Donegal Industrial Fund founded in 1883 ‘to revive the old Cottage Industries, and to develop and improve the ancient arts of spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, and embroidery’, after she and her physician husband, Ernest Hart, had visited the Congested Districts in Donegal.3 Hart’s village was one of two Irish villages planned for Chicago; the second was constructed under the patronage of Ishbel, Countess of Aberdeen (1847–1939). Hart’s village will be discussed in this chapter rather than Aberdeen’s for three reasons. First, the reconstructed ruins and objects made for Hart’s village more overtly captured the nationalist sentiment that favoured home rule for Ireland than did Aberdeen’s village. In Chicago where the majority of diasporic Irish favoured home rule, the specific monuments, buildings and objects selected for reproduction would have reminded Irish viewers of their cultural heritage and history. Second, the replication of ancient Irish ruins itself paralleled a relationship between ancient Ireland and nationalism that developed as early as the eighteenth century. Ruins, as Yvonne Scott argues, were ‘fundamental in the construction of a positive concept of Irish national identity predicated on a claim to a developed pre-invasion culture’.4 Hart’s approach to this is most clearly articulated in her statement about textile designs developed by the Donegal Industrial Fund’s artist/designer, Aimée Carpenter (b. 1859).5 The designs, claimed Hart, were inspired by ancient Irish monuments and illuminated books of the seventh and eighth centuries when Ireland ‘was in questions of art far in advance of England’.6 Third, while later writing about the fair tends to focus on Aberdeen’s village, contemporary accounts were more apt to draw attention to Hart’s village.7 Teresa Dean’s light-hearted and entertaining recollections highlighted the differences between the villages and hints at aristocratic ‘titles’ as one reason why, in later accounts, the focus tends to be upon Aberdeen’s village.8 Dean asked a woman who spoke with ‘a broad accent of the Emerald Isle’ why ‘Ireland’s own representative should dub the Blarney

Craft and Heritage

Castle Irish Village [Lady Aberdeen’s village] a “Flunkey Village”’. She replied, wrote Dean: ‘It’s flunkey, Miss, because it’s the everlasting running after titles. Lady Aberdeen may be a bonny lady, and may want to help the poor of Ireland, but it’s not the true industries of Ireland, the real workers, that she has here. It’s the Donegal Industry fund that has done the real good.’9 The sentiment was confirmed when Aberdeen hoisted the Union Jack over her village, initiating a riot: ‘Irishmen gained access to the top of the tower and tore down the English emblem, because they did not consider that it ought to be unfurled in an Irish village.’ The police attempted arrests ‘in the face of threats from a crowd of several thousand sympathizers’.10 On the other hand, visitors consistently saw the green flag of Ireland fluttering over Hart’s village.

Recreated heritage Hart’s village, then, evoked Irish history, heritage and popular political sentiment in its reconstruction of well-known monuments interspersed with romanticized cottages; thus heritage was reimagined and recreated in a site far removed from the ‘real’ site. David Lowenthal maintains that ‘every account of the past is both more and less than that past’ and that ‘memory and history both derive and gain emphasis from physical remains’.11 Combined with Raphael Samuel’s discussion of popular heritage and his assertion that the ‘built environment gives materiality to the idea of history’,12 this chapter will contemplate the edifices and crafted objects made for the Donegal Industrial Fund’s faux Irish village at Chicago as reimagined history and as both popular and evocative heritage. What follows is a narrative about a remodelled past that evoked memory and history along with nostalgia and identity. Specifically, this crafted past offered diasporic Irish people recollections of home that suggested what ethnographer Tamás Hofer referred to as ‘national cultural heritage’. In his analysis of Hungarian displays in exhibitions, Hofer maintained that such exhibits were used for political purposes as ‘material symbolizations of imagined communities’.13 Hart’s village participated in a similar ‘symbolization’ and in this was, as Lowenthal suggests, both more and less, and both fictional and real. As the correspondent for the New York Times wrote soon after the opening of the World’s Fair, Donegal Village recalled ‘earlier scenes to many Irish-Americans’ signifying an aspect of their heritage which, in this instance, reminded Irish-Americans of their ‘roots’ and brought together built reminders that spanned centuries of history. Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper highlighted ‘the Druidical stones and early Christian crosses, the round tower, the St. Lawrence [sic] Gate of Drogheda, and Donegal Castle’ and suggested that, together, they formed ‘a group of buildings as beautiful as interesting’.14 The newspaper also complemented the ‘unequalled homespuns, the splendid embroideries, the many coloured and iridescent linens, the beautiful laces’ as demonstrating the ‘high class’ work accomplished by skilled Irish artisans.15 Thus, at a time of political turmoil and overt discrimination directed against the Irish in Ireland and England, Hart’s village elicited pride of accomplishment evidenced by the quality of the handcrafted objects as it evoked memories of a rich history embedded in remodelled monuments. Historic 24

Popular Heritage: ‘Donegal Village’

England’s informative website suggests that the term ‘heritage’ ‘has become synonymous with the places, objects, knowledge and skills’ that have been inherited but become ‘valued for reasons beyond their mere utility’; that is, their value ‘is over and above their functional use’.16 That Irish heritage had been displaced and recreated far from its permanent location would not have diminished its impact upon those who wandered around the village’s Chicago environs.

Alice Rowland Hart and the Donegal Industrial Fund The Donegal Industrial Fund was a non-profit organization that operated as what today would be called a ‘fair trade’ network and promoted Ireland and Irish goods in large, prominent venues such as International Exhibitions (Paris, Chicago, San Francisco, among others) and Arts and Crafts Exhibitions.17 While Alice Hart’s overt activities on the public stages of exhibitions and her well-attended lectures attracted press attention, her determination to establish a link to Ireland via objects was located in craft and design and was verified by her choice of Una Ashworth Taylor (1857–1922) as the fund’s chief embroiderer and teacher of embroidery. An article published in The Times after Taylor’s death commended her literary abilities (she was an accomplished poet and author as well as an artist) and remarked that ‘among art-embroiderers she had probably few, if any, equals in the country’.18 More significantly for her relationship with the fund, Taylor articulated her commitment to Ireland and Irish home rule in her choice of venue for her writing which, most frequently, was the nationalist newspaper United Ireland or The Nation. According to D. J. O’Donoghue in his Poets of Ireland, Taylor wrote ‘almost exclusively on Irish and Catholic themes’; she was, wrote O’Donoghue, ‘fervently Irish’.19 Taylor, according to Ireland’s Freeman’s Journal, took ‘an energetic part in promoting the Home Rule Movement in London’; she was an ‘earnest and gifted friend of the Irish cause’ in England.20 Her contribution to the fund, then, complemented Hart’s interest in Ireland and in Irish nationalist politics.21 By 1885, when Hart opened her storefront, Donegal House, on Wigmore Street just off Oxford Street in the heart of London, Taylor was embroidering (and teaching Irish women to embroider), a visual symbol of Ireland, the fund’s trademark design ‘Kells Embroidery’ which enshrined the concept ‘Irish’ on textiles showcased in exhibitions and provided a foretaste of Hart’s more elaborate significations of Irish heritage as Irish villages in exhibitions. The concern for publicizing Irish history and design broadened from textile art to include architecture and heritage when Hart ‘invented’ her first reimagined Irish village in London in 1888.

Exhibition villages Hart’s first attempt to reconstruct an Irish space for exhibition viewers was fabricated to be part of the large Irish Exhibition that opened in 1888 in London’s recently constructed exhibition space, Olympia, located in West Kensington.22 It was not, however, the first 25

Craft and Heritage

space built to simulate village life. The first ‘ethnographic village’, or perhaps more appropriately ‘politico-ethnographic exhibition’, was more a street than a village built to accompany the 1867 Panslav Conference in Moscow ‘to demonstrate the brotherhood of Slavic peoples’.23 That same year Paris hosted an international exhibition which included a similar venue for various national and ethnic groups but, again, these were more pavilions than villages. For example, Africa and Oceania together were allotted 2,657 square feet; China, Japan and Southern Asia similarly occupied 2,657 square feet; Persia and Central Asia 2,130 square feet.24 And, accounts indicate that specific geographic areas were represented within the pavilions by models of buildings: ‘The governments of Turkey, Japan, Egypt, Morocco, Tunis, Persia, Mexico, and China have sent to the Champ de Mars models of their buildings, specimens of their art and industrial products.’ Tunis’s contribution, for example, was an ‘exact representation of the Palace of the Bey of Tunis’.25 Almost two decades later and possibly significant for Hart’s future endeavours, a Japanese village opened in London in 1885, the very year Hart opened Donegal House.26 Hart, along with the Earl of Leitrim, organized a ‘Donegal Village’ for London’s 1888 Irish Exhibition which, according to Ireland’s Freeman’s Journal, gave ‘an accurate idea of peasant life in the north-west’ as well as reproducing ‘historic buildings’27 (Figure 1.1). Thus the village performed two roles: it promoted the quality of Irish goods (particularly textiles) produced by artisans and it offered viewers the simulated experience of a tour through Ireland. The ‘embroiderers cottage’, for example, included a wide array of embroidered textiles all handcrafted using flax thread, Irish linen and natural dyes, production that had already been recognized as ‘a genuine national industry’28 (Figure 1.2). In part, Hart’s contribution participated in the overarching goal of such exhibitions which was, as Paul Greenhalgh succinctly stated, for ‘the enhancement of trade, for the promotion of new technology, for the education of the ignorant middle classes and for the elaboration of a political stance’.29 Hart’s projects focused specifically on three characteristics: the ‘enhancement of trade’, the ‘elaboration of a political stance’ and education, although for all classes not only, as Greenhalgh suggests, for ‘the ignorant middle classes’. She was particularly concerned to counter a dominant English view of Ireland such as the one expressed by Charles Dickens, Jr., in his ‘Donegal Sketches’: ‘County Donegal is, to the average Englishman, quite as much “terra incognita” as India or South Africa. I will not say it is as rough and interesting as those other parts of our little globe.’ And while his sketches continually praise the landscape, they consistently disparage the Irish: ‘As for the Donegal Paddy, indeed, Paddy all over the land, he takes what he can get from us, and does not even pretend to be grateful.’30 Hart aimed to display a rich history, a valuable heritage, and productive, engaged people. Contrary to Dickens, Hart viewed the Irish as ‘industrious, sober, pure, and honest’.31 The Irish Times, in its comments on the 1888 London Exhibition, optimistically expressed the ‘strongest hope’ that the display of ‘Irish industries, Irish art, and Irish traditions and customs’ would create a ‘better feeling’ towards Ireland as well as a ‘juster idea of its resources and wants’.32 Dublin’s nationalist Evening Telegraph saw more than that: it was certain the exhibition would ‘hasten the coming of Home Rule’.33 26

Popular Heritage: ‘Donegal Village’

Figure 1.1  The Irish Village. Olympia 1888. Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, 7 July 1888

Figure 1.2  Inside the Kells Embroiderers’ Cottage, Irish Village, Olympia, 1888. Queen, 28 July 1888

27

Craft and Heritage

The cottages on display in London were ‘built and thatched by native workmen in the true Donegal fashion’ and, comparable to many so-called exhibition tableau vivant, they were ‘occupied by natives from Donegal, and the women, arrayed in brilliantly coloured shawls … carding, spinning, and weaving just as if they were at home on the dark-grey hills of Innishowen’.34 Like the cottages, the historic buildings reconstructed for London paved the way for those of Chicago: a ‘cross brought over from Ireland’, the ruins of a ‘low Irish tower’ and a ‘Holy well’.35 Aspects of the village’s purpose were also transported to Chicago. Hart’s village built for Chicago, the ‘architectural features’ of which were ‘constructed specially for the purpose of representing in as effective a way as possible the most prominent among the picturesque objects, old and new, of Ireland’, occupied a ‘space of 25,000 square feet’.36 Additionally, the recreated buildings were not models such as those displayed in Paris in 1867, but large spaces meant to be walked through and occupied. The replicated Donegal Castle, for example, provided spaces for viewing objects: the ‘large banqueting hall, which is not in a ruined condition’ contained ‘splendid reproductions of ancient Celtic jewellery’, embroidered hangings, coloured linens, ‘Kells’ laces, ecclesiastical vestments and ‘many other objects’. Another part of the castle included a gallery of paintings, both portraits and landscapes.37 As Hart claimed, the village exhibited Irish history, antiquity and art, as well as ‘Irish industry’, and because many of the portable objects were for sale viewers had the opportunity to ‘own’ an aspect of Irish cultural heritage.38 Specifically, while Hart certainly meant to promote Irish products, her ‘political stance’ sought to confirm Ireland and the Irish as historically and culturally equal to England and the English. Thus her villages in London and in Chicago were more than views into an exotic ‘foreign’ culture; while they did promote Irish culture, they also sought to place Irish goods as well as culture on an equal footing with that of England, hence the significance of her historical reminders and references to objects like the Book of Kells and grand architecture.

Chicago 1893 The Irish village made for Chicago in 1893 combined rebuilt and reimagined elite structures with vernacular cottages in a multi-layered viewing space meant ‘to make prominent all that is picturesque in ancient or modern Ireland’39 (Figure1.3). A twentyseven-foot-high Celtic market cross made of Irish limestone by Dublin sculptor Edmund Sharp (1853–1930) from designs by Irish architect Thomas Drew (1838–1910) stood in the ‘centre of the open space’.40 The cross complemented the replicated ‘imposing ruins of Donegal Castle’ (the ‘faithful representation of the banqueting hall’ alone was 60 feet by 30 feet) all of which caught the attention of diasporic Irish in America.41 Significantly, the round tower which was located in the centre of the large courtyard and could be viewed through the archways of ruins of the castle had been ‘built by Irish Americans and presented by them’ to Hart ‘as a mark of their sympathy’ with the ‘very useful work

28

Popular Heritage: ‘Donegal Village’

Figure 1.3  Donegal Industrial Fund at Chicago World’s Fair, Queen, 14 October 1893

29

Craft and Heritage

she has done’.42 According to Dublin’s nationalist newspaper, United Ireland, the ‘round tower was 120 feet high’ and was ‘regarded as one of the finest and most striking objects of the Exhibition’.43 The New York Times elaborated: the original purpose of round towers remains a ‘matter for speculation’: ‘About eighty of these curious monuments to nobody knows what are still extant in Ireland, and no more picturesque feature in the view could have been thought of.’44 Documentary sources about the towers are considered unreliable; the earliest extant tower may date to the tenth century while some ruins may date as far back as the fifth century.45 Hart’s selection of reproductions was popular and also layered with political and cultural significance. Donegal Castle, partially destroyed in the sixteenth century before it could fall into English hands, had been admired as a ‘picturesque ruin’ long before its facsimile appeared at Chicago.46 Today, the popular tourist guide, Lonely Planet, in its description of the castle, writes: ‘Built by the O’Donnells in 1474, it served as the seat of their formidable power until 1607, when the English decided to rid themselves of pesky Irish chieftains once and for all. Rory O’Donnell was no pushover, though, torching his own castle before fleeing to France in the infamous Flight of the Earls.’47 In their more scholarly version of the history of Donegal Castle, T. E. McNeill and M. A. Wilkin declare that in ‘1588 the Council in Dublin was told of a report that the castle had been burned by the O’Donnells to prevent it being used by the English’.48 United Ireland ’s account of the opening of Hart’s village linked the faux ruin to its Irish counterpart: during the opening of the village, ‘Ireland’s flag of Emerald hue, emblazoned with its golden harp of seven strings, waved triumphantly above the stronghold of the O’Donnells for the first time in over 200 years’.49 It is likely that many Americans of Irish descent were aware of the narrative and even more likely that Alice Hart knew the castle’s real or imagined history, particularly if the reconstructed castle is looked at in conjunction with two other objects: a model of Daniel O’Connell’s Memorial Chapel and a large bronzed statue of William Gladstone, the home rule prime minister. A ‘model of the Memorial Chapel of Daniel O’Connell’ along with the ‘chair and the hat of the great liberator’ commanded a significant place within Hart’s village.50 O’Connell (1775–1847) advocated ‘first for Catholic emancipation and then for repeal of the union’ from the mid-1820s through to the mid-1840s.51 Irish historian, Roy Foster, wrote that O’Connell, the ‘greatest leader of Catholic Ireland’, consistently ‘protested against the Union’ and called for ‘constant agitation, not dignified silence’.52 Contemporary accounts of the inauguration of the O’Connell memorial in Dublin in the 1860s give a sense of the intensity that surrounded commemorations dedicated to the politician. The unveiling had elicited unionist anger and caused serious rioting in pro-Union Belfast during which O’Connell had been burned in effigy: ‘[E]very indignity was wrecked on the effigy of the man who was being celebrated in quite a different manner in Dublin.’53 Paula Murphy in her investigation of nineteenth-century Irish sculpture suggests that the O’Connell Monument (1867–1882/3) ‘was the first politically nationalist sculptural work commissioned for the streets of Dublin in the nineteenth century’.54 Thus, O’Connell, in the midst of handcrafted lace and elegant embroidery, signified Irish politics, as did English-born William Gladstone (1809–1898). 30

Popular Heritage: ‘Donegal Village’

The ‘nine feet high’ bronzed statue of Gladstone, the home rule prime minister, portrayed the ‘subject in an oratorical attitude with the right-hand outstretched as if pleading for liberty’. It had been made by Irish-born sculptor Albert Bruce-Joy (1842–1924) and replicated the original, which had been placed in front of Bow Church in London’s East End in 1882.55 Gladstone had unsuccessfully advocated for Irish home rule; his Irish Home Rule Bill, defeated in June 1886, ‘marked the end of Gladstone’s third ministry, and brought about the dissolution of Parliament’.56 Nevertheless, he remained a symbol of hope for those favouring home rule. Chicago’s Tribune published a sketch of the village’s sculpture and quoted the Mayor of Chicago’s speech: Gladstone was the ‘uncrowned King of the people of England and Ireland, a man whom friends worship and enemies admire’.57 After the speech Alice Hart unveiled the sculpture while a singer ‘in splendid voice and with much feeling sang “Come Back to Erin”’.58 The Tribune went on to write that there was a ‘peculiar felicity in the unveiling of this counterfeit presentment of him in the Irish Village and under the circumstances that surround us today’.59 Gladstone, at that moment, according to the columnist, ‘was engaged in one of the most important political struggles of his great life in an endeavour to secure for the people of Ireland justice and home rule’.60 While Hart’s overall objective was to demonstrate ‘what industries are actually being carried on in Ireland to-day, and what the people there can do’, her rationale for Chicago was ‘to acquaint the people of the United States with the development of Ireland from the earliest times as shown by relics, reproductions, and specimens of handiwork’.61 The presentation of the objects and replications within the context of a widely attended and popular fair was supported by one of Chicago’s most prominent Irish immigrants, John F. Finerty (1846–1908). Finerty arrived in the United States from Galway in 1864, became a correspondent for a Chicago newspaper and later the editor of The Citizen, an Irish nationalist weekly published in Chicago; between 1883 and 1885 he was an Independent Democrat in Congress.62 Finerty, ‘[n]ationalist to the marrow of his bones’, gave a speech to a large audience during the village’s ‘Irish Day’, in which he stated his belief in Ireland as a nation and in ‘the genius of the Irish people’; Ireland ‘free, self-governed’ would take her ‘proper rank’. He called upon ‘the Irish in America to keep this great aim in view, to struggle for it, to make sacrifices for it’. He also lauded Hart ‘who though English by birth, had carried on the work of reparation to the Irish’.63 Finerty’s support complemented and enhanced the relationship between diasporic Irish in America and the reconstructed remnants of their cultural heritage: fragmented memories embedded in faux architecture, replicated monuments and contemporary Irish-made objects.64 Foster, in his discussion of ‘Ireland Abroad’, maintains that the ‘close, vital and passionate relationship of the Irish with land meant a traumatic wrench when it was left; hence the importance of mechanisms that kept the sense of connection’.65 The village, with its emphasis on culture and history, complemented a vision of Irish identity that momentarily erased what Foster referred to as the ‘implication of placelessness and a sense of banishment’.66 Certainly, to watch the making of and then ‘handle the embroidered linens and laces’, to view ‘home-spun of old time quality’, to observe the 31

Craft and Heritage

‘artistic objects in wrought iron, hammered out by the village blacksmith working in his smithy just outside the castle walls’, would have affected memory and recalled real or imaginary sites and even smells of Ireland.67

Irish identity: Imagination and memory By the latter part of the nineteenth century, three American cities possessed ‘considerable Irish populations’: New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.68 Alan O’Day in his research on ‘imagined Irish identities’ wrote: ‘Proportionate to the size of its population, Ireland contributed more people to the United States than did any other country, and the Irish were the most prominent group with a political agenda before 1914.’69 And Irish Americans were perceived as willing to promote and contribute financially to Irish causes, particularly following the successful 1880 visit of Irish parliamentarian and land reformer, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891) to a number of North American cities, including Chicago.70 Finerty, as to be expected, had played a large role in Chicago’s demonstration of support for Parnell whose welcome in the city was considered by Ireland’s Freeman’s Journal to be ‘enthusiastic’, attracting ‘perhaps one of the greatest’ audiences the ‘honourable gentleman has yet been accorded’; it was estimated 20,000 paid the ‘high’ charge for admission. 71 Almost immediately after Parnell’s arrival at New York, a Dublin newspaper reported that the ‘Western press, unlike the New York dailies, are in entire sympathy with the movement, and the Chicago Tribune, the great Republican paper of the West, has been especially pronounced in favour of Mr. Parnell and his policy’.72 Thirteen years after Parnell’s visit, the Chicago Tribune was one of the American newspapers that gave Hart’s Irish village extensive and complementary reports thus continuing its support for Ireland and its people. The Tribune, in its account of the official opening of Hart’s village, commended John Finerty’s address for the ‘fervour which he lends to all his orations to themes connected to his native land’ and commended the textiles and the ‘reproductions of old and new Irish art’.73 The Chicago Herald was equally complementary in its accounts some of which were republished in Ireland. United Ireland, for example, in one of its reports of the village, published a quote from the Chicago Herald: ‘The writer, who, no doubt, is thoroughly imbued with Irish sentiment, regards the spot where the village is constructed as the dearest spot in Jackson Park, or miles around it, for Irish exiles, and thinks that to visit it is to get a glimpse of the old land itself.’74 It is the narrative that surrounds the ‘glimpse of the old land itself ’ that resonated so effectively with ‘Irish exiles’. For many who would never have the opportunity to return to Ireland, the village reconnected them with their heritage relocated and temporarily constructed in Chicago. The village provided a space in which to view and experience the tangible and intangible remnants of their culture which they could seek out and savour; as the New York Times stated, ‘it will appeal to both the sentimental and the practical’.75 And, as Finerty stated in his opening ceremony speech, ‘We see here the fruits of re-created industries from which we catch a gleam of hope that someday our people, defeated for seven centuries, but who have never abandoned principles, may yet be a nation self-reliant and free.’76 32

Popular Heritage: ‘Donegal Village’

Saint Laurence’s Gate, Drogheda To conclude this interrogation of Hart’s Irish village, I want to focus on one of the large faux monuments, the gate to the village, ‘a reproduction of the St. Lawrence [sic] Gate at Old Drogheda, a structure which dates from King John’, which delineates the entry or beginning of the village as well as its exit or end.77 Hart’s choice for replication was astute and relevant, representing a link to the largest walled town in Ireland, one which, according to a recent article in the Irish Times, ‘may have survived because it was used as a sea lookout, allowing views far down the river Boyne towards the Irish Sea’.78 The gate is a barbican, one that remained standing after most were demolished in the eighteenth century. It is also the site of what historian John Cunningham called ‘the stain of Drogheda’, with reference to Oliver Cromwell’s 1649 notoriously bloody defeat of the town and its citizens.79 Foster commented on the ‘massacre of the civilian population of Drogheda’ identifying it as ‘one of the few massacres in Irish history fully attested to on both sides’.80 As a selection for Hart’s Irish village, it has the potential to be a contested reconstruction of an otherwise obviously nationalist representation and, in retrospect, one of the most complicated. While most of the other constructions, such as Donegal Castle, the memorial to Daniel O’Connell and the sculpture of Gladstone, obliquely if not overtly, suggest home rule and, to a great extent, Catholic Ireland, Saint Laurence’s Gate signals a more complex history driven, to a great extent, by the perception of Cromwell as ‘the bogeyman-in-chief of Irish history’.81 Today, Drogheda’s official tourist website mentions Cromwell’s massacre but gives more space to a narrative of ancient ruin: the gate originally ‘led to the Friary of St Laurence’, ‘consists of two lofty circular towers’, dates to the medieval period about 1334, and ‘is widely regarded as one of the finest of its kind in Europe’.82 As recently as 2017, Saint Laurence’s Gate, ‘part of the original medieval Drogheda town wall’, in an attempt to preserve and maintain the heritage site, was made ‘permanently traffic-free’.83 In keeping with Hart’s mandate ‘to acquaint the people of the United States with the development of Ireland from the earliest times’, the replicated barbican was probably meant to demonstrate the great accomplishments of twelfth-century Irish builders and artisans and, like the present-day heritage site, was more apt to suggest that the gate represented ‘one of the finest of its kind in Europe’.84 Thus, the gate, like the rest of Donegal Village, would offer an ‘eloquent’ acknowledgment of ‘Ireland and her heroes of past and present’.85 Visitors to the site, once through the gate, would see before them a combination of replicated heritage sites, the originals of which, in various states of restoration and recently added attractions, can be visited in Ireland today. Chicago’s faux Donegal Village brought monuments and ruins together with a heritage of traditions in the form of lacemaking, embroidery and wood working all related directly to Irish culture and tangentially to Irish politics. The memories and recollections contributed to the village’s reimaging as heritage even though the remnants of culture and tradition were translated and repositioned far from Ireland. To return to Raphael Samuel, there is little doubt that the ‘Donegal Village’ at Chicago represented popular heritage, confirmed by numbers of visitors and lively descriptive accounts written for contemporary newspapers in 33

Craft and Heritage

the United States and in Ireland. It was, to borrow Samuel’s phrase, an ‘imaginative reconstruction of the past’,86 while at the same time, it purported to demonstrate what Hart perceived as valuable heritage that celebrated and complemented the capable, industrious artisans of Ireland and their products. If, as Samuel suggests, ‘“[h]eritage” is a nomadic term, which travels easily’,87 then the Donegal Village in Chicago brought spectacle together with ‘popular memory’ and, as Alice Hart remarked in her closing speech at the end of the celebration of Irish Day in the village, ‘proud memories … will be blended with happy recollections of this Irish village’.88

Notes 1

‘Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Village’, New York Times, 7 May 1893, 17.

2

The Chicago Columbian Exhibition, most often referred to as the Chicago World’s Fair, was meant to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America in 1492. This ‘aggrandizing national fête’ more recently has undergone revisionist assessments. See, for example, Judy Sund, ‘Columbus and Columbia in Chicago, 1893: Man of Genius Meets Generic Woman’, Art Bulletin LXXV, no. 3 (1993): 443, 443–66.

3

Alice Hart, ‘Cottage Industries: And What They Can Do for Ireland’, a report given at the Club House, Bedford Park (30 May 1885): 14. British Library pamphlet 8275 C 24. A Congested District was an area where the population surpassed the ability of resources to maintain it. See Janice Helland, British and Irish Home Arts and Industries: Marketing Craft, Making Fashion (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007) for a more expansive discussion of Alice Hart and the Donegal Industrial Fund.

4

Yvonne Scott, ‘Ruins in Ireland, Ireland in Ruins: Symbols and Semiotics in Irish Visual Culture’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 40 (2017): 146–7, 142–73.

5

Textiles were ‘carded, spun, woven and embroidered by Irish hands; the design alone is by an English hand’. Alice Hart, The Cottage Industries of Ireland, with an Account of the Work of the Donegal Industrial Fund (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887), 17.

6

Hart, ‘Cottage Industries’, 14.

7

For example, United Ireland ’s report at the closing of the fair stated: ‘Mrs Hart’s show has been a much better one than Lady Aberdeen’s; proof for which statement is to be found in the fact that while several of Mrs Hart’s exhibits have received awards of merit, we are not aware that any of Lady Aberdeen’s have received any such distinction.’ United Ireland, 4 November 1893, 4. As a high-profile aristocrat, Aberdeen’s life and work has attracted much more attention in recent literature than has the relatively unknown Alice Hart, a middleclass woman from a mercantile family married to a Jewish physician.

8

Dean was ‘said to have been the first woman war correspondent’. In addition to her book about the World’s Fair, she ‘had assignments during the Spanish-American war, the Boxer rebellion, and Mexican revolutions’. ‘Teresa Dean, Pioneer Newspaper Woman, Dies’, Chicago Tribune, 9 January 1935, 14.

9

Teresa Dean, White City Chips (Chicago: Warren Publishing Company, 1895), 271.

10 ‘Hauled down the Union Jack: Almost a Riot in Lady Aberdeen’s Irish Village’, New York Times, 22 October 1893, 8. ‘Extraordinary Incident at Chicago: Irishmen and the British Flag’, Irish Times, 23 October 1893, 5. The Irish Times wrote that ‘a very serious disturbance arose at Lady Aberdeen’s Irish Village yesterday, when a second attempt was made by 34

Popular Heritage: ‘Donegal Village’ Irishmen to pull down the British flag which was flying from the tower of the representation of Blarney Castle’. 11 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge University Press, 1985), xxii and xxiii. 12 Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. Theatres of Memory, Vol. II (London: Verso, 1998), 351. Samuel’s discussion of heritage elaborates upon the reconstructed or the restored as well as upon evolving approaches to what is, or what is not. heritage, upon ‘unofficial knowledge’ and ‘popular memory’. See also Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (1994; London: Verso, 2012). 13 Tamás Hofer, ‘Construction of the “Folk Cultural Heritage” in Hungary and Rival Versions of National Identity’, in Hungarians between ‘East’ and ‘West’: National Myths and Symbols, ed. Tamás Hofer (Budapest: Museum of Ethnography, 1994), 45, 27–49. 14 ‘Mrs. Ernest Hart’s Irish Village at the Chicago Exhibition’, Queen, 14 October 1893, 638. 15 Ibid., Irish linen and Irish lace would have been recognized as traditionally Irish by diasporic Irish. The designs most often were developed by either Hart or Aimée Carpenter. The embroidery or lace was made by Irish women. 16 Historic England, ‘Heritage Conservation Defined’, Historic England, accessed 9 May 2018. https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/hpg/generalintro/heritage-conservation-defined/. 17 See, for example, Janice Helland, ‘Benevolence, Revival and “Fair Trade”: An Historical Perspective’, in Craft, Community and the Material Culture of Place and Politics, 19th–20th Century, eds. Janice Helland, Beverly Lemire and Alena Buis (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 125–41. 18 ‘A Link with Carlyle and Stevenson: Miss Una Taylor and Her Friends’, The Times, 24 June 1922, 7. 19 D. J. O’ Donague, The Poets of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 451. She and her sister Ida were considered radicals who held revolutionary interests while Una in particular frequently indulged in ‘heroics about Ireland or the proletariat’. ‘Miss Ida Ashworth Taylor’, The Times, 22 October 1929, 18. 20 ‘London Correspondence (from Our Own Correspondent)’, Freeman’s Journal, 14 May 1890, 5. Taylor’s mother was Irish, the daughter of the 1st Baron Monteagle; she was related to a number of Irish nationalists including William Smith O’Brien, editor of United Ireland. An elegy to Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), written by Taylor, leaves little doubt about her commitment to Ireland: ‘We are his love and we are his hate; / His sword are we – he strikes the blow; / He leads us onward to slay the foe.’ ‘Imposing Scene at the Grave’, United Ireland, 23 January 1892, 5. 21 Her political views attracted vitriolic letters to the editors of newspapers. For example, a letter to the editor written in response to her 1887 London speech aligned the fund with Hart’s ‘boycotting and National League friends’. Dublin Daily Express, 2 September 1887, 6. Additionally, Ernest Hart, according to The Times, was a ‘thorough-going’ Home Ruler, The Times, 5 June 1888, 9. He worked with Parnell on the development of a scheme ‘to purchase depopulated grass lands of Ireland to which people in the barren congested districts could migrate’. Hart, ‘Cottage Industries’, 3. See also Parliamentary Debates, 1 July 1889, 1162, and Parliamentary Papers, Vol. 12, 492. 22 Olympia as an exhibition venue opened to the public on 26 December 1886; its buildings and grounds covered twelve acres. ‘Olympia’, The Graphic, 1 January 1887, 4. 23 Hofer, ‘Construction of the “Folk” Cultural Heritage’, 49. The Pall Mall Gazette referred to these displays as ‘politico-ethnological’. ‘Russian Exhibitions’, Pall Mall Gazette, 14 November 1867, 9. 35

Craft and Heritage 24 ‘The Paris Exhibition, 1867’, The London Reader, 20 April 1867, 584. 25 ‘Paris Universal Exhibition’, Morning Post (London), 23 May 1867, 2. ‘The Paris Exhibition – No. I, The Building and Park’, Saturday Review, 14 September 1867, 344–6. 26 Although well received in London, the 1885 Japanese village was not favourably reviewed in Edo Japan: ‘To read only English language accounts of the exhibition would leave one unaware of what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibition: the striking contrast between indignant Japanese reactions to the show, and the enthusiastic reception offered by the English people and press.’ Amelia Scholtz, ‘“Almond-Eyed Artisans” / “Dishonouring the National Polity”: The Japanese Village Exhibition in Victorian London’, Japanese Studies 27, no. 1 (May 2007): 74, 73–85. 27 ‘The Irish Exhibition in London’, Freeman’s Journal, 2 June 1888, 5. Weekly Irish Times, 21 July 1888, 4. 28 ‘Village Industries’, All the Year Round, 23 October 1886, 281. 29 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 3. 30 Charles Dickens, ‘Donegal Sketches. Part I’, All the Year Round, 13 May 1893, 447 and 451. Charles Dickens, Jr., took over All the Year Round after his father’s death in 1870. However, he referred to himself simply as Charles Dickens, not Charles Dickens, Jr. 31 The Times, 2 July 1883, 11. 32 Irish Times, 5 June 1888, 4. 33 Evening Telegraph (Dublin), 6 June 1888, 2. 34 ‘Irish Exhibition in London: Opening Ceremony’, Freeman’s Journal, 5 June 1888, 5. 35 ‘Irish Exhibition in London’, The Times, 14 May 1888, 11. 36 ‘The village will cover an area of 25,000 square feet, and is to be between the Japanese village and the great American glass works of Libby.’ ‘Opening the “Donegal Village”’, United Ireland, 3 June 1893, 5. 37 ‘Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Village’, 17, and ‘Mrs. Ernest Hart’s Irish Village at the Chicago Exhibition’, 638. Artists represented in the display included Rose Barton (1856–1929) and Helen O’Hara (1846–1920). ‘The Irish Village at Chicago’, Irish Times, 28 November 1893, 6. 38 Contemporary objects were for sale, but reproductions of ancient objects such as the Durrow Bible, the Book of Kells and ‘ancient Irish jewellery’ were for display only. Ibid. 39 ‘Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Village’, 17. While most accounts focused on a romantic and nostalgic view of Ireland, Hart included factory-made goods: Hart ‘will also exhibit the product of a factory which she has established in Ireland, where are employed men, women, and boys in turning out many products, examples of which you will see in the woman’s department’. ‘An Irish Industrial Village at the Chicago Exhibition’, The British Architect, 18 March 1892, viii. 40 ‘Opening the Donegal Village’, 5. 41 ‘Ireland at the Chicago Exhibition’, United Ireland, 4 March 1893, 7. 42 ‘Opening the Donegal Village’, 5. 43 Ibid. 44 ‘Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Village’, 17. 45 George Lennox Barrow documented sixty-five towers and maintained that there is ‘no contemporary account of the building of a round tower’. George Lennox Barrow, The Round Towers of Ireland (Dublin: The Academy Press, 1979), 15.

36

Popular Heritage: ‘Donegal Village’ 46 See, for example, ‘Scenery and Traditions of Ireland’, The London Journal, 29 December 1849, 265–6. 47 Lonely Planet, ‘Donegal Castle: Top Choice Historic Building in Donegal Town’, Lonely Planet Staff, accessed 11 January 2018. http://www.lonelyplanet.com/ireland/countydonegal/donegal-town/sights/architecture/donegal-castle#ixzz44CwLNhFh. 48 T. E. McNeill and M. A. Wilkin, ‘Donegal Castle’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology 58 (1999): 81, 81–9. I thank Joseph McBrinn for bringing this article to my attention. 49 ‘The Opening of the Donegal Village’, United Ireland, 24 June 1893, 3. 50 ‘An Irish Village for the World’s Fair’, Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, 14 October 1893, 638. Without visual confirmation it is unclear whether Hart reproduced a model of a design by Irish artist George Petrie for a monument to be constructed near Dublin’s cemetery at Glasnevin which was exhibited in the Dublin Exhibition of 1853 or a model of the extant O’Connell monument. The O’Connell Memorial Church was not completed until 1902. 51 S. J. Connolly, ‘Culture, Identity and Tradition: Changing Definitions of Irishness’, in In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography, ed. Brian Graham (London: Routledge, 1997), 55, 43–63. 52 R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600—1972 (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 291. 53 ‘O’Connell – The Orangemen’, Freeman’s Journal, 14 August 1864, 4. 54 Paula Murphy, Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 185. 55 ‘Statue of Gladstone Unveiled’, Chicago Tribune, 26 June 1893, 2. The original was unveiled in 1882. It was presented to the city of London by Theodore Bryant. ‘Unveiling of Mr. Gladstone’s Statue at Bow’, Pall Mall Gazette, 10 August 1882, 10. 56 Michael Partridge, Gladstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 210. 57 ‘Statue of Gladstone Unveiled’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 26 June 1893, 2. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Alice Hart as quoted in ‘United States Market’, Irish Textile Journal, 15 November 1893, 133. 62 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, ‘Finerty, John Frederick’, accessed 19 January 2018. http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=F000127. 63 Derry Journal, 18 October 1893, 7. 64 Within the Village’s cottages, ‘typical of Irish homes’, Irish artisans made lace and demonstrated the making of linen, dying, spinning and carding, as well as producing wood carvings, and metal objects. ‘Donegal Is Opened’, Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1893, 2. Objects were sold. In an interview in Dublin after the closing of the Chicago Fair, Alice Hart told the reporter that ‘owing to severe commercial depression, the profits were considerably less than would otherwise have been the case. Nevertheless we have come out on the right side’. Evening Herald (Dublin), 29 November 1893, 2. 65 Foster, Modern Ireland, 370. 66 Ibid. 67 ‘Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Village’, 17. 68 Alan O’Day, ‘Imagined Irish Communities: Networks of Social Communication of the Irish Diaspora in the United States and Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Immigrants & Minorities 23, nos. 2–3 (2005): 405, 399–424.

37

Craft and Heritage 69 O’Day, ‘Imagined Irish Communities’, 402. 70 Parnell arrived at New York Harbour the beginning of January 1880. Ireland’s Freeman’s Journal reported that, on landing, Parnell was invited ‘to visit Chicago, the capital of the great North-West’: ‘That great community, of which Chicago was the capital, pledged itself, the address stated, to do all in its power to relieve the distress in Ireland, and, moreover, to particularly support Mr. Parnell’s organization in obtaining justice for the Irish farmers.’ ‘Mr. Parnell’s Arrival at New York’, Freeman’s Journal, 3 January 1880, 5. 71 Parnell, introduced by the Governor of Illinois, spoke in Chicago on 23 February 1880. ‘Mr. Parnell in America’, Freeman’s Journal, 25 February 1880, 5. According to the Belfast Morning News the streets were lined with people as Parnell, escorted by the ‘2nd Regiment of the National Guard – one thousand bayonets’, made his way to the Exposition Building where his speech took place. ‘Mr. Parnell in America’, Belfast Morning News, 26 February 1880, 3. 72 ‘The Entire North-West for Ireland’, The Nation, 3 January 1880, 4. The paper provides a more detailed account of the increased interest in and support for Ireland in the United States, as Parnell’s tour progressed. ‘Cheering News for Chicago’, The Nation, 17 January 1880, 11. The Nation was a nationalist publication, one to which Una Taylor frequently contributed. 73 Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1893, 2. According to the Tribune, 300 guests attended the opening. 74 ‘Opening the Donegal Village’, 5. 75 ‘Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Village’, 17. 76 ‘Opening the Donegal Village’, 5. 77 Ibid. 78 Hugh Linehan, ‘Historic Irish Gate to Be Closed to Traffic’, Irish Times, 16 August 2017, 2, accessed 21 May 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/historic-drogheda-gateto-be-closed-to-traffic-1.3187866. In 2017, the council of the town was hiring ‘landscape architects to advise on the redesign of the public realm around the structure, which will be funded by the Heritage Council’s Irish Walled Towns Network’. 79 John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, The Historical Journal 53, no. 4 (2010): 937, 919–37. 80 Foster, Modern Ireland, 102. 81 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, 921. Cunningham’s article seeks to complicate Cromwell’s Irish policies while, at the same time, accepting that the ‘the massacre at Drogheda in 1649 remains a blot on his reputation’ (919). 82 ‘Explore & Do in Drogheda: St. Laurence’s Gate & Drogheda Walls’, Drogheda on the Boyne, accessed 21 May 2018. https://www.drogheda.ie/explore-and-do/explore/castles-andconquests/drogheda-walls.html. 83 Linehan, ‘Historic Irish Gate to Be Closed to Traffic’. 84 Ibid. 85 United Ireland, 24 June 1893, 3. 86 Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 114. 87 Ibid., 205. 88 ‘At Donegal Castle in the World’s Fair on Irish Day’, Derry Journal, 18 October 1893, 7.

38

CHAPTER 2 SOPON BEZIRDJIAN, CRAFT, HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN VICTORIAN MANCHESTER

Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan

In the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century, craftsmen (sanaatkar) often hailed from the non-dominant populations of this Muslim-governed polity. Armenian Christians were particularly numerous among palace artisans, including stonemasons, carpenters and other fields that were needed for imperial building works. In the nineteenth century, these trades, which were self-taught, staffed through an apprentice structure and often passed down among families, were supplemented by individuals offering expertise in new building and decoration techniques that had come from a European education or technological expansions. Sopon Bezirdjian (1839–1915), an Armenian born in Constantinople, was one such character and his biography draws attention to key transformations in the nineteenth-century Ottoman cultural landscape. Yet Bezirdjian is also interesting because of his migratory status. Having fled difficult conditions for Armenians in the 1880s, he resettled in Victorian Manchester and proceeded to refashion his creative output and professional status as a jobbing designer. His subsequent works, consisting of print advertisements, sketches for interior decoration schemes, as well as his magnum opus – a collection of designs for household items with (what he terms as) ‘Oriental’ designs – show his negotiation of complex heritages and identities (as an ethnic Armenian-Christian, an Ottoman subject in exile and as a Victorian émigré) in his quest to earn a living and his wish to gain institutional enshrinement. Thanks to a sketch of his life given in an early-twentieth-century Armenian almanac, we are able to trace the main phases, or movements, of Bezirdjian’s career. After working as chief decorator for the Ottoman sultan in his native Constantinople (the imperial capital) for over a decade, Bezirdjian moved to Europe sometime after the fall of his patron Sultan Abdülaziz (r.1861–1876).1 Records indicate that he was initially active in London: in 1885 he was put forward by an Armenian with the surname of Hakoumian for the decoration of a room ‘in the genuine Oriental Style’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum.2 Lack of follow-up documentation indicates that Bezirdjian was not successful in gaining that commission, instead moving on to focus his time on publishing a book of his so-called Oriental Designs in 1889.3 By 1891, the Census tells he was resident in Manchester with the occupation of ‘Artist, Portrait painting’.4 This pragmatic career turn did not signal a disavowal of the institutions of the art world and its international spectacles, however: in 1900, Bezirdjian contributed to the Ottoman delegation to the 1900 Paris Exposition.5 Finally, in 1911 he again approached the Victoria and Albert Museum, this time with architectural designs for purchase.6

Craft and Heritage

Apparently rejected for the second time (his designs remained in private hands until recently and there was no further correspondence with the V&A), Bezirdjian died four years later, at the age of 76 in 1915. Despite failing to achieve the institutional recognition he coveted, Bezirdjian was a successful designer and decorator. The archive of his drawings, preserved by his family as part of their own personal and cultural heritage and now housed in Manchester Metropolitan University Library within a larger community heritage, gives plentiful evidence of his productivity and the versatility of his long career. What is curious, though, about both the content of his pattern book of ‘Oriental Designs’ and the bulk of his professional works (as evidenced by his archive), are the few-and-far-between references to his Armenian identity. This essay will discuss how, as a recent ArmenianOttoman immigrant to Victorian Britain, Bezirdjian adapted his design portfolio, and even his public persona, to the tastes – and, more significantly as a jobbing designer, to the market – surrounding him. His Armenian identity, only on the Victorians’ radar due to British Prime Minister Gladstone’s and others’ campaigns on the status of Armenians as victims of Ottoman oppression, was not (and to some extent is still not) something that was saleable to the tastemakers of arts institutions. However, this essay will also argue for the important ways in which Bezirdjian’s ‘Armenian-ness’ did manifest itself: namely through his networks of patronage, which enabled his professional life to flourish, and his ability, as an outsider, to appropriate local modes of expression and to attempt to position himself as an authority on what he termed ‘Oriental Art’. Bezirdjian’s vision of Oriental Art was encapsulated by the patterns of Persian, Ottoman-Turkish and Arabian ornament, which he devoted his 1889 pattern book to exploring and imprinting on every-day Victorian household items. Oriental did not refer to the Far East in Bezirdjian’s parlance (as it does in today’s English) but, instead, he used it as a catch-all term to bring together the Near East of the dynastic powers of the Ottoman sultans, Persian shahs and Arabian khedives (rulers of Egypt under Ottoman suzerainty). Bezirdjian’s pattern book was a homage to their opulent courts (all of whom he had served or would soon serve), which had inherited rich traditions of decorative arts. Bezirdjian distinguished these dynastic styles through their different colour palettes, ornament types and visual vocabularies, including prominent display of their insignia(s). His category of ‘Oriental Art’ was, therefore, a way to claim back the contemporaneity of Islamic Art from Victorian stalwarts like Owen Jones, who sought to replicate its historic patterns in the service of a renaissance in British design.

From Constantinople to Manchester In Constantinople there was a sizeable Armenian community, which dated back at least to the fourteenth century, by which time there were already two churches established there.7 It became an extremely important node for an early modern trade diaspora that stretched across the globe.8 The Armenian community within Ottoman society was, however, relatively fixed and hierarchical, with the church and notables (amira) 40

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

holding considerable importance over Armenian affairs.9 Sopon Bezirdjian’s father was an optician, but Bezirdjian junior instead opted for being trained by ‘famous specialists’ in ‘miniature arts’.10 The private nature of Bezirdjian’s early education indicates privilege: it was common for the amiras to educate their children through specialized tutors.11 Bezirdjian’s close working relationship with the family of imperial architects, the Balyan Family, also points to elite connections.12 Aged just nineteen, Bezirdjian was given the task of decorating the sultan’s hunting pavilion at Izmit, on the Marmara coast, suggesting that his path to the top was an accelerated one.13 Following this, Bezirdjian was employed as decorator on successive imperial palaces built by the Balyans. The first phase of Bezirdjian’s career, spanning two decades, was spent designing decoration schemes for the sultan’s palaces of the 1860s to 1870s such as Çırağan (1872) and Beylerbeyi (1865). Bezirdjian worked in conjunction with the Balyans’ other longtime collaborator, the carpenter Vortik Kemhadjian. The Balyans had been educated in Paris and had excellent connections to leading figures there, such as the Labrouste family of Romantic-Rationalist architects.14 However, the Constantinople workforce consisted, in the majority, of local Armenians, many of whom were trained in new ‘westernised’ techniques, but had the local sensibility to construct works according to the sultan’s taste, and the supply networks to offer a convenient price.15 Bezirdjian’s involvement in these palaces of the 1860s to 1870s is documented by compositions for walls and ceilings that survive in his archive (complete with pinholes), along with designs for cabinets, mirrors and chairs that can be matched to items currently held in the palaces.16 Bezirdjian’s designs in this first stage of his career decorating imperial works for the Ottoman sultans, such as his designs for Beylerbeyi Palace (Plate 1), show unmistakable reference to Owen Jones’s (1809–1874) Grammar of Ornament (1856), specifically his ‘Arabian’ and ‘Moorish’ styles.17 Photographs and drawings in Bezirdjian’s archive suggest that he likely travelled to Spain and north Africa to study Islamic architecture,18 as Jones studied the Alhambra.19 Yet these designs for Ottoman palaces were not part of a concerted attempt to recreate the architecture of an Islamic golden age: instead Bezirdjian’s works formed just part of an eclectic design whole, which also included naval paintings by Polish artist Chlebowski, Ottoman calligraphy, ceilings and walls in Westernized floral styles and chinoiserie cabinets. Bezirdjian’s designs were reflective of the overall attempt by the Balyans to craft an iconography of ‘old and new’ in the palaces of the sultans and were indicative of the vibrant court culture under Abdülaziz, the first sultan to travel to Europe.20 Following the succession from Abdülaziz to Abdülhamid II (1876–1909), there was a changed atmosphere towards Armenians, as was recounted in the 1907 novel L’Amira by Marie Sevadjian.21 One prime example of an Armenian in state service who was swiftly penalized was Serkis Balyan. He was accused of embezzlement, exiled and, later, associated with political mischief-making. Bezirdjian moved to Cairo, carrying out works for the khedives, then settling in London, then Manchester and then London again.22 The Armenian community in Manchester was dominated by cotton traders and calico printers from Constantinople, many of whom were from amira lineage.23 The Manchester

41

Craft and Heritage

merchants engaged in traditional modes of patronage seen among Constantinopolitan elites: they commissioned the Holy Cross Church (Figure 2.1) in 1870, designed by Manchester architects Royle & Bennett;24 they donated culturally resonant objects to the treasury such as luxury textiles with symbolic iconography and built additions to the church structure, indicated by Armenian inscriptions.25 Through such works, these merchants were crucial in establishing the ‘symbolic framework’ of the Manchester Armenian community.26 They had created a form of outward Britishness but continued many of their former behaviours and indulged in many of the tastes they had brought with them from Constantinople. Neither the churches in Constantinople nor in Manchester were built in the medieval style with conical dome, which became the Urform of Armenian identity (especially following the studies of Austrian art historian Jozef Strzygowski, who promoted Armenian architecture as an Aryan style).27 Instead, the Victorian neo-Gothic was chosen for Holy Cross, and only small details in the interior, such as the holy Armenian letters in stained glass roundels, reveal its Armenian-ness.28 Houses in Didsbury, a suburb where many of the Armenian merchants settled, followed this pattern of adhering to the prevailing fashions of their adopted home. The mansion built by the Funduklian

Figure 2.1  Holy Cross Armenian Church, Manchester (1870), architects: Royle & Bennett

42

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

family of merchants, for instance, is a thoroughly Victorian structure, with red brick and Darley-dale stone, terracotta tiles carved with floral reliefs, stained glass panels, prominent entrance porch, bay windows, feature chimneys and other fittings described in the architectural publications of the time.29 As with the stained glass windows displaying Armenian letters in the interior of the church, small traces of the Armenian heritage of these merchant families can be seen on these mansions, such as the name, Massis (Mt Ararat), inscribed on the entrance of the Funduklian family home. Funerary sculpture in the sizeable plot of the Southern Cemetery dedicated to Manchester’s Armenian community shows the more open display of mixed heritage and identity symbols. Monuments include sentimentally carved, Victoriana-style sculptures of the angel of peace or the urn draped with a cloth. They communicate their otherness through their Armenian-language inscriptions.30 As a holy script, Armenian was particularly important to display in communal and religious settings, even if many of these immigrants from Constantinople would not have spoken it, but may have preferred to use Armeno-Turkish (Turkish language spelt with Armenian letters) in their everyday communications. Bezirdjian himself, for instance, used Armeno-Turkish in his tiny notebook that survives among the sketches in the Manchester Metropolitan University archive holdings. These Manchester Armenians engaged in similar activities to the British expats in India, who have been described by Plotz as ‘exiles in a foreign land’, due to their idealizing of the country they knew and their engaging in strategies of making Britain tangible and important to their identity in ‘exile’. However, the notion of where ‘home’ was for these Armenians was complex. Manchester Armenians, in the main, as recent immigrants from Constantinople were looking back to the Ottoman-Islamic culture of that territory: the textiles they produced would not look out of place among the possessions of elite Ottoman-Turkish households. They, as did those British ‘exiles’ in India, primarily used portable objects as ‘repositories of mobile memory’ to communicate their continued belonging to Constantinople: items such as the textile collection of the church gave the community a semblance of unity.31 While the Manchester Armenians saw British and Ottoman cultural forms as important public aspects to their view of their (unremitting) belonging to these large empires, they expressed their Armenian-ness in specific, and usually interior, settings, such as through the Armenian letters of the stained glass (visible only from the inside of the church). By the time of the census in 1891, Sopon Bezirdjian was living at 16 Ducie Street in Chorlton-on-Medlock.32 Bezirdjian was apparently an active member of the church community: in the introduction to his pattern book, Albert Fine Art Album, for example, he notes his relationship with the vicar, Sukias Baronian. His children (his wife, Armenian actress from Constantinople Arusiag Papazian, did not accompany him to Britain) show differing degrees of assimilation through their marriage choices. Bezirdjian’s son Theo (journalist, lithographer and traveller) married an Ottoman-Armenian,33 and his daughter Rose (of no occupation) married a Briton.34 Given the tendency for Constantinopolitan merchant and noble families to intermarry (and propensity for Armenians to intermarry, in general), Rose’s betrothal to a Briton is noteworthy. As a 43

Craft and Heritage

scion of calico printers and a music professor, Rose’s husband’s credentials must have seemed, nevertheless, attractive to Bezirdjian père. Theodore and his wife were also not averse to some forms of assimilation: they changed their name to ‘Birch’. Sopon Bezirdjian displayed his identity as an Armenian through traditional acts of patronage, which were a stalwart of the amiras and other noble and merchant families of his generation. He is noted by the almanac-compiler Teotik to have engaged in what Teotik calls ‘national activities’ (i.e. activities that would advance the Armenian azk, ‘nation’ or community). These activities included establishing an Armenian school in Cairo and designing the altarpiece for the Armenian Mother Church at Etchmiadzin (in 1902), reportedly at the request of the Catholicos (the Armenian Pope).35 Bezirdjian’s Armenian-ness, therefore, was not firmly bound by territory and although he chose to add his prestige as a leading artisan to the Mother Church in (at that time Russian) Armenia, this was, headed by Catholicos Mıgırdiç Khrimyan, who was an OttomanArmenian of the same generation as Bezirdjian. Like most amiras and wealthy merchants, Bezirdjian did not openly voice his politics. Although traditional in their outlook, the Armenians of Manchester nevertheless became important for their associations, such as the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) and the Armenian Ladies’ Association. Such groups offered financial support, gave a voice to communal concerns and engaged in lobbying politicians after the Ottoman massacres of the Armenian population in 1894–189636 and the Armenian genocide of 1915.37 This, as Jo Laycock has argued, resulted in the events of 1915 becoming a national concern and the establishment of significant relief and fund-raising organizations such as the Lord Mayor’s Fund.38 Aside from numerous sketches of churches, several designs for altarpieces (including the one destined for Etchmiadzin) and a design with Armenian letters spelling out the name of a well-known Constantinople newspaper, Bezirdjian’s Armenian-ness is not easy to discern from his artistic output. One rare example where he adheres to a more ethnically and territorially defined notion of Armenian-ness is in a print entitled Hayastan (Armenia). This design takes the model of Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi to evoke the wreckage of an ancient and noble Armenian culture and civilization. The names of Armenian towns as well as monuments such as Garni Temple (a Roman-era construction) are shown amidst the rubble of countless buildings, with the figure of the personification of Armenia/Hayastan sitting with her crown toppled and the recognizable lakes and mountains of Armenia in the background. This print does not have a date, although it was printed in Rue Gozlin, Paris, and may be dated on that basis if more were known about that studio. Hayastan had adopted the mode of a personification of the nation that was part of the ‘entirely new symbols’ or ‘invented traditions’ such as John Bull, Uncle Sam and the German Michel.39 The composition for the image was not Bezirdjian’s innovation, but he developed a more sophisticated version of it and it may have been circulated more widely due to his print media contacts (including his son, Theodore). It served as part of the broader efforts of the BritishArmenian community to make the Armenian cause attractive to Western audiences at the time when their compatriots were facing massacres, and intervention was gravely 44

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

needed.40 However, the majority of Bezirdjian’s works from his time in Manchester show not open expressions of his Armenian-ness, but his overwhelming acclimatization to the tastes that surrounded him.

Works in Manchester Sopon Bezirdjian declared as his profession ‘artist, portrait painting’,41 but his extant drawings substantiate that he was engaged in a range of trades, including interior decoration, furniture and jewellery design. Bezirdjian’s designs capitalized on Manchester’s status as a growing commercial hub, and his move there, no doubt, was influenced by the prospect of attracting the attention of wealthy merchant and industrialist patrons, including Armenians. Bezirdjian’s works as a private decorator, evidenced by his ceiling and furniture designs (Figures 2.2 and 2.3), largely resemble what was available on the market for middle-class consumers in Victorian Britain. Wallpapers with repetitive patterns featuring simple motifs such as a hot air balloon, chintzy florals, Japanese fans and holly motifs are akin to Owen Jones’s bestselling ‘Daisy’ wallpaper (1864). Designs for chairs are more luxurious and could be said to make vague references to ‘oriental’ luxury through the inclusion of ornament mimicking star-like geometrical shapes. These drawings were likely shown to clients as advertising brochures as they depicted figures alongside the furniture; bearded

Figure 2.2  Designs for ceilings (floral geometric, leaf geometric and woven pattern), pencil on paper, by Sopon Bezirdjian (no date) 45

Craft and Heritage

Figure 2.3  Designs for four chairs by Sopon Bezirdjian, pencil on paper (no date)

men viewing the chairs can be seen sketched in alongside women in full Victorian formal evening-wear complete with toy dog. Bezirdjian also produced works for less eminent patrons. Several pieces of evidence show that he won some success as a jobbing designer. Advertisers selling items in publications such as the Illustrated London News were an important aspect of consumerism and increased in correlation with the rise in national wage.42 Bezirdjian capitalized on this, with the assistance of son Theodore. His front page to the 1897 Supplement to the Stationer, Printer, and Fancy Trade’s Register (Figure 2.4) shows his bold manipulation of Victorian iconographical elements, such as a scene depicting a factory, alongside heraldry (a shield, eagles and angels) and symbols of the trade. His advertisement for the Royal Life Company Insurance (Figure 2.5) also shows an eye-catching composition of putti being drawn away on a cart by a large bird, which, although it harks back to Roman models, is Victorian-ized through the banner advertising the company being held as if a carnival float. 46

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

Figure 2.4  Promotional calendar for Spicer Bros paper suppliers, Supplement to the Stationer, Printer and Fancy Trade’s Register (1897), designed by Sopon Bezirdjian, print (no date)

Figure 2.5  Advertisement for

‘Royal Life Insurance’ by Sopon Bezirdjian, pencil on paper (no date) 47

Craft and Heritage

Figure 2.6  Design by Sopon Bezirdjian illustrated in Myra’s Journal (1 March 1889)

Bezirdjian’s designs (Figure 2.6) were also featured in specialist publications, such as the monthly Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion (published 1875–1912). A renaissancestyle fan, and ‘design for braiding the fronts, sleeves, collar and back of the Lennox jacket for a lady’, published in 1887, shows his own versions of wholly Victorian products. Within these designs, there are only very small indications of Bezirdjian’s cultural difference – a label states: ‘M. Sopon Bezirdjian: Artist-Designer to His Late Imperial Majesty Abdul Aziz’. Here Bezirdjian’s former status as designer to the sultan is worn as a badge of honour; it establishes the exalted circles he had moved in within the Constantinopolitan art world and elevates his renaissance-style fan and Lennox jacket with a sheen of ‘Oriental’ (i.e. exotic, for a Victorian reader) luxury. Bezirdjian’s pattern book, named Albert Fine Art Album, published in 1889, represented a change in direction. What Bezirdjian introduced as his ‘Oriental designs’ were, in some ways, the culmination of the earlier stage of his career in Constantinople, but in other ways the result of his lived experience in Victorian Britain.

Albert Fine Art Album and the Victorian market Bezirdjian published a small collection of plates under the name of Albert Fine Art Album in 1887; by 1889, the album was reissued as a chromolithographed monograph accompanied by a long introductory text written by Bezirdjian himself. The monograph 48

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

contained sixteen colour plates with a further eight plates reproduced from the earlier series. These plates were adorned with designs for particular objects, such as a fire screen, or there were plates reserved for border decoration. The items depicted varied from a tea cosy, to a pocket patch, to a calico, to an anti-Macassar, all related to the Victorian domestic sphere and/or portable property. The Albert Fine Art Album was a relatively late addition to the large body of pattern books which had proliferated since early in the century and which paved the way for middle-class consumption of interior fashions by the mid-century.43 The dizzying array of styles on offer in a single book could include ‘Early English, Louis XVI and XIV, Buhl, Chippendale and Adams, Italian, Neo-Grec, Queen Anne, Modern, Renaissance, Gothic, Medieval, Venetian and Japanese’.44 Within this eclecticism of the interior, Bezirdjian’s ‘Oriental’ designs were not wholly unexpected, but they did represent some degree of novelty, as was shown by reviewers who referred to ‘original work’ and ‘great individuality’,45 stating the designs were ‘elegant and effective’,46 ‘very good of their kind’,47 ‘elaborate and novel’,48 ‘suitable’,49 and evaluated them as ‘talented Oriental designs suitable for decorations’.50 The sixteen coloured plates of the 1889 album were credited for being ‘expressly designed for ornamental fine art decoration’51 and intended for embroiderers.52 The doit-yourself ethos appealed to recent changes in consumer demand and is in evidence from Bezirdjian’s ‘design for a slipper, Persian style’, which was drawn from above to ensure ease of copying. Late-Victorian instructions for handcrafts appeared in monthly periodicals such as Lady’s Magazine and Ladies’ Drawing Room Book, aiming to reclaim traditional activities that had been lost due to mass production.53 Such publications reviewed Bezirdjian’s album favourably.54 The items that Bezirdjian chose to illustrate were often peculiarly Victorian and domestic, but they were fused with his unique ‘Oriental’ aesthetic to create imaginative compositions, which functioned on several semantic levels (even though they were, ostensibly, intended as everyday, practical things). Many of the objects seemed chosen for their suitability for showcasing Bezirdjian’s skill at ornamentation: fire screens, as flat surfaces of wood or papier mâché designed to shield the face and hands from the fire’s direct heat, were large spaces ideal for decoration and needlework.55 Bezirdjian’s ‘Tea Cozy, Arabian Style’ was also quaintly place-specific, but its headpiece (or even turban)-like shape was ideal for emphasizing the bold symbolism of the crescent. As the example of the tea cosy shows, Bezirdjian adorned these designs not only with his vision of ‘Oriental’ (Persian, Turkish or Arabian) ornament, but he supplemented them with symbolic elements that told a more specific meaning. The tea cosy’s recognizable Islamic symbol of the crescent (symbol of the Ottoman Empire and later Turkish Republic, as well as, nowadays, numerous other Islamic polities) shows Bezirdjian’s blending of curiously political elements within his anodyne Victorian domestic packaging. Indeed, the fact that these designs were depicting Victorian domestic items and were intended for domestic use was not remarked upon by reviewers of Bezirdjian’s album. Most dwelt on aspects of his cultural difference noting the ‘design of Turkish character’56 or ‘Eastern Ornament’, even praising his avoiding ‘the common error of 49

Craft and Heritage

copying inferior European types’;57 that is, they praised his ‘Oriental’ authenticity. However, both in 1887 and in 1889, his designs were made legible and appealing to such reviewers because they were communicated through the cultural tendencies of the time, such as the pattern-book format, the do-it-yourself ethos and the domestic focus of Bezirdjian’s designs. One of the cultural tendencies of the Victorians that the Albert Fine Art Album particularly capitalized on was a preoccupation with royal patronage, transmitted through several of the album’s features. The royalist features included, most notably, the title connecting Bezirdjian’s designs with Victoria and Albert (for no obvious reason, on the basis of the content of the book and its designs); the inclusion of ‘eulogiums’ from Christian of Schleswig-Holstein (1831–1917, member of the royal family through marriage to Victoria’s daughter Helena) and from Malcom Khan (Persian Ambassador); the coats-of-arms and warrants on the cover page; and frequent mentions within the text of both European royals and Ottoman, Persian and Arabian dynasts. The design plates, too, repeat symbols of these same royals and dynasts from East and West (whether the imperial monogram of the sultan, the crescent and star or Victoria’s profile). Royal ritualism became prominent under Victoria (r. 1837–1901) and her symbols developed into a shorthand for power and influence.58 J. E. C. Bodley describing the coronation of Edward VII (1902) wrote of ‘the recognition by a free democracy of a hereditary crown, as a symbol of the world-wide domination of their race’.59 Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887, which included a procession and service in Westminster Abbey, was remarked upon as an event of great pageantry.60 It was, ostensibly, to celebrate this latter event that Bezirdjian designs were published: this is what is stated in his introductory text, although no connection exists between his actual works and the British queen and her consort. The jubilee was the moment at which the commercial commemorative potential of the monarchy was unlocked: there was an outpouring of pottery and ceremonial medals and firms used references to royal ceremonial to market their goods.61 Following the event, images of Victoria adorned items as varied as perfumes, pills and cocoa.62 ‘Jubilee kitsch’, ornamented with insignia, souvenirs and icons, signified both a ‘guarantee of quality’ and the ‘authority of the English crown’.63 Like Bezirdjian’s designs, the bulk were domestic items addressed to women, who had played a key role in the emergence of the consumer economy. The Albert Fine Art Album tapped into these invented traditions and, chiefly, the revival of heraldry. The royal warrant was reinvented in the service of Victorian industrial development and consumerism. Commercial products were described in the press as connected to dukes, earls, lords and bishops as endorsers;64 potters such as W. H. Goss displayed family crests, images of Queen Victoria, national symbols (e.g. rose, thistle and crown) and heraldic pieces.65 Albert Fine Art Album’s focus on ‘Oriental’ patterns (which Bezirdjian categorized as those arising from Ottoman, Persian and Arabian dynasts and their lands) was also part of Bezirdjian’s appeal to the prevailing tastes of Victorian consumers. ‘Exotic’ items filling domestic interiors could be souvenirs from travels or colonial pasts, serving 50

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

to demonstrate the cosmopolitanism of their collector or enforce European ideas of superiority.66 A list of collectable items advertised by Liberty Department Store in 1885 stressed their foreign origins in order to attract customers: ‘Greek costume, during season. Art products from Cyprus during August. Oriental costumes in November’.67 Debates concerning non-Western ornament (and specifically the ornament of what would now be termed ‘Islamic art’ styles such as the Moorish or the Persian) had been dominated by the ‘triumvirate of taste’: Owen Jones, the painter Richard Redgrave and Henry Cole (chief of the Museum of Ornamental Art, later to become the South Kensington Museum and V&A).68 They viewed decoration as ‘not only a model for human habitation but also a blueprint for social change’.69 Within this schema, empiremade non-Western arts were displayed with the underlying purpose of making Britain stronger through generating income and reinvigorating British design (which often paled in comparison with these objects from the colonies).70 By 1889, there was a shift to a more explicitly colonial tone in the display of nonWestern artworks. The Builder mentioned (in 1885) a ‘work of modern art’ sent over by the Maharajah Scindia of Gwalior as a gift and positioned outside of the South Kensington Museum: ‘[T]he ponderous carved stones of a gateway executed in the Hindoo style by the modern Hindoo workmen for the recent Calcutta Exhibition.’71 These ‘workmen’ were described as creating ‘a work in emulation of their ancestors’.72 The finished work, the arch, was praised as ‘an example of their great skill’73 and ‘executed by men of our great dependency’,74 thus underlining the status of the men as artisans and as colonial subjects. In the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition the ethnographic approach reached its acme.75 An ‘Indian Palace’ was built by Purdon Clarke that incorporated elements from the Mughal palace city of Fatehpur-Sikri, stained glass windows and features from Islamic architecture more generally, with the centrepiece of the ‘Durban Hall’ crafted by Punjabi craftsmen.76 A priority of the displays was to be ‘authentic’: with ‘native artisans’ and ‘pictures of all kinds painted by bona fide British Colonists’.77 Given this fixation on artisans who were ‘bona fide British Colonists’, the rejection of the Armenian-Turkish Sopon Bezirdjian’s applications to the V&A are not altogether surprising.

Albert Fine Art Album and the Grammar of Ornament In publishing the Albert Fine Art Album, Bezirdjian presented a related, but different, view on ‘Oriental’ art from that which had been developed by Owen Jones in his 1856 Grammar of Ornament. Jones was highly influential in determining the approach to non-Western arts in Britain and particularly those of ‘Islamic’ lands such as medieval Andalusia. He played an important role among the tastemakers of the Victoria and Albert Museum through his association with Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave, A. W. Pugin and others who were particularly active in selecting the objects that would make up the display at Marlborough House (later the South Kensington Museum and taking its final form as the V&A).78 Viewed in concert with Jones’s Grammar of Ornament of 51

Craft and Heritage

thirty-plus years earlier, Bezirdjian’s publication can be seen as a follow-up statement, where Bezirdjian both aimed to revive the interest Jones’s study had stimulated and to lay claim to his own, updated, vision of ‘Oriental’ (Persian, Ottoman and Arabian) art as a legitimate practice. Albert Fine Art Album followed the same general approach to ‘Oriental’ art as was presented by the Grammar of Ornament. The monograph proceeded in an academic manner by incorporating representation of the same three categories used by Jones: Persian, Arabian and Turkish. Bezirdjian, also like Jones, distinguished between Persian, Arabian and Turkish styles primarily through their palette and motifs. Jones advocated the study of historic works, stating: ‘He who should set about forming a new style for himself without regard for the past, would be like a student in astronomy who should reject the discoveries of Newton and endeavour to work out every process for himself.’79 Although Bezirdjian never refers to the architecture of the past in his introductory text, his archive testifies to his study of a range of Ottoman decorative works (largely textiles and ceramics) and travels to Spain and north Africa. His finished designs show how these studies were translated into his ‘Turkish’, ‘Persian’ and ‘Arabian’ modes. Jones’s ‘higher ambition’ was ‘to search out the thoughts which have been expressed in so many different languages’.80 According to his ‘propositions’, colour was of utmost importance and primary, secondary and tertiary colours should be used to distinguish parts of a design.81 Primary colours were revered as reflecting the peak of Arab and Moorish arts and ‘the ruling harmonies’.82 Jones also stressed the importance of using edgings (particularly in white, gold or black) to enhance combinations.83 He specified that ornament was governed by universal rules: lines needed to flow out of a parent stem, and curves should be in proportion.84 As well, he encouraged that elements detracting from this pattern should be sublimated.85 Bezirdjian’s designs followed Jones’s lead regarding the use of colour. Jones stated that the Persian style included more secondary and tertiary colours than Arabian and Moresque.86 Bezirdjian placed a stress on yellow, blue and pink (seen on his Persian-style fire screen), while Jones, in his own plates, foregrounded pink, green and yellow. In both, colour combinations appropriate to the Persian style were complementary ones: light yellow with light blue, pink, yellow, blue and green. Outlines were drawn with a light touch and using one of the colours from the main design, such as blue. This contrasted with the palette used for Arabian styles, which in both cases was dominated by dark hues (for Jones: brown, yellow, blue, green and gold; for Bezirdjian: gold, grey, brown and black). For the Turkish style, Bezirdjian showed greens, yellows, blues and reds, whereas Jones added gold and black. Bezirdjian’s designs differed from Jones’s primarily in terms of their content. While Bezirdjian’s Persian style was marked by its floral vocabulary of petals, tendrils and specific flower types such as carnations, Jones’s style, albeit also a floral one, was ‘conventionalised’.87 Bezirdjian paid more attention to accuracy and gradations of colour, at times giving the designs a three-dimensional effect, which was also an aspect denied in ‘Oriental’ arts by Jones.88 Bezirdjian’s Persian designs depicted animals (real and 52

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

mythical), which Jones did not include in his Islamic styles due to his focus on abstract ornament.89 Bezirdjian showed greater desire for differentiation between ‘Mahometan races’, communicated via symbolic items, such as the Turkish crescent mentioned before, or the bird with outstretched wings (reminiscent of Iranian national symbol, Faravahar), depicted on one Persian-style table cover. Aspects of Bezirdjian’s designs that, in their attention to the display of royal and dynastic symbols, bring them up to date with the Victorian obsession with royal ritualism are the crucial differences from Owen Jones’s ornamental plates. There are decorative elements that mimic royal imagery, such as the fronds on the apex of his Arabian-style mirror, which serve as a substitute for a crown, and the tea cosy with star and crescent (also a motif taking on a leadership-related significance). For the Islamic settings of the ‘Arabian’ and ‘Turkish’ (i.e. Ottoman) world, a cluster of fronds or a star and crescent could fulfil the role of a bust portrait of the monarch (or some other figurative image) in Europe. Jones admitted that his appreciation for decoration precluded the arts of the time in which he was writing (stating that the rules applied ‘[i]n all ages but our

Figure 2.7  ‘Turkish Design’ from Sopon Bézirdjian (Albert, Paris-Marseille, 1900)

53

Craft and Heritage

own’) and complained about contemporary proliferation of styles in the decorative arts, which produced ‘novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence’.90 As a result, contemporary references, such as the Islamic heraldry of the Ottoman star and crescent or the Ottoman coat-of-arms, were markedly absent from Jones’s opus. The Turkish style was in some ways the culmination of Bezirdjian’s album, perhaps an unsurprising fact given his service to the Ottoman sultan and Constantinopolitan origins, and also a significant departure from Jones, who viewed the Alhambra as the greatest accomplishment of Islamic Art. Specifics such as the tendrils with nodules show attention to idiosyncratic detail that can only refer back to first-hand study of Ottoman ceramics, as testified to by Bezirdjian’s sketches. The table cover in Turkish style (Figure 2.7) incorporated interlocking motifs and palette of blue and yellow akin to the Persian calico, but the chinoiserie of the latter contrasts with the more rooted cultural specificity of the Ottoman tulips. He used his hundreds of sketches, including many of tulips (Figure 2.8), and transformed them in accordance with Jones’s propositions on colour. He then added, as with his Arabian and Persian styles, a heraldic element, which demonstrated the contemporaneity of ‘Oriental’ art. In the Turkish designs, he did this in the form of the sultan’s monogram, depicted on the design for a pocket. Instead

Figure 2.8  Sketches of Ottoman motifs, including Iznik-style tulips, by Sopon Bezirdjian, pencil on paper

54

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

of depicting the Islamic calligraphy seen in Jones’s Turkish Style, Bezirdjian chose to represent the sultan’s monogram, thus distancing the style from religion and instead repositioning it as a dynastic one. Jones, in contrast, stressed that religion was an aspect ‘with which every thought and action of their [Eastern artists] daily life is interwoven’.91

Correcting misconceptions Sopon Bezirdjian advocated the aesthetic power of ‘Oriental’ art and its reshaping into a modern mode. Seeking out an influential tastemaker who would be sympathetic to – and would promote – his cause, Bezirdjian sent his portfolio of designs to the president of the Royal Academy, Frederic Leighton. Having travelled many times to the territories of the Ottoman Empire and filled his Holland Park mansion with Islamic ceramics, textiles, mosaics, fountains and window screens (mashrabiyya), Leighton was the most likely candidate to give Bezirdjian’s work a sign of approval. Indeed, Leighton commented that the designs were ‘elegant and effective’ and he was ‘in sympathy’ with Bezirdjian’s ideas about ‘Oriental ornament’.92 Yet, despite fishing for their approval, Bezirdjian does seem to have been critical of the generation of Leighton: he complains in his introductory text that the development of art in Europe was ‘neither so great, nor so general as it should be’.93 In contrast, he advocates that art should reflect progress to a greater extent, stating that art is ‘daughter of civilisation’ owing ‘not a little to science’, in what might have been a dig at the aesthetes’ fixation on medieval historical styles.94 Indeed, Bezirdjian’s intent in his lengthy introductory text was primarily to defend his vision of ‘Oriental’ arts against European misrepresentations, which he did on several levels. In his introduction, he posited the moral superiority of ‘Oriental’ art above the prevailing Victorian applications that he could see around him. He corrected the notion that ‘Oriental’ art was purely aesthetic or giving pleasure, stating that the Ottoman sultans were interested in art for ‘its humanising aspects’ and, that despite their own views on iconoclasm, they travelled widely in Europe to find out about other cultures.95 He asserted that ‘pleasure must never be of a coarse or vulgar kind’, adding that this is something that is ‘frequently overlooked in Western countries’, which may have been a criticism of the attention Orientalist painters paid to sensationalist images of the hamam (Turkish bath).96 Bezirdjian went on to critique more specifically the approaches of Western scholars to misconceptions of ‘Oriental nations and their Sovereigns’ (he also refers to ‘the Eastern nations and Governments’), advocating that academic methods should be used in their study. He stated: ‘[W]hen we have a desire to have a thorough knowledge of a nation, past or present … it is of utmost importance … to closely examine with unprejudiced wide open eyes.’97 Bezirdjian claimed that Europeans were mistaken on a number of their assumptions about the Ottoman royal family, such as the court expenses, ‘which have been stigmatised as enormously extravagant’98 and he stressed the sultan’s modern habits and sympathies.99 55

Craft and Heritage

Conclusion: Consumerism, authenticity or exilic identity? With the Albert Fine Art Album, Bezirdjian, like other non-Western cultural producers in diaspora, used his heritage as a public image to lend him ‘the exotic edge so necessary for public recognition’.100 He achieved his authenticity, in part, through appealing to Orientalist stereotypes, such as touting in the written introduction to his pattern book that he could describe the ‘inner life’ of the sultans to which he previously had access, thus attracting consumers of harem memoirs such as those of Melek Hanum (1872) or Leyla Hanımefendi (1922).101 However, Bezirdjian used the content of his text to correct Western assumptions about the ‘Orient’ (chiefly the Ottoman Empire): for instance, stating that (Sultan) Abdülaziz (r.1861–1876) was ‘liberal minded’, Abdülmecid (r.1839–1861) was endowed with ‘grace, liberality and large minded-ness’ and Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) ‘moves and breathes in harmonious accord with the times’.102 By means of his designs for the album, Bezirdjian questioned Owen Jones’s didactic and imperialistic tone using dynastic iconography to herald the modernity of the monarchs of the Islamic world. He presented his designs in a manner that was directly applicable to Victorian middle-class life, depicting fire screens and tea cosies – instead of dwelling on the aestheticizing and sensationalizing ‘smoking room’ or the Turkish baths. His designs were adorned with a signature, as a riposte to the colonial obsession with artisans over artists. Bezirdjian’s return to more explicit references to the ‘Orient’ in the Albert Fine Art Album was also an expression of his exilic identity. Romanticizing the Ottoman past, and particularly aspects of its materiality, was apparently common among expats. Like Setrak Dinjyan, an Armenian character in Richard Hagopian’s 1952 novel Faraway the Spring, who works in a Boston factory and visits an old lady from Constantinople with an oriental salon that transports him back, Bezirdjian associated Oriental places, things and styles with his lost homeland.103 This sense of Oriental-ness as identity in exile was shared by Jewish merchant Robert Levy, who represented the Ottomans at the Chicago exhibition in 1893 and continued to sport Ottoman-style clothing.104 The Camondo family of Jewish bankers, who moved to Paris from the 1860s, expressed their Oriental heritage through photographs of their forefathers in Ottoman garb, alongside their better-known French eighteenth-century luxury furnishings.105 Personal demonstrations of identity could also correspond to a broader group sense of ‘exiles solidarity’: this was expressed through the culture of the Manchester Armenians, their textiles, house names and tombstones.106 Bezirdjian did engage with his Armenian-ness through a number of his commissions, such as the Hayastan print examined earlier, and the altarpiece for the Etchmiadzin Cathedral. However, writing in 1889, he gave a porous definition of ‘the Armenian Nation’, stating that it consisted of ‘the minor portion, where will be found wealthy and most distinguished personages’, inhabitants of Europe ‘all of whom are rich merchants’ and the majority of ‘handcraftsmen, workmen, agricultural labourers, etc.’ He limited himself to a single comment about the hardships Armenians were encountering: ‘[A] man must only hope for success by patience and hard labour, and, moreover, by always walking in the right path.’107 56

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity

Bezirdjian, although living in a time of monumental upheavals for his people’ economic pressures, migrations, soon to be followed by widespread massacres, and genocide, that were to change the way that Armenian identity was construed, did not have an exclusive notion of his heritage. Instead, his works, and especially his Albert Fine Art Album, show a flexible approach to being an Armenian. He promoted himself as a proud ‘Oriental’ and as a loyal servant of sultans and shahs. At the same time, he did not view this status as precluding his ability to celebrate Queen Victoria and Prince Albert or to engage in works to benefit the Armenian communities, whether in Cairo or in Etchmiadzin. Bezirdjian was a craftsman, a decorator and a designer: his professional status reflected the same multiple references as his personal identity. Institutional acceptance in Victorian Britain was, however, what Bezirdjian desired. He applied in 1885 and 1911 for his works to be shown in the V&A. In his short biographical entry on Bezirdjian, the Armenian almanac-compiler Teotik writes Bezirdjian’s paintings were displayed by the India Museum, as well as admired by a number of notable figures from Empress Eugenie to (Russian-Armenian painter) Ivan Ayvazovsky, ‘Queen Victoria’s daughter Christine’, to president of the jury of the 1900 exposition, Jourdain.108 The dust jacket of the Albert Fine Art Album was also enthusiastic in displaying reviews from leading publications and correspondence with individual figures such as Leighton. The academy, in the form of the leading institution for the promotion of decorative arts in Victorian Britain, nevertheless, seems to have been reluctant to accept Bezirdjian’s works. In 2013 Bezirdjian’s two large-scale architectural drawings were again offered to the V&A by his surviving relatives.109 This time, they were accepted. A home was also found for Bezirdjian’s further personal archive of drawings and notebooks at the Manchester Metropolitan University Library. Thanks to a proliferation of academic work on migration, identities and mobility between East and West over the past ten years, museum collections have begun to open up their collections to include works that serve to document ‘in-between’ personalities like Bezirdjian. Further work is needed, though, to distance his example from being a mere curiosity among categories that continue, overwhelmingly, to separate into ‘Islamic Middle East’ or ‘Europe’.110

Notes 1

Teotig (Teotig Labdjindjian), Ամէնուն Տարեցոյցը [Everyone’s Almanach] (Constantinople: V. and H. Nersesian Publication, 1912 and 1921 (1912)), 255.

2

Victoria and Albert Museum, Blythe House Archives, Abstracts of Correspondence, [Registered Paper number] RP/1885/3751 [Date] 1885/06/18 [Correspondent] Hakoumian M. [Abstract] Recommends S. Bezirdjian as a competent artist for the decoration of room referred to in the genuine Oriental Style. [No further information is yet known on the identity of Hakoumian.]

3

Sopon Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album (London: John Heywood, 1889).

4

The 1891 Census states Bezidjian was around fifty at this point, when resident in Manchester. British National Archives (NA), England Census 1891, IR27/502, 1891.

57

Craft and Heritage 5 Teotig, Everyone’s Almanach, 255. This is also substantiated by a photograph of Sopon in his family’s archive, which shows him in an official photograph from the exposition. 6

Victoria and Albert Museum, Blythe House Archives, Abstracts of Correspondence, [Registered Paper number] RP/1911/1249, 1911/03/03 Bezirdjian, Sopon, Offers architectural designs for purchase.

7

Vladimir Barkhudaryan, ‘The Armenian Colonies’, in Armenia: Imprints of a Civilization, eds. Gabriella Uluhogian, Boghos Levon Zekiyan and Vartan Karapetian (Skira: Milan, 2011), 194.

8

Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean (California World History Library) (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014).

9

Hagop Barsoumian, The Armenian Amira Class of Istanbul (Yerevan: American University of Armenia, 2007).

10 Teotig, Everyone’s Almanach, 255. 11 Archag Alboyadjian, Les Dadian, tr. Anna Naguib Boutros-Ghali (Cairo, 1965), 59. 12 The Balyan Family were an amira family that held a monopoly over the construction of the sultan’s buildings. Pars Tuğlacı, The Role of the Balian Family in Ottoman Architecture (Istanbul: Yeni Çığır, 1990); Alyson Wharton, Architects of Constantinople: The Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 13 Teotig, Everyone’s Almanach, 255. 14 Alyson Wharton, ‘The Balyan Family and the “Linguistic Culture” of a Parisian Education’, International Journal of Islamic Architecture 5, no. 1 (2016): 39–71. 15 Cengiz Göncü, ‘Beylerbeyi Sarayi’nin Insa Sureci, Teskilati ve Kullanimi’, Istanbul University, Unpublished Masters Thesis, 2006. 16 Alyson Wharton, ‘The Unknown Craftsman Made Real: Sopon Bezirdjian, Armenian-ness and Crafting the Late Ottoman Palaces’, Études arméniennes contemporaines. Special Issue. towards Inclusive Art Histories: Ottoman Voices Speak Back 6 (2015): 71–109. 17 Turgut Saner, 19 Yüzyıl Istanbul Mimarlığında ‘Oryantalizm’ (Istanbul: Pera Turizm ve Ticaret, 1998). 18 Serkis and Agop Balyan sent a team of artists to Spain and North Africa. Tuğlacı, The Role of the Balian Family, 318. 19 Owen Jones, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, from Drawings Taken on the Spot in 1834 by the Late M. Jules Goury and in 1834 and 1837 by Owen Jones, Archt., (London: O. Jones, 1842–5). 20 Wharton, Architects of Constantinople, Ch. 5. 21 ‘Une sorte de malentendu régnait entre les Arméniens et les Turcs. Le Sultan Aziz ayant été déposé. La condition des Arméniens fut totalement changée sous le nouveau Sultan, et la capitale commença à prendre un air triste’. Marie Sevadjian, L’Amira, Traduit de l’Arménien Par Frederic Macler (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1907/1927), 176. ‘A misunderstanding existed between Armenians and Turks. Sultan Aziz had been deposed, the condition of the Armenians was completely changed under the new sultan, and the capital began to take on a sad air.’ 22 Teotik, Everyone’s Almanach, 255. 23 Joan George, Merchants in Exile. The Armenians in Manchester, England (1835–1935) (Reading: Taderon Press, 2002); Edwards’s Manchester and Salford Professional and Trades Directory, 1906, 69 and 286-7. 24 George, Merchants in Exile, 23.

58

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity 25 Ibid., 24. The textiles are very high quality, showing convergences with those in Ronald T. Marchese, Marlene R. Brev, and the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul, Splendor & Pageantry. Textile Treasures from the Armenian Orthodox Churches of Istanbul (Istanbul: Çitlembik Film Video Yapım Çeviri, 2010). 26 Denise Aghanian, The Armenian Diaspora. Cohesion and Fracture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007), 21. 27 Christina Maranci, Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and Nation (Leuven; Sterling, VA: Peeters, 2001). 28 James R. Russell, ‘Truth Is What the Eye Can See. Armenian Manuscripts and Armenian Spirituality’, in Treasures in Heaven. Armenian Art, Religion and Society, eds. T. F. Mathews and Roger S. Wieck (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1998), 149. 29 The British Architect. Series of Articles on the Buildings of the Present Day in the Various Districts of Great Britain, ‘Series II-Domestic Buildings. Country Mansions of Manchester, No. 1’, Manchester, 1874, 8–10. 30 There are a few exceptions, which are those belonging to the priests and which show much more explicit national and Armenian church iconography. 31 Informed by the research of Sarah Coggrave for Manchester Archives +. I thank the head of the Manchester Armenian Ladies Association, Penny Evrenson, for taking me to Didsbury and the Southern Cemetery. John Plotz, ‘The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Victorian Greater Britain’, Victorian Studies 49, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 659. 32 British National Archives (NA), England Census 1891, IR27/502, 1891. Ducie Street was part of the clearance areas in 1959. The Marr 1904 map indicates that it was upper working class or lower middle class. I thank my colleague Dr James Greenhalgh for this information. Marr, T. R., Housing Conditions in Manchester and Salford (Manchester, 1904). 33 Iskender (Theodore) is mentioned in Ahmet Ziya, ‘Nos Compatriotes en France’, La Jeune Turquie. Journal pour la défense des intérets de l’Empire ottoman, 9 July 1910, 3. 34 NA, England Census 1891, IR27/502, 1891. Sopon died in 1915 aged 76 in St Pancras. Theodore married Henrietta, who, naturalized in 1933, was ‘(Armenian) from Turkey’. The couple changed their name to Birch and moved from Cheshire, where their son Montagu was baptized in 1893, to London. NA, Baptism Record 1893; NA, Nationality and Naturalisation Certificate AZ3781, issued 4 December 1933. Sopon’s daughter Rose married John Morgan Bentley (professor of music and son of a calico printer). Manchester Archives, Manchester, Marriages and Bans 1754–1930, Rose Camellia Bezirdjian and John Morgan Bentley, Parish Church of St J. Chrysostom, Manchester, 2 January 1892. 35 Teotik, Everyone’s Almanach, 255. 36 These were also known as the Hamidian Massacres, as they took place under the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II and are asserted by some historians to have been carried out according to his orders. They were estimated to have killed between 150,000 and 200,000 Armenians. Stephan H. Astourian, ‘The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations Ethnicity and Power’ in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman Naimark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65. 37 Despite ongoing denial by the Turkish State and refusal to recognize the events as ‘genocide’ by major powers, such as the United States (although President Obama did use the Armenian term Medz Yeghern), studies by scholars such as Raymond Kevorkian and Taner Akçam have established a consensus that the events of 1915 constituted an attempt to annihilate the Armenian population of Ottoman-ruled Anatolia (Eastern Turkey). These

59

Craft and Heritage scholars have used a variety of sources in different languages, including Ottoman archival documents that Akçam upholds as a ‘smoking gun’. MESA’s book award in 2013 being given to Taner Akçam’s The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2013) pointed to the enshrinement of this scholarly recognition. 38 Jo Laycock, Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, Ambiguity and Intervention 1878–1925. Cultural History of Modern War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 103. 39 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 7. 40 Laycock, Imagining Armenia. 41 NA, England Census 1891, IR27/502, 1891. 42 Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 15. 43 Charlotte Gere, Nineteenth-Century Decoration: The Art of the Interior (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 47. 44 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 74.; Cites Designs and Catalogues of Cabinet and Upholstery Furniture (London, 1880), no page. 45 Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album, quotation from The Queen. 46 Ibid., quotation from The Athenaeum. 47 Ibid., quotation from Decoration. 48 Ibid., quotation from The European Mail. 49 Ibid., quotation from The Citizen. 50 Ibid., quotation from The News of the World. 51 Ibid., cover. 52 Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album, reviews by Myra’s Journal, the Lady’s Magazine and The Citizen. 53 Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 163–4. 54 Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album, quotation from The Lady’s Magazine states that Bezirdjian’s work would give readers ‘an idea of Oriental embroidery’. 55 Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 120. 56 Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album, quotation from The Athenaeum. 57 Ibid., quotation from The Queen. 58 David Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c.1820-1977’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 108–16. 59 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 282–3. Cites J. E. C., Bodley, The Coronation of Edward VII: A Chapter of European and Imperial History (London, 1903), 153, 201. 60 Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual’, 134. 61 Ibid., 137. 62 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 86. 63 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 92. 60

Sopon Bezirdjian, Craft, Heritage and Identity 64 Ibid., 84–5. 65 Briggs, Victorian Things, 157. 66 Gere, Nineteenth-Century Decoration, 27; Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 197–8; Deborah Cohen, Household Gods. The British and Their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), xv. 67 The Year’s Art 1885 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886), 62. 68 Cohen, Household Gods, 23, cites anonymous critic ‘Argus’. 69 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 29. 70 Briggs, Victorian Things, 71, cites the Guide to the 1851 Great Exhibition. 71 The Year’s Art 1885, 22. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Tim Barringer, ‘The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project’, in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, eds. T. J. Barringer, Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 23. 76 Ibid., 25. 77 Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886 Official Catalogue (London, 1886), xlviii, lxiii. 78 Sonia Ashmore, ‘Owen Jones and the V&A Collections’, V&A Online Journal, no. 1 (Autumn 2008), ISSN 2043-667X, accessed on 21 June 2019 at: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/ journals/research-journal/issue-01/owen-jones-and-the-v-and-a-collections/. 79 Owen Jones, ‘Lecture XX. An Attempt to Define the Principles Which Should Regulate the Employment of Colour in the Decorative Arts with a Few Words on the Present Necessity of an Architectural Education on the Part of the Public’, Lectures on the Merits of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London, 1852), 258. 80 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones. Illustrated by Examples from Various Styles of Ornament. One Hundred and Twelve Plates (London, 1868), 2. 81 Jones, ‘Lecture XX’, 259. 82 Ibid., 264. 83 Ibid., 262. 84 Jones, The Alhambra Court, 36–8. 85 Jones, ‘Lecture XX’, 262. 86 Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 76. 87 Digby Wyatt, ‘Lecture XIX, An Attempt to Define the Principles Which Should Determine Form in the Decorative Arts’, in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 247, citing Owen Jones, Journal of Design, June 1851. 88 Wyatt, ‘Lecture XIX’, 247, citing Jones Journal of Design, June 1851. 89 Yet Jones did note in his text that Persian styles portrayed figures. Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 75. 90 Jones, ‘Lecture XX’, 255. 91 Jones, ‘Lecture XIX’, 272. 92 Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album, 1. 61

Craft and Heritage 93 Ibid., 3. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 3–4. 96 Ibid., 3. 97 Ibid., 5–8. 98 Ibid., 5. 99 Ibid. 100 Julia Philips Cohen, ‘The East as a Career: Far Away Moses & Company in the Marketplace of Empires’, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 21, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 35–77; Juanita Marie Holland, ‘Mary Edmonia Lewis’s Minnehaha. Gender, Race and the “Indian Maid”’, in Diaspora and Visual Culture. Representing Africans and Jews, eds. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 45–56. 101 Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 102 Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album, cover and 4–5. 103 Richard Hagopian, Faraway the Spring (New York: Sribner, 1952), 126–9. 104 Julia Philips Cohen, ‘Oriental by Design: Ottoman Jews, Imperial Style, and the Performance of Heritage’, American Historical Review 119, no. 2 (2014): 364–98. 105 Rodini argues that this was not just an effort to ‘blend in’ but that Moise Camondo curated his collection with its future display in mind. Elizabeth Rodini, ‘Preserving and Perpetuating Memory at the Musée Nissim de Camondo’, Museum History Journal 7, no. 1 (2014): 36–54. 106 Plotz, ‘The First Strawberries in India’, 664. 107 Bezirdjian, Albert Fine Art Album, 8. 108 Teotig, Everyone’s Almanach, 255. This might have been Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, husband of Helena or daughter Charlotte. 109 The two drawings can be viewed at the link: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1275100/ drawing-bezirdjian-sopon/. 110 The geographical locations according to which items are displayed in the V&A include Islamic Middle East, Europe 1600-1815, Japan, Korea, South Asia and China. Although collections do now include nineteenth and twentieth century and contemporary Islamic art, unlike in Jones’s day, there remains a sense of what to do with individuals like Sopon within these categories.

62

CHAPTER 3 EMPIRE, NATION AND BIÊN HÒA CERAMICS: CRAFT AS A SITE OF CHRONOPOLITICAL REPRODUCTION

Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương

During several summers between 2011 and 2017 spent in and around the present applied art school in Biên Hoà, still known for ceramics made famous by its previous colonial incarnation, I heard of two instances of ceramic objects being smashed by the school’s directors. In the first story, the head of the colonial school in the 1920s and 1930s, Robert Balick would smash all ceramic pieces he deemed less than exquisite. In the second story, the head of the school in the late 1970s, newly appointed by the victorious revolutionary government of a unified Vietnam, smashed all exquisite pieces representative of the school’s best achievements. The faculty and staff of the present school see the first as a story about the act of civilizing the natives by laying down strict standards for artisanal craft. The second they see as a story about the act of dogmatic destruction of those standards in reaction perhaps to the colonial and neocolonial deployment of the idea of civilization and progress to subjugate those in a place like Vietnam. Both were political acts deploying the very idea of craft that contested notions of heritage. What is craft? We moderns seem to understand it only in opposition to something else, as that which is not mass-produced and not art. As the Arts and Crafts Movement was linked to socialist and progressive reforms in the United States and Britain, its promoters presented handicraft practitioners as individuals engaged in unalienated labour to oppose late-nineteenth-century industrialization and early-twentieth-century Fordist mass production of goods.1 In this understanding of craft, the past of tradition is evoked to oppose the then present and future of industrial capitalism. Likewise, mainstream art history and the global art market separate art from craft, relegating the latter to tradition, objects and practices that comprise a group’s or nation’s heritage. And unless the objet d’art resulting from such artisanal craft was antique or rare, works of art would fetch a lot more money in the art market. The question of why ‘innovative art’ is elevated above ‘traditional craft’ is so obvious that there is a TED talk devoted to it.2 The answer offered in this TED lesson points to a historical turn when value in individual innovation came to be celebrated with the rise of Renaissance humanism that would later spread to the rest of the world through European colonialism. Beyond this historical tracing of a simple transfer of humanist value in European colonialism, I argue this relegation of craft to tradition in the context of the colony is a legacy of colonial chronopolitical enforcement of progressive time as an instrument of rule. Colonial art education privileged the modern innovation and creativity of the

Craft and Heritage

individual artist over native practices relegated to craft passed down from a so-called static past. Predictably, the anti-colonial nation and its developmentalist state also rely on this colonial notion of ‘traditional craft’ to both symbolize the nation’s antiquity and promote its engagement with the global economy. These craft ‘traditions’ however have complex histories and contemporary fates that defy these bifurcated categories. I am examining the case of Biên Hoà ceramics in southern Vietnam to think through the politics at these sites of artistic production. Biên Hoà ceramics has gone through many phases of diverse innovations since the days of French colonialism through the École des Arts appliqués de Biên Hòa. The artisanal and artistic skills gained international attention during the previous age of empires; yet today in the current age of global capital, many skilled ceramics artists must fill subcontracted orders for retailers such as Ikea or World Market. The chronopolitics set in motion by colonial education now operates through the global production and exchange of craft products as authenticity. On another level, the same logic applies where the cosmopolitan art world incorporates this chronopolitical fetishization to artists who work with older traditions like Biên Hoà ceramics. These artists face either rejection of their work as a form of handicraft lacking the value ascribed to contemporary art or the incorporation of their work by cosmopolitan mediators who either exoticize or disregard local conditions and power relations.

Biên Hoà Twenty-five kilometres northeast of Saigon, Biên Hoà today is ringed by pollutionspewing factories engaged in capitalist global production seeking less-than-liveable waged labour. The soupy air on bad days reminds inhabitants of less visible poisons in the soil known by their rainbow colours: agents white, green, blue, pink, purple, orange. The American-run Biên Hoà Airbase held the largest stockpile of tactical herbicides in wartime South Vietnam. Buried in a common grave by American forces under the airbase for nearly half a century were 150 bodies of National Liberation Front combatants, more popularly known then as the Viet Cong, who attacked the airbase during Tết 1968. It was also here that a French colonial art school made Biên Hoà ceramics internationally known. Biên Hoà, in other words, was and is a place caught up in often deadly entanglements with global and regional economies and geopolitics in a history that included migration and empires. Although much older settlements with pottery existed in the general region,3 what is now geographically Biên Hoà was part of the Óc Eo culture and the Cham and Khmer empires before Vietnamese settlement in the area. Regional archaeological sites show a distribution of material culture identified as Óc Eo across a large area which some have attributed to territory southwest of Champa labelled Funan (c. first century to seventh century AD) in Chinese records. There may have been a collection of Hinduized municipalities rather than a kingdom called Funan, but the area definitely conducted trade with the Mediterranean world. The second-century geographer and astronomer 64

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics

Claudius Ptolemy identified a port he called Cottiaris or Kattigara/Cattigara, which later historians and geographers placed in various locales in present-day southern Vietnam.4 Legends of the riches of Cattigara and the gold mines of Champa (Ciamba) motivated early explorers like Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespuci who stumbled upon the New World in the process.5 From the eighth century on, southern Vietnam became part of the Cambodian empire (802–1431 AD), whose zenith culminated in the building of Angkor and whose art reflects Hindu and Buddhist traditions.6 Vietnamese settler colonialism in the region would become the next wave of migration and settlement. Vietnamese annexation of this portion of the Cambodian empire was aided militarily by Chinese Ming troops who fled the Manchu conquest. These military men were referred to as Minh Hương (or those burning incense to the Ming Dynasty). They provided security for seventeenth-century Viet settlements and defended this region against Cambodian and sometimes Siamese claims for the Nguyễn Lords who used these settlements to wrestle this territory piecemeal from the Cambodian court and of course to dispossess diverse local tribal communities, making up what would become southern Vietnam in a unified country under the Nguyễn dynasty from 1802 on.7 This brand of Vietnamese settler colonialism with remnant Ming Chinese military support marginalized Khmer and other ethnic communities and provided what would later become the mainstream cultural formation of the region. Vietnamese from north and central Vietnam moved in and Chinese migration extended into the colonial period with waves from different regions of China, including Guangdong. Of particular note were the ceramics produced from the 1670s onward by the Chinese community who had settled on the small isle called Cù Lao Phố. Early pottery in the general Saigon area bears  resemblance to the work of Shiwan potters from Guangdong in southern China. We see such similarity in the roof ornamentation on top of temples in the forms of colour-glazed ceramic figures of people, animals, flowers, etc. Ceramics emerging from this history later came to be known as Cây Mai pottery in the Saigon larger area, influencing regional practices. This pottery style is marked by vivid colour glazes that run over figures in low, mid and high relief. Craftsmen on the isle of Cù Lao Phố used the local clay and mineral deposits of the Đồng Nai River to make household items such as vases, vats, decorative reliefs on walls and roofs of residences and temples, as well as statues for worship.8 The next wave of innovation came when South Vietnam was a direct French colony called Cochinchine. Since its opening in 1903 and particularly from 1923 under the leadership of Robert and Mariette Balick, the École des arts appliqués de Biên Hòa spearheaded a new phase in Biên Hòa ceramics. Robert Balick graduated from L’École national superieure des arts decoratifs de Paris. He taught casting and became director of the school from 1923 to 1940 and then again from 1943 to 1946. His wife Mariette graduated from L’École des beaux arts de Limoges. As the main ceramics lecturer at the Biên Hòa school, Mariette Balick set out to innovate a new line of ceramics that would put the school on the map and help it acquire an international presence. She worked with local practitioners to innovate on existing glazes and firing techniques. Together, they developed the celadon glaze called vert de Bien Hoa that would make its mark at 65

Craft and Heritage

international expositions in Paris in 1925 and 1931, leading to many commissions and the establishment of a school-run cooperative in 1933 to meet commercial demand, with a Paris commercial office established in the 1940s.9 The aesthetics promoted by the school was diverse. Early works drew some continuity with Cây Mai ceramics in their use of bright colour glazes. The Biên Hoà style formed since the Balicks was marked by a prevalence of exotic and historical motifs. Potters from the middle decades of the twentieth century reproduced vases in the ‘Lý-Trần’ style, evoking the two dynasties considered the golden age of the Vietnamese nation. Figure 3.1 shows a prevalence of motifs that call to mind Cambodian civilization, either as an exoticized representation of a neighbouring culture in the region or an evocation of historical Khmer presence in Southern Vietnam where the region was part of the Cambodian empire prior to Vietnamese and Chinese settlement. The same manner of cultural appropriation appears in the prevalence of ethnic motifs, including representations of minoritized upland culture. These works also revived Chinese forms and themes that evoke antiquity. Yet these historical and exotic elements were often combined with more contemporary Art Nouveau and Art Deco motifs from the 1920s and 1930s. The unique result of this mixing became recognized as the Biên Hoà style.

Figure 3.1  Biên Hoà vase with Angkor motifs c. 1960s 66

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics

Colonial time: Biên Hoà and colonial art education The École des arts appliqués de Biên Hòa was part of a network of local arts and trade schools opened by the colonial government first and foremost to supply items of practical and decorative use to French settlers and the local intermediary class of civil servants and merchants. But art and applied art schools also served ideological functions. The French mission civilisatrice pushed modernity as the progress that French colonial rule would bring to Vietnam. Western fine art and literature were presented as the cultural achievements of bourgeois modernity in relation to local cultural forms. Even the reforms ended up reinforcing this intelligibility. Radical socialist Albert Sarraut, who served as the French governor of Cochinchine in the 1910s, pushed the idea of ‘association’ as the softer form of assimilation in the colony, leading to the systematic incorporation of local cultural elements into French policies and education.10 The implications of this move were at least twofold for artistic practices in the colony. First, ‘local’ elements came in various forms. Kerry Nguyen-Long argues that Biên Hoà ceramics responded to the popularity of Chinoiserie from the eighteenth century, as well as Japonisme and Art Nouveau from the mid-nineteenth century in France.11 European Orientalist knowledge production, artistic practice, as well as commodification and consumption determined an intelligibility of the ‘local’ essentialized into ‘oriental traditions’. Another related source was onsite colonial production of knowledge about the local. These included travelogues, memoirs, anthropological and other kinds of studies including those coming out of the École Française d’Extrême-Orient, as well as colonial government records and reports. For example, a Sorbonne graduate and an official in the French colonial government in Indochina, Henri Oger, worked with a team of woodblock cutters to record social and cultural practices in Tonkin. The result was a work of multiple volumes called ‘The Technique of the Annamese People by Henri Oger – An Encyclopaedia of All the Instruments, of the Utensils, of all the Gestures of the Life and Crafts of the Tonkin Annamese People’.12 Such knowledge production recorded and catalogued local objects and practices from the viewpoint of the European colonial administrator-cum-amateur anthropologist with all the attendant issues at the nexus of power and knowledge that became the staple for self-reflection in the discipline of anthropology in the American academy throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The European production of knowledge helped to apprehend the world they were about to conquer or were administering. As seen in the French promotion of Angkor Wat, discovering local achievements and exotic practices also added to the value of European colonial possessions. The circulation of such knowledge back to the ‘natives’ through colonial education completes colonial appropriation in that these local inhabitants were compelled to see themselves and their cultural practices through the eyes of their colonial rulers and the latter’s system of valuation. Colonial knowledge production supported the racialization and racism in bolstering European rule over the colony and the modernity project of the European civilizing mission. In that way, innovations in the form of ‘local’ elements incorporated into artistic works such as the Biên Hoà ceramics must not be understood apart from the context of 67

Craft and Heritage

colonial knowledge production. Much of what was deemed local beyond materials and craftsmanship also played into an exoticist aesthetics that evoked the wide and far in time and place, rendered contemporary and enjoyable to Europeans through a presentation of fashionable contemporary motifs such as the previously mentioned Art Deco elements. Second, Bội Trân Huỳnh argues that French colonial art education, while incorporating local forms and practices, privileged Western art over local craft. She writes of l’École supérieure des beaux-arts de l’Indochine or the Fine Art College of Indochina (FACI): The FACI inaugurated the biggest aesthetic shift in arts and crafts through its new vision and status for artists. It expanded painting practice, so it was on equal terms with the existing tradition in sculpture and set up a distinction between fine and applied arts. […] The establishment of the FACI initiated a new profession in Vietnamese culture, denoted by the word ‘hoạ sĩ’ (painter), to describe a creator of artistic painting, as opposed to ‘thợ vẽ’ meaning a person who draws or paints as a craft. Furthermore, artists – the creators – started to sign their names on their works, an action that reveals individuality.13 Practices at the FACI, argues Huỳnh, impelled ‘students to rise out of the artisan level and be “a real artist”, leading to a “disdain of craft”’.14 Art acquired the status of modernity while craft was relegated to tradition in the locality. Franco-Vietnamese ‘association’, whatever the progressive intentions, turned out not to be the egalitarian affair its proponents touted. Incorporation of traditions was encouraged by French art educators, yet such encouragement could only be sustained in a frame of understanding that distinguished Western art from local craft. What might look like the integration of local and Western elements in aesthetics seems less innocently syncretic and more like the deployment of local labour, materials and cultural work for the advancement of modern artistic practices, if not the project of colonialism itself. If the teaching and production of Biên Hoà ceramics in this period did not escape the general colonial equation of power discussed above, the Balicks’ approach took seriously local history, skills, techniques, knowledge, forms and materials beyond token appropriation. The l’École des arts appliqués de Biên Hoà encouraged teachers and students to explore museums, old texts, objects of older history from various areas of Indochina, including what is now Vietnam. Biên Hoà practitioners studied their earlier cultural heritage – the ceramic works of the Vietnamese Lý (1009–1225 AD) and the Trần (1226–1400 AD) dynasties – and adopted techniques as well as forms from this period in Vietnamese ceramics. Etching and carving techniques similar to the Lý Trần ceramics became part of the mainstay of the Biên Hoà style.15 The work of the school stimulated local innovations. A grouping called the Societé cooperative artisanal des potiers de Bien Hoa was formed in association with the school in 1933, separated from the school in 1950, but continued until 1974. This society developed the technique of applying glaze in a way that accentuates reliefs and leaves etched borders, and where negative and other selected spaces have a thinly applied 68

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics

transparent coating. Sometimes this background is filled in with a different colour glaze for contrast. Glazes come from local ingredients usually containing ash and give a different surface texture and appearance than industrial glazes. With some updating, this style endured into the post-independence era under the Republic of Vietnam in the South lasting from 1954 to 1975 (Plate 2). Within the logic of colonial knowledge production that served a narrative of progress, empire, and European civilization as the guardian of human history and culture through the collection of artefacts and teaching about the history and culture of various places, the Biên Hoà practitioners, including teachers like the Balicks, promoted aesthetic sensibilities opened to exploration and mixing of diverse sources and elements. European empire allowed for innovative reprisals of expression of previous empires and waves of migration, resulting in the complex place that Biên Hoà was by the mid-twentieth century. What the Balicks did with their encouragement of local techniques and exploration into this history paved the way for local practitioners to take advantage of opportunities to expose their creations to a much wider world, of course catering to European tastes, but also engaging with the layered and intersecting histories of the region through cultural appropriation. It was a complex negotiation between French ideological work in art promotion and commodification on the one hand and local responses on the other. The results were open exploration and incorporation in unequal power relations that at the same time reproduced the colonial deployment of modernity and tradition in grand historiographic imagining of time as progress, which in turn fuelled the fetishization in a commodity economy of art objects as cultural artefacts. This does not mean such colonial chronopolitics can exhaust our understanding of Biên Hoà ceramics. Besides carving out a niche in Paris and beyond as the combination of Orientalist/exoticist themes delivered by modern European decorative aesthetics, Biên Hoà ceramics, well into the postcolonial period, also served the local community. Besides objects of everyday use like the famous Biên Hoà clay vats, bowls, tea sets, incense pots, animal statues, etc., Biên Hoà also turned out a large number of statues for worship. These also reflect the syncretic and eclectic sensibilities of the Biên Hoà style, yet their spiritual purpose spilled beyond the colonial chronopolitics and commodity market I have so far suggested. Among the most popular of these is the figure of ‘Tara’ the female aspect of the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion Avalokiteshvara. Tara has multiple iterations and sources, even perhaps Hindu ones. The Tara forms in Biên Hoà statues are also multiple with Chinese Kuan-yin features, Cham and other elements that might be traceable to artefacts from Champa, Cambodia, among other sources. The presence of diverse elements in objects of worship complicates the assignment of these features to fetishization and exoticism in a global commodity economy of art objects in late colonialism. Rather, this speaks to local syncretic religious practices like those of Hoà Hảo Buddhism and Caodai, whose pantheon included the Buddha, Jesus, Kuan-Yin, Li Bai, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Vietnamese scholar Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm.16 It would be wise for us to note practitioners and consumers of craft often exceed the function to which they are assigned in unfavourable relations of power bent on producing culture that serves either political power or global capital. 69

Craft and Heritage

National time: The quandary of modernization Benedict Anderson argues the imagined nation narrates itself backwards and forwards in time to foster a sense of continuity similar to that provided by religious thought ‘between the dead and the yet unborn’ in a community.17 He points to the colonial practice of collecting and displaying antiquities in museums that provided a visual repertoire for the newly independent nation in its construction of a common national past binding its new citizens into a people.18 Yet the new nation’s projection of itself backwards in time as a means to bind its people enters into a fraught relationship with the need to present itself as modern and on par with a fraternity of other nations in the postcolonial era. If colonial authorities relied on a historiography of progress to subjugate the people in the colony, the postcolonial nation must prove itself capable in the role of the new agent of progress. The postcolonial nation necessarily incarnates in the developmentalist state and engages in a complex deployment of past and future, tradition, heritage and modernity in its quest to modernize. Even before the birth of the new nation state at the site of the colony, future citizens would already see themselves as members of a nascent nation courtesy of nationalist ideas spread by diasporics who travelled to the metropoles, met others from different colonies, learned of the common condition produced by colonialism and dreamed of alternative futures. In the Vietnamese case, the alternative solidified into nationalist violence costing millions of lives in the impending First and Second Indochina Wars, respectively, against the French from 1946 to 1954, and against the Americans from the late 1950s to 1975. The war against the French ended in the creation of the Democratic Republic in the North and the Republic in the South. The war against the Americans ended with the birth of the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In each of these nation states, what it meant to claim a place for one’s nation was a complex dance between particularities in recognizable traditional forms and claims on universality in human progress. In the North, socialist realism oriented new visual aesthetics on sculptures, murals and mobilization posters exhorting citizens to fight old (French) and new (American) colonialism in order to bring about a socialist society and the new man. Marxist historiography underwrote the truth of progress in human history through struggle between class archetypes albeit with ‘Vietnamese’ features, clothing and surroundings. There was no arrogant exaltation of art over craft. Instead, there was to be one mode of cultural expression for all realms of cultural production: nationalist in that it is liberatory, proletarian or peasant in the Vietnamese historical context and forward looking.19 Modernity in the Western vein was to be bested, not rejected even as the nation was undergoing wars of liberation. In his last days, ever the poet of the future, Hồ Chí Minh in his 1969 will and testament still promised a better tomorrow from the ongoing destruction of war: ‘Defeating the American enemy, we will build ten times what stands today.’20 Whatever the particularities in the visual markings of ‘traditional’ repertoires, they must move the nation forwards ever closer to the universal humanist telos of a communist future. Itself a postcolonial nation replete with an anti-colonial ideology, the Republic of Vietnam in the South similarly made a claim on modernity and the universal value 70

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics

of art, albeit far from socialist realism. Through governmental agencies, the young republic under Ngô Đình Diệm established regular art competitions and prizes to build a national culture while he consolidated power through the violent elimination of groups like the Bình Xuyên, Hoà Hảo and Cao Đài, armed forces left over from the war against the French; and political opposition forces like the Đại Việt Quốc Dân Đảng and Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng. The young state’s inaugural art exposition in 1962 attempted to set the direction for art in the young nation. In a lengthy manifesto about art, nation, and modernity, the representative of the organizing committee forcefully set down the universalizing tendencies of modern art. Giving an account of the progression of human historical time in the realm of artistic achievement, the author wrote: ‘In the previous centuries, the paintings of different nations throughout the world were more or less aboriginal or folkloristic’, which ‘cannot be considered as superior or inferior to another one, especially from the ethnographical viewpoint’.21 However, ‘with the modern means of communication and of transport of today, cultures (just as paintings) inevitably confront each other and reciprocally influence each other in successful confrontations for the common benefit’.22 The result is that cultural works ‘lose little by little, without realising it, their local or national character, and become new ones, conceived and realised with a spirit and a concept of the era in which we live’.23 This coming-out party for South Vietnamese art was the young nation state’s way of claiming presence and parity in the modern world. In unequivocal terms, Vietnamese art must join this march of human progress, which at that moment includes all the new artistic movements. Indeed, some artists at the time embraced what they thought of as new movements in art. This confidence and optimism in the modernity and universality of Vietnamese art would soon be overwhelmed by war. The Second Indochina War, started by North Vietnam to unify the country through violent means after the Geneva Accords of 1954 partitioned the country along Cold War lines, was already raging and would soon be known to the world as the Vietnam War. By 1963, one year after that hopeful manifesto and international debut of Vietnamese art, Ngô Đình Diệm was overthrown and killed with American approval, signalling the escalation of American involvement in the war. War was not the only cause of the demise of claims of modernity in South Vietnamese art. Colonial chronopolitical deployment in the realm of art lived on in other forms. Despite claims in former colonies on their cultural parity in modernity with the old European colonial masters or the neocolonial replacement in the form of the United States, newly independent nations found themselves caught in Westernissued postcolonial judgement of them as mere places of lack – lacking full humanity because their liberatory redemption in humanist historiography led only to slaughter in nationalist and revolutionary violence trailing with corpses from Africa to Asia, and falling short in modern cultural achievement, belying their lack of civilization in the first place just as the colonial mission civilisatrice narrative had asserted. In these postcolonial relations which included newly independent nations’ renewed economic and security dependence on old and new colonial masters, artists from these places could never catch up to their masters in the march towards the humanist telos. Indeed, writing about 71

Craft and Heritage

the futility of the cultural logic of catching-up, Boitran Huynh-Beattie makes the brutal assessment that the Vietnamese attempt ‘to play “catch-up” with the West while evading its shadow, particularly in South Vietnam’ ‘turned out to be outdated before it was born’.24 This exhausting pursuit pushed the postcolonial nation to retreat into ‘tradition’, tipping the scale towards the other side of the national chronopolitical formula. By 1972, ten years after the government-organized International Exhibition’s manifesto urging the embrace of all movements in modern art, art writer Peggy Steinle writes for the New York Times that because of wartime travel restrictions resulting in South Vietnam’s isolation, South Vietnamese artists ‘do not understand modern art and cannot adapt it to their own needs’.25 Asserting that South Vietnamese insist on their visual tradition consisting solely of silk screen and lacquer supplemented by outdated French movements learned in colonial times, Steinle complains of South Vietnamese failure to engage with contemporary forms while their reality demanded such engagement: [T]urbulence and frustration cloud their lives, yet they do not respond to Abstract Expressionism. Their cities smother in commercialism and urban congestion, yet they dismiss Pop and Op. Instead they rely on a combination of the styles they know: Impressionism, Surrealism, Symbolism – hardly adequate to convey the violent emotions of today’s Vietnam.26 It is difficult to fathom why only American contemporary forms of Abstract Expressionism and Pop and Op art would be adequate to the task of expressing violent emotions in wartime. Or that cultural movements like surrealism mostly born out of colonial violence, seen in the poetics of such cultural works as Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,27 would not be up to the task of dealing with neocolonial and nationalist-revolutionary violence. Steinle’s writings on the South Vietnamese art scene merely reflect common judgements issued from the old and new metropoles – the Paris of old and the New York of new – that find postcolonial nations wanting when it comes to the civilizational catch-up game with the West. What could governments and artists or other cultural producers do from these places of want, given the condescension towards, and assignment of, a place like South Vietnam to backwardness because of violence endemic to these postcolonial nations? The obstacles to the early hopes of joining a modern ‘brotherhood’ of nations on their way to a brighter future increasingly seemed insurmountable. They had little choice but to lean more heavily on cultural modes of expression that are given some credit as their own, rather than those perpetually seen as pale imitations of those in the West: art forms relegated to traditional craft in the old colonial temporal deployment. The postcolonial developmentalist state promoted modernization of economy and politics while tethering its nationalist credentials on traditional cultural forms. As the war intensified in Vietnam through the latter half of the 1960s, a war fought on Southern soil more and more with American aid and American soldiers, the South Vietnamese State increasingly relied on traditional cultural forms as it lost the mantle of the nation 72

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics

in the eyes of its citizens and the world. Understood in the colonial narrative as crafts, traditional forms like silk screen, lacquer, wood carving and of course ceramics took on a heavier burden of embodying national identity. As such, they entered into the body of national art in painting, sculpture and architecture. The most visible example of the last of course was the ‘traditional’ motifs in the design of the Independence Palace, the South Vietnamese presidential palace completed in 1966. In the late 1960s, the South Vietnamese government erected in central locations of Saigon statues of Vietnamese nationalist heroes selected from the nation’s myths and history like those of King An Dương Vương, Phù Đổng Thiên Vương, Trần Hưng Đạo and Trần Nguyễn Hãn.28 Steinle in 1972 complains of the pervasive presence of silk screen and lacquer in state-organized art competitions, which according to her was the sign of conservatism stifling artistic innovation.29 Such complaints about the craftification of national art not only ignore the deadly postcolonial politics of perpetual civilizational lag ascribed to the formerly colonized, they also reproduce such politics and the attendant value assignation. The cultural dialectics of colonialism and nationalism came to a head with the communist victory of 1975 and the forced unification of the Republic in the South with the Democratic Republic in the North to create the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam with its capital in Hanoi. It was in this triumphant moment rife with an inferiority complex on the part of the victorious anti-colonial nation that the new head of the now renamed Đồng Nai College for Decorative Arts, a northerner assigned to a leadership position in the defeated South, in a revolutionary gesture smashed all samples selected to best represent the achievements of Biên Hoà ceramics from the French and South Vietnamese days. It was a gesture in turn pathetic and terrorizing to artists and educators connected to the old applied art school. A former head of the school told me this act scared him into burning all his beloved books published under the Southern ancien régime.30 By then, Biên Hoà ceramics were already tainted by both colonial art education and a neocolonial-occupied South Vietnamese regime looking for national culture while flailing with the pressure of a hot war within a Cold War waged from Hanoi and Washington. Neither art nor craft, in the communist perspective, should be decorative. Rather, they should serve the purpose of advancing wars of liberation and socialist culture; in other words, moving Vietnamese forwards in Marxist historiography, which of course was just another version of Enlightenment progress towards humanist mastery as redemption. In the minds of these nationalists/revolutionaries, this Marxist variant of progress could nullify the Western variant of progress in bourgeois modernity used to subjugate people in the colonies. Biên Hoà ceramic objects, primarily decorative in purpose, exemplified the double sin of colonized nation and bourgeois culture. Drawing strength from revolutionary conceptions of progress, that new head of the art school would smash the inferiority produced by the West’s colonial and neocolonial conceptions of progress that perpetually relegated Vietnamese to the backwaters of humanity. He had another reason to fear the ceramics coming out of Biên Hoà – its regional character. The whole field of complex nationalist negotiations over meanings in cultural production is further complicated by the need to narrate national temporal continuity entangled in the politics of geography replete with problematic regional histories. Once 73

Craft and Heritage

unified, the new Vietnamese nation would strive to build one new national culture centred on an imagined origin in the North, allowing the nation to make a claim on one uninterrupted lineage from antiquity. With such a complex history and eclectic sensibility, Biên Hoà ceramics would pose difficulties for efforts to incorporate it into a nationalist framework of a unified culture. What Biên Hoà exemplified instead was the problem that nationalized culture in Vietnam encountered with things southern, precisely because of this history of empire and migration. Among other things, Chinese, Cambodian and French elements in southern cultural practices and productions disrupted this imaginary about a northern-centric national homogeneity and temporal continuity.

Global time: Tradition and capitalist time lags If crafts came to be seen as carrying ‘tradition’ in both the colonial and postcolonial nationalist narrative albeit for different reasons, they became rife for their fetishization as commodities of local colour, exotic in both space and time. As socialist Vietnam marketized in the late 1980s and integrated into the global capitalist economy, the Communist Party used essentialist notions of Vietnamese culture to maintain legitimacy and control over this process.31 The government slogan has been ‘Giữ gìn bản sắc dân tộc’ [safeguard the essence of the nation]. Cultural authorities, with copious encouragement and pressure from the government, impose this northern model of the Vietnamese traditional craft village on understandings of artisanal clusters in southern Vietnam.32 While ill-fitting in its embodiment of homogeneous national culture, what remains of Biên Hoà ceramics is now part of the subcontract chain of global mass production for buyers like Ikea or World Market who in turn market these products to global middleclass consumers looking for traces of the old handicraft traditions and exotic styles. Fittingly, World Market’s slogan is ‘Unique, authentic, and always affordable’.33 Such exotic ‘authenticity’ geared to metropolitan consumption of cheaper goods is predicated on cheap global production, realized in the factories that ring modernday Biên Hoà. Global capital marshals the progressive historiography that for so long organized our experience of time in order to create zones of lags, between the global metropoles and its peripheries, between the urban and the rural in each ethnonationalist territory, inhabitants of which could be subjected to differentiating regimes of consumption and work in social worlds that produce gradations of civilization and degrees of human dignity. As the late socialist state enters into the global economy to ‘modernise and industrialise’, it offers its particularly rural female populace as a source of such cheap labor.34 From the 1930s, as mentioned, Biên Hoà ceramic producers grew to produce for both domestic and international markets. These were small producers, each retaining the artisanal character of Biên Hoà ceramics. Each was usually run by a family of artisans with the help of a few to a dozen workers engaged in manual shaping, glazing and firing in wood-burning kilns. Some of these producers survived through the war 74

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics

and revived in the 1980s exporting to Eastern Europe as Vietnam entered into the international economy of socialist countries. Now, a couple of decades after Vietnam’s entrance into the global economy, producers of Biên Hoà ceramics have to turn to subcontracting for these global chains if they want to survive. The last holdouts of Biên Hoà ceramic producers currently fill orders of planters, vases and large rainwater vats ubiquitous to the region now converted to the function of decorating the gardens of middle-class consumers in the metropoles.

The contemporary: Biên Hoà ceramics beyond craft The colonial differentiation of craft from art held sway and surfaced as soon as socialist Vietnam rejoined the capitalist economy since the late 1980s. The international art market pressed for the craftification of art (made possible by the logic separating craft from art in the first place) started in the postcolonial era as mentioned in relation to the Republic of Vietnam. To acquire market value from the 1990s on, Vietnamese art must take on exoticist airs. Paintings of Hanoi streets by Bùi Xuân Phái, one of the last graduates of FACI, fetched good prices because they convey the atmosphere of a bygone Hanoi. Since the 1990s, Đỗ Quang Em and his followers have been selling at high prices large numbers of works of hyperrealism in exoticist tableaux of women in local attires and other local colours. The selling formula had to be art with exotic local colours embodying tradition. Craft, on the other hand, remained devalued in their assignation as ‘not art’ even while they are relegated to tradition. Some contemporary practitioners of Biên Hoà ceramics pose a challenge to this separation of craft from art, tradition from modernity. Their works represent contemporary innovations that pay homage to local histories via techniques and materials, while pursuing Biên Hoà’s exploratory and eclectic sensibilities. The market and other institutions for contemporary art, forever fighting to distinguish themselves from less exalted pursuits, differentiating creativity from authenticity, do not notice these kinds of art practices with complicated and entangled histories. Falling in the crack between sub-contracted order and exalted contemporary art, commercial disadvantages liberate these contemporary practitioners to a degree. One of these practitioners is Nguyễn Trọng Lộc, who teaches at the Đồng Nai College for Decorative Arts. His contemporary work pays little attention to embodying local characteristics for national culture. His work uses local materials and some local glazing techniques. However, his themes depart from colonial and postcolonial pursuits in Biên Hoà ceramics. In a current series of striking sculptures ranging from a few inches to five feet in height depicting the various conditions of the (un)human, Lộc refuses the exoticism of tradition ascribed to Biên Hoà craft. Instead, he explores the precarity of the human in uncanny forms and contorted poses (Figure 3.2). Together with another Biên Hoà artist, Nguyễn Quốc Chánh, Lộc stretches the continuity of forms, style, techniques, and introduces tension into what might still be labelled Biên Hoà ceramics. 75

Craft and Heritage

Figure 3.2  Nguyễn Trọng Lộc, Untitled, ceramic figurines, 2018 Nguyễn Quốc Chánh is first known as a poet who began the political dissident ‘Saigon sidewalk’ literary movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s circumventing government monopoly over all media. Chánh sought out to learn Biên Hoà ceramic history and techniques in a 2010–2011 residency at the same school. His ‘Chân đất’ (Barefoot) series uses the form of the vats, a Biên Hoà staple (Figure 3.3). Attentive to the position of Biên Hoà ceramics in global and nationalist imaginings, Chánh writes in his artist’s statement: Rather than nostalgic reproductions or subcontracted production, I make use of local clay, glazes, and techniques to evoke Biên Hòa’s eclectic tendencies blurring the boundaries between artisanal craft and art, between sentiment and concept. In this Barefoot series, I follow the art of Biên Hòa vat making but inspired by the footfalls of Burmese monks marching against military dictatorship in 2007.35 76

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics

Figure 3.3  Nguyễn Quốc Chánh, Barefoot, ceramics, 2011 Other works by this artist continue to play with traditional forms, distorting them for purposes relevant to contemporary times. His Parallax series from 2011 uses the same vat-making techniques, yet these sculptures feature shifting male and female, masculine and feminine, imposing and abject forms depending on the angle of viewing. The multiplicity of shifting forms in this series speaks to the condition of a place like Biên Hoà within Vietnam, former colony in the periphery of today’s world, whose very sense of time and place becomes enmeshed in conflicting aspirations produced within capitalist global temporal zones of lag. In this series, the act of making sense of self and the world is enmeshed in multiple frames of reference, shattering the unity of the viewer. Chanh’s current series Guerrilla Mode reprises moulds of conventional Biên Hoà motifs like the faces of goddesses, dragon scales, water buffaloes in rice fields, etc., to combine with ironic sculptural forms to create a sense of humorous unease about the movement of history that renders obsolete both national conventions and the revolution that co-opted them (Plate 3). On many in this series, we find coins discovered at excavated Óc Eo archaeological sites next to American bank-issued credit cards, with revolutionary figures in the likeness of Lenin and those in revolutionary mobilization posters next to moulds of Tara-like goddesses. Appearing together on these strange forms, the conventional motifs’ orthodox meanings become disrupted and they must exist uncannily in relation to each other in a state of disorder and uncertainty. The use of moulds of conventional motifs for new purposes speaks to the country’s long history of guerrilla warfare not only as a mode of violence but also as a mindset in the everyday life of Vietnamese. 77

Craft and Heritage

Such play between traditional forms and contemporary conditions defies clichéd imaginings about local artists having to ‘catch up’ to contemporary Western ideas and concepts in a place like Vietnam – former colony and formerly of the revolutionary Third World. In such places, responses to ‘the West’ in vastly lopsided power relations have been happening for longer than a century. Locals have been responding in cultural forms, intellectual ideas and armed liberation all along the way with complex results not easily chalked up to failure or success, positive change or destructive violence. Understanding of local cultural works as either ‘catching up’ to contemporary artistic concerns or performances of local authenticity has been more a function and compulsion of transnational markets for goods, including art. Additionally, while interpretations of local art as playing catch-up to the cosmopolitan centres in the West flatter world art collectors, curators and art practitioners from the West, performances of authenticity often play into local mobilization of nationalism for both commercial and political gains. The colonial legacy of relegating craft to local traditions paradoxically rendered it amenable to anti-colonial nationalist appropriation in fostering national identity and unity. The eclecticism seen in Biên Hoà ceramics, nevertheless, reminds us of complex and entangled histories exceeding the ideological simplification necessary for nationalism to function. The uncanny evocation of the past in the contemporary works coming out of Biên Hoà seems to point to what exceeds such simplistic understanding. They engage with the present and future of the local as embedded in the regional and the global. These contemporary practitioners understand this complex historical heritage and deploy it in their work in ways that disrupt nationalist imagining and its sense of time inherited from its colonial past.

Notes 1

See, for example, Michele Krug, ‘The Joy in Labour: The Politicization of Craft from the Arts and Crafts Movement to Etsy’, Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 44, no. 2 (2014): 281–301.

2

Laura Morelli, ‘Is There a Difference between Art and Craft’, Ted-Ed, available online: https:// ed.ted.com/lessons/is-there-a-difference-between-art-and-craft-laura-morelli#review (accessed 10 July 2018).

3

Please see, for example, Carmen Sargeant, Conceptualizing the Neolithic Context of Southern Vietnam (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014); and Olov R. T. Janse, ‘Some Notes on the Sa-Huỳnh Complex’, Asian Perspectives 3, no. 2 (1959): 109–11.

4

George Coedès, ‘Some Problems in the Ancient History of the Hinduized States of SouthEast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 5, no. 2 (September 1964): 1–14.

5

For Columbus’s use of Ptolemy’s map which identifies Cattigara and Marco Polo’s accounts of Champa or Ciamba, see, for example, Cristóbal Colón’s letter to the King and Queen of Spain, printed in ‘The Original Narratives of the Voyages of Columbus’, from Original Narratives of Early American History, edited and annotated by Edward G. Bourne (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 393–4, and 394 n. 4.

78

Empire, Nation and Biên Hòa Ceramics 6

Sherman E. Lee, A History of Far Eastern Art, Fourth Edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982), 231–44.

7

Please see, for example, Sơn Nam, Lịch Sử Khẩn Hoang Miền Nam [The history of the settlement of the south], reprint (Hochiminh City: Trẻ, 2006); and Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, Khmer-Viet Relations and the Third Indochina Conflict (Jefferson NC: MacFarland, 1992).

8

Please see, for example, Huỳnh Ngọc Trảng and Nguyễn Đại Phúc, Tượng Gốm Đồng Nai – Gia Định [Ceramic sculptures of Đồng Nai-Gia Định] (Biên Hoà: Đồng Nai Publishing, 1997), 9–17.

9

Bội Trân Huỳnh, ‘The Birth of Modernism, 1925-1945’, available online at http://ses.library. usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/633/1/adt-NU20051129.15002903Chapter2.pdf (accessed 27 June 2016), 85.

10 Gail P. Kelly, ‘The Presentation of Indigenous Society in the Schools of French West Africa and Indochina, 1918 to 1938’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3 (July 1984): 523–42, 528–9. 11 Kerry Nguyen-Long, ‘Biên Hoà Ceramics’, Arts of Asia 33, no. 4 (2003): 67. 12 Bội Trân Huỳnh, ‘Modernism’, 80–1. Please see also Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng, Ký Hoạ Việt Nam đầu thế kỷ 20 [Vietnamese Sketches in the Early 20th Century] (Hochiminh City: Trẻ, 1989). 13 Bội Trân Huỳnh, ‘Modernism’, 118. 14 Ibid., 119. 15 Field observations. See also Gomsuu, ‘Vài Nét về Gốm Hoa Lam Việt Nam’ [A few strokes about Hoa Lam ceramics in Vietnam], online at https://gomsuu.com/vai-net-ve-gomhoa-lam-viet-nam/(accessed 29 June 2019); and Nguyễn Dòng, ‘Gốm Biên Hoà’ [Biên Hoà ceramics], online at http://www.covatvietnam.info/co-vat-chat-lieu-gom/gom-bienhoa/(accessed 29 June 2019). 16 Please see Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); and Thien-Huong Ninh, ‘Holy Mothers in the Vietnamese Diaspora: Refugees, Community, and Nation’, Religions 9, no. 8 (2018): 1–15, available online at https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9080233 (accessed 6 November 2018). 17 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (New York: Verso, 1991), 11. 18 Ibid., 183–5. 19 This mode of expression is evident in literature as well as the mobilization posters coming out of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Please see also discussions of socialist realism in Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam during Marketization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 185–214; and Trần Đình Sử, ‘Tiếp nhận phương pháp sáng tác hiện thực xã hội chủ nghĩa ở Việt Nam’ [Reception of the creative mode of socialist realism in Vietnam], posted 16 July 2015, available online at https://trandinhsu.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/tiep-nhan-phuong-phapsang-tac-hien-thuc-xa-hoi-chu-nghia-o-viet-nam/ (accessed 17 June 2019). 20 ‘Còn non, còn nước, còn người/Thắng giặc Mỹ, ta sẽ xây dựng hơn mười ngày nay!’ In Hồ Chí Minh, ‘Di chúc’ [Last will and testament], Báo Điện Tử Chính Phủ Nước Cộng Hoà Xã Hội Chủ Nghĩa Việt Nam, 21 August 2014, available online at http://baochinhphu.vn/45nam-thuc-hien-Di-chuc-Bac-Ho/Toan-van-Di-chuc-cua-Chu-tich-Ho-Chi-Minh/206578. vgp (accessed 21 July 2018). 21 Đào Sĩ Chu, ‘Foreword’, First International Exhibition of Fine Arts of Saigon, 1962 Catalog, 68. 22 Ibid.

79

Craft and Heritage 23 Ibid. 24 Boitran Huynh-Beattie, ‘Saigonese Art during the War: Modernity and Ideology’, in Cultures at War: Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, eds. Tony Day and Maya Hian Ting Liem (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010), 82. 25 Peggy Steinle, ‘Vietnam: The Artist’s Agony’, The New York Times, 21 February 1971, 19, available online at https://www.nytimes.com/1971/02/21/archives/vietnam-the-artistsagony.html, (accessed 20 July 2018). 26 Ibid. 27 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. and eds. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). 28 The years these statues were erected can be found in Hoàng Nam, ‘Chuyện ít biết về các tượng đài trước năm 1975 ở Sài Gòn’ [Little known stories about pre-1975 statues in Saigon], Người Lao Động, 25 April 2018, online at https://nld.com.vn/diem-den/chuyen-it-bietve-cac-tuong-dai-truoc-nam-1975-o-sai-gon-20180425090556553.htm (accessed 17 June 2019). 29 Steinle, ‘Vietnam: The Artist’s Agony’. 30 Personal conversation, name withheld for privacy consideration, Biên Hoà, 6 August 2016. 31 Please see Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, The Ironies of Freedom. 32 See, for example, Phan Đình Dũng and Nguyễn Thanh Lợi, ‘Hỏi Đáp về Biên Hoà Đồng Nai, phần Di Tích, Làng Nghề, Tập Quán’ [Compilations of questions and answers on Biên Hoà-Đồng Nai, section on vestiges, the craft village, and customs], online at http:// dongnai.vncgarden.com/tu-lieu-ve-lang-nghe-tap-quan-dhong-nai (accessed 6 July 2016); Phan Dũng, ‘Những làng cổ, làng nghề truyền thống trên đất Biên Hoà – Đồng Nai’ [Ancient villages and craft villages in Biên Hoà – Đồng Nai], available online at http://www.baotangbrvt.org.vn/index.php?Module=Content&Action=view&id=283 &Itemid=328# (accessed 6 July 2016); or Nhật Hạ, ‘Làng nghề truyền thống ven sông’ [Traditional craft villages along the river], 2 November 2015, available online at http:// www.bienhoa.gov.vn/mlfolder.2014-01-08.9720204454/mlfolder.2015-02-11.0730621266/ mlnews.2015-02-11.5885302512 (accessed 6 July 2016). 33 This slogan can be seen on numerous advertisements for World Market. Please see, for example, this Omaha branch profile of Cost Plus World Market online https://www. reliableindex.com/posters/detail/unique-authentic-and-always-affordable-255 (accessed 17 June 2019). 34 Nguyễn-võ, Ironies, 115–16. 35 Nguyễn Quốc Chánh, ‘Artist Statement’, available online at http://nguyenquocchanh.com/ barefoot.html (accessed 6 July 2016).

80

CHAPTER 4 THE UNICORN AND THE GROUND HORNBILL: HERITAGE IN THE KEISKAMMA ART PROJECT’S INTSIKIZI TAPESTRIES

Brenda Schmahmann

The Keiskamma Art Project, an initiative in the village of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, has produced various large-scale needleworks that are modelled on well-known art objects from Europe but adapted to convey local meanings. Among these are the Intsikizi Tapestries (Figure 4.1). The source in this instance was the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. Thought to have been designed in Paris and woven with wool, silk and metallic threads in Brussels between 1495 and 1505, this famous series is now in the Cloisters Museum, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Figure 4.2). But the South African reworking offers an account of a hunt for a local bird: intsikizi is isiXhosa (the language spoken by the members of the Keiskamma Art Project) for the southern ground hornbill, Bucorvus leadbeateri. And rather than being woven, the works are hand-embroidered and include appliquéd elements. Linda Hutcheon’s ideas about parody provide a useful entry point to explore the relationship between the Intsikizi Tapestries and the works to which they respond. Indicating that the genre involves repetition ‘which marks difference rather than similarity’, Hutcheon emphasizes how points of likeness between a work and its parodic source stress the distinctions between them.1 Working in light of this idea, it will be suggested in this chapter that, by making reference to the Hunt of the Unicorn works, the Intsikizi Tapestries emphasize that their own content is linked to norms, values and

Figure 4.1  Keiskamma Art Project, Intsikizi Tapestries (2016), third series on display in the gallery at 33 Twickenham Avenue, Auckland Park

Craft and Heritage

Figure 4.2  Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries (c. 1495–1505) in the Cloisters Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art practices of isiXhosa speakers operating in a contemporary South African context rather than those of Europeans in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Substituting the resurrection of the unicorn in the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries with a resurrection of the ground hornbill, a species that is endangered,2 the Intsikizi Tapestries speak of an impetus to ensure the conservation of local fauna. And by replacing the European tapestries’ depiction of an abundance of flora and fauna with local trees, flowers and birds, the tapestries celebrate the beauty of the Eastern Cape as well as suggesting ways in which isiXhosa-speaking people have customarily shown profound awareness of their environment. Furthermore, by referring to historical practices among the amaXhosa that are being revised in light of new understandings about the environment and the need to preserve it, the tapestries conceive of heritage as involving change rather than stasis and as embracing not just single objects, but environmental ecosystems (writ large). Such revisions have particular resonance and import for a work made in Africa – a continent that has tended to be misunderstood as home to communities of people who are outside the forces of history and where modernity corrupts ‘authentic’ art-making practices.3 It should be noted that there are in fact three sets of Intsikizi Tapestries, each comprising six component works, and they have varied sets of motifs rather than simply being repetitions of one another. In the initial set of embroideries, each component work was mounted on a frame between 98 cm and 102 cm in height. A second set, commissioned by an architect in the UK, comprises works that are each about 1.5 metres in height and left to hang freely, as tapestries normally do. Both were exhibited in 2015 at the 82

Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries

National Arts Festival, a major South African arts festival held annually in early July in Grahamstown, a small town in the Eastern Cape (Figure 4.3). The third series, first exhibited in November 2016, is also comprised of embroideries that are each about 1.5 metres in height and left to hang freely. My focus in this chapter is on the third series. This is in part because I had the opportunity to examine these works extensively when they were exhibited at the gallery in the research space of the chair I occupy (and where they are shown in Figure 4.1).4 More crucially, while these embroideries are especially accomplished (given that the artists had already experimented with the theme on two prior occasions), they have not hitherto been reproduced in literature on the project – an omission I seek to remedy. It should also be mentioned that this chapter offers the first in-depth exploration of any of the Intsikizi Tapestries. A fifty-two-page publication produced in time for the 2015 exhibition5 is comprised of high-quality illustrations of the first series as well as the project’s embroideries of various local birds, along with their isiXhosa names and an indication of the customs surrounding them derived from a 1941 publication by Robert Godfrey.6 But its brief text does not engage with the circumstances underpinning the making of the works, and the analysis of the significance of their content is limited to two or three sentences. Also, I offered only broad discussion of the first two series in my own book on the Keiskamma Art Project.7

Figure 4.3  Exhibition by the Keiskamma Art Project in Christ Church Hall at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2015. Four of the first series of Intsikizi Tapestries are on easel-like stands at the far side of the venue with the other two, on the same kind of stands, immediately on their left. Component panels of the second series are on the left wall 83

Craft and Heritage

I begin by providing some brief background on the Keiskamma Art Project and an overview of the tapestries in the Cloisters Museum before turning my attention to the Intsikizi Tapestries themselves. First focusing on the circumstances surrounding the making of the works as well as beliefs about the southern ground hornbill, I then explore the content of the third series of Intsikizi Tapestries, revealing how their narrative reworks the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries.

The Keiskamma Art Project Hamburg is adjacent to the mouth of the Keiskamma River and some 80 kilometres southwest of East London.8 Categorized as rural rather than urban when a census was taken in 1970,9 the village proper is comprised of little more than a general dealer, police station and some private homes, many of which are used only as holiday accommodation, and most of its isiXhosa-speaking residents live in small homesteads scattered across its surrounding hillside.10 The Keiskamma Art Project was started by Carol Hofmeyr, an artist and medical doctor who settled in the village in 2000. Envisaged as a way of addressing the dire poverty of people in Hamburg and surrounding settlements such as Bodiam and Bell, the content of works also focuses on issues of concern to the community – whether on histories of amaXhosa peoples, challenges facing the project through the impact of HIV-AIDS, or imperatives to appreciate and ensure the conservation of the natural environment. In 2002, the project showed its first embroidered cloths and cushion covers at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. The project’s earliest large-scale work, the Keiskamma Tapestry, was unveiled at the National Arts Festival two years later. A parody of the Bayeux Tapestry, it was also the first of the project’s works to be modelled after a well-known art object.11 This would be followed by other parodies. For example, the Keiskamma Altarpiece (2005) was modelled after the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512 to 1516), including paintings by Grunewald;12 the Creation Altarpiece (2007) is a reworking of the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) with paintings by Jan van Eyck;13 and the Keiskamma Guernica (2010) reworks Picasso’s Guernica (1937).14 While various other media have since been introduced to the project (printmaking, drawing, painting, wirework and pottery among them), needlework remains the primary focus of most people involved. The Keiskamma Art Project supports about 130 people. About twenty-seven people are in management and receive a monthly salary. Others receive a salary when working in groups on large-scale works or commissions, meeting at the main studio in Hamburg or, for example, in a second embroidery studio in the nearby village of Bodiam. When not contracted to such projects, members are able to earn a living by producing small works individually, such as hand-embroidered cushion covers or bags, items of beadwork and pictures in felt. While some items are sold at the shop attached to the project’s main studio, most are marketed at retailers specializing in arts and crafts in urban centres. 84

Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries

The Keiskamma Art Project falls under the ambit of the Keiskamma Trust which has been set up to develop various interventions to assist and support the community – including ones involving health and education. Additionally, a Keiskamma Music Academy – enabling youngsters in the Hamburg community to learn music – was launched on 3 August 2006.15 Hofmeyr had ceased practising as a doctor for some years when she moved to Hamburg. But, realizing that the lack of a medical doctor in the village presented an enormous difficulty for the community, she resumed practising medicine late in 2004. In the years since then, she has endeavoured to balance this calling with work on the art project – bringing in others to assist in managing the day-to-day running of it, but always ensuring she is available to enable it to develop and grow. Hofmeyr tends to come up with the initial concepts or ideas motivating large-scale works, and – unsurprisingly – it was she who initially thought of parodying the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters Museum.16

The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries First mentioned in an inventory from 1680 of the contents of the town house of the deceased Duke Francois VI de la Rochefoucauld, where they were listed as hanging in the grande chambre – the bedroom – of the duke,17 the seven tapestries comprising the Hunt of the Unicorn group measured together about 26.4 metres in width.18 They would subsequently be recorded as contents of the chateau of the Rochefoucauld family in Verteuil when Duke Francois VIII died there in 1728. When the chateau was looted during the French Revolution, the works escaped destruction because they contained no signifiers of royalty.19 They nonetheless suffered extensive damage. When discovered in 1850 in an old barn where they were serving to protect vegetables, only two fragments remained of one of the tapestries and the others, between them, had lost about 2.37 metres in width.20 Repurchased and restored by the Rochefoucaulds, the works were once again displayed in their chateau – this time in the salon. The six more or less complete tapestries were exhibited at the Anderson Galleries in New York in 1922, where they were seen by John D. Rockefeller who purchased them and installed them in his residence on 54th Street in Manhattan. In 1937, Rockefeller organized that a space for them be designed in the new Cloisters Museum he was developing. The museum staff, learning that the Rochefoucauld family still had the fragments of the missing tapestry, acquired these in time for the 1938 opening of the Cloisters to the public.21 (These two fragments are visible above the doorway in Figure 4.2.) While the tapestries are generally understood to refer metaphorically to the Passion of Christ or the taming of a lover or both, it is unclear for whom they were first commissioned.22 For Margaret Freeman, the seven tapestries were understood as part of a single narrative. The first shows the commencement of the hunt. In the second, the huntsmen encounter the unicorn dipping his horn in the stream, thus cleansing the water of pollutants and enabling other animals depicted in the work to drink from it. 85

Craft and Heritage

In the third, the hunt proceeds in full force but the unicorn evades capture by leaping across the stream. In the fourth tapestry, the unicorn resists by kicking a huntsman and goring a hunting dog. The fragments are from the fifth tapestry in which, according to this reading, the unicorn is tamed by a maiden, enabling it to be captured. In the sixth tapestry, the unicorn is killed and brought back to the castle. In the final tapestry it is resurrected and is shown in an enclosure with a pomegranate tree. Yet anomalies in style have confounded scholars. While some believe this may have stemmed from their being woven in different workshops,23 there has also been speculation that the tapestries may in fact have originated in different commissions. Adolfo Salvatore Cavallo, for example, sees the first and last of the tapestries in the previously accepted sequence as a narrative involving the taming of a lover, the fifth as a solitary devotional piece that ‘was a specific depiction of The Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn, where Gabriel the hunter causes Christ the unicorn to enter the hortus conclusus, succumbing to Mary, and so become incarnate’.24 The remaining four, he suggests, served as their own sequence within an allegory of the Passion.25

Developing the Intsikizi Tapestries The substitution of the unicorn in the Cloisters tapestries with a ground hornbill can be understood on one level in the light of a focus on birds that had emerged in work by the Keiskamma Art Project as well as in performances of the Keiskamma Music Academy. The art project included some panels representing birds in the space in which they first exhibited their Creation Altarpiece at the National Arts Festival in 2007. The newly launched Keiskamma Music Academy accompanied the unveiling of the Creation Altarpiece with a rendition of a component of Camille Saint-Saëns’s orchestral work, Carnival of the Animals, entitled Aquarium, adding various bird calls on their recorders in the middle section. This interface between visualization and art was developed further in 2013, when the Keiskamma Music Academy and the Keiskamma Art Project collaborated successfully on a new arrangement of the Carnival of the Animals by South African composer Allan Stephenson in an offering at the National Arts Festival that year. Accompanying the musicians were three-dimensional representations of various animals and birds made from wirework, felt and other materials that were displayed and ‘danced’ by young actors from Hamburg. When the Keiskamma Art Project began developing the Intsikizi Tapestries for the 2015 festival, it was envisaged that they would also be integrated with a performance by the Keiskamma Music Academy. The art group had begun embroidering images of birds inspired by the work of Marguerite Poland, a well-known South African author whose writings respond to oral traditions and draw on her knowledge of isiXhosa and isiZulu as well as anthropology. A concept of an integrated performance involving music and visualization, and with both deriving from Poland’s work, thus underpinned an application for funding that the Keiskamma Trust furnished to the National Art Council of South Africa. Unfortunately, Hofmeyr indicates, communication between 86

Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries

different parties involved in the initiative went awry. The play developed by Mojalefe Koyana, a creative teacher and drama student, did not in fact end up incorporating the embroideries. Entitled Indalo (meaning ‘Creation’), it explored the customary meanings of birds among isiXhosa speakers and was thus conceptually linked to the Intsikizi Tapestries, but, involving only some banners along with its storytellers, it necessitated that a different exhibition space be secured to display the embroideries being done by the project. The two series of Intsikizi Tapestries ended up being displayed in the hall of the Christ Church, while the Indalo performances took place at a hall at St. Andrew’s Preparatory School, some 1.5 kilometres away.26 Whereas the Keiskamma Altarpiece, the Creation Altarpiece and the Keiskamma Guernica were modelled on the large scale of their prototypes, and the Keiskamma Tapestry ended up even longer than the Bayeux Tapestry that inspired it, the Intsikizi Tapestries are considerably smaller than the six full-size Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries. The reason for this change was primarily financial. Although the motivation to the National Arts Council was successful, the funding of R 1,000,000 (about £ 60,000 in UK currency) was in fact half of what had been sought, and it was required to support the music performance and a full-colour publication as well as fund the making of the embroideries. The project thus realized it would be wholly insufficient to produce a full set of embroideries on the scale of the works being parodied. Consideration was given to the possibility of commencing producing the works on the scale of the original one at a time and selling them separately. When the collector who ultimately ordered the second series first approached the project, this idea was still being considered. While negotiations were still underway, the project member who took responsibility for the design, Cebo Mvubu, produced drawings for the works on a small scale. Persuaded that these would result in a compelling series, it was decided to forge ahead with a full set of embroideries that were small in size. The negotiations with the second collector concluded with a decision to make a second set for him that was slightly larger than the first and hanging freely, and to show both at the National Arts Festival before shipping him his works.27 As this scale had worked well, it was retained in the third series. In reworking the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries as a single sequence, the Keiskamma Art Project has preferred to work on the basis of the prototype or source having a unified narrative rather than adhering to the argument that the works may in fact have originated from about three different commissions. But rather than including what is understood to be the fifth component of the narrative and that now consists of just two fragments, each set of Intsikizi Tapestries reworks only the other six Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries.28 While the overall idea for the work was Hofmeyr’s, Mvubu undertook to give it shape and form. Prior to doing any drawing, he commenced a process of research by interviewing a local hunter. He and Hofmeyr also gathered photographs of the Hamburg environment as well as identified various visual references from books and the internet that were used as sources for the birds, animals and trees in the works.29 In devising the general design, Mvubu indicates, he had available at his work space reproductions of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries.30 Mvubu did not, however, do the drawings of flowers 87

Craft and Heritage

appearing in the work: these were added by project members Sinovuyo Makhubalo, Nokuphiwa Gedze, Nomfusi Nkani, Ndileka Mapuma, Nombuyiselo Malumbezo and Avumile Nyongo, who based them on illustrations of local flora.31

Intsikizi in AmaXhosa communities Writing in 1941, Robert Godfrey observed that the capture of the ground hornbill was associated with the management of rain. According to a commentator who spoke to him: ‘In a season of drought, this bird is hunted down by horsemen attended with dogs, and, as it is not a bird that flies high, it is caught and put alive into water; it is said that a great rain will follow.’32 Although commentators also suggested that the ground hornbill ‘is held sacred and must not be killed’ and that early missionary records indicated that a person who inadvertently did so would be obliged to sacrifice a calf in atonement, in some districts ‘the bird is killed before being put into the water’.33 A custom of killing the ground hornbill to enable rain was also brought to the attention of Joos Gijsbertsen, whose master’s thesis on the cultural significance of birds in amaXhosa communities was completed in 2012. Gijsbertsen quotes a 29-year-old living in the same district as Hamburg who indicated that, as a youngster, he had hunted hornbill for its rainmaking capacities: ‘When I was young we used to kill Intsikizi during a drought and hang it in a tree so that the rain would come. To stop the rain the dead bird was removed.’34 Although people continue to regard the sighting or sound of the bird as a premonition of rain, they no longer hunt it.35 As the ground hornbill is a critically endangered species, the fact that it is no longer hunted is a step forward for conservationists. Nonetheless, in the course of his interviews with a hunter, Cebo Mvubu learned of another practice that had developed that threatened the ground hornbill’s future: alert to the fact that these birds tend to run on the ground at no great speed before taking flight, hunters realized that they could be used to teach novice hunting dogs how to catch prey.36 Gijsbertsen found that people in rural isiXhosa-speaking communities do not tend to associate declining bird populations with human activities,37 and this use of the hornbill would seem to support this conjecture. 38 But it also paradoxically points to the knowledge of birds and animals that hunters have acquired through observation and experience. Michelle Cocks, Tony Dodd and Susi Vetter observed in 2012 that, while traditional hunting with dogs is viewed by conservation authorities ‘as reprehensible and has been an illegal activity for many years in South Africa’, those engaging in the hunt showed remarkable insight and understanding of the habitats and habits of the animals they hunted. Hunters set bird traps using specific bait to catch different bird species and are able to identify bird calls and even call various birds by whistling or making a sucking sound on the back of the hand. When hunting with dogs, hunters are able to identify animal spoor and droppings and control the hunt, for example, by calling back the dogs when the flushed antelope is a female.39 Cocks, Dodd and Vetter suggest that conservationists, rather than seeing themselves simply as at odds with those in rural locales who engage in practices such 88

Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries

as hunting, might instead work with relevant communities and individuals to glean benefits from their understandings, knowledge and worldviews.40 The Intsikizi Tapestries are underpinned by a related sentiment. In depicting a hunt for the ground hornbill, the project is certainly not advocating a return to such an activity. Rather, they are celebrating ways in which isiXhosa-speaking peoples have customarily shown deep awareness of the characteristics of fauna and flora in their environment. One might in fact argue that the tapestries reveal how the profound knowledge and understanding within amaXhosa communities could be harnessed to ensure the future sustainability of local species.

Form and content of the tapestries The descriptions of the first series of tapestries in the small publication produced at the time of their showing at the National Arts Festival also apply to some of the six tapestries constituting the third series. But there have also been some subtle modifications to the fourth and fifth tapestries – ones that stem in part from a more direct parody of the structure of the narrative in the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries than was the case in the first and second versions. A further development in the third series is the inclusion at the top and bottom of each tapestry of a border constituted from isishweshwe fabric. An indigo-printed cloth that has a long-standing history of use in South Africa, isishweshwe is associated particularly strongly with garments worn by women in rural areas of the Eastern Cape.41 The narrative of the first tapestry (Plate 4) in the third series, which is entitled ‘Setting Out’, is described as follows: ‘The Xhosa men prepare to leave home for the hunt. They have their dogs and sticks. Both men and dogs are skilled at hunting and have learned this from older men. It takes many years to train a dog to hunt and huntsman’s dog responds to his unique call or whistle.’42 A parallel to the commencement of the hunt thought to be the subject matter of the tapestry constituted as the first in the Cloisters Museum sequence, it retains that work’s mille-fleur pattern but substitutes figures in medieval clothing with individuals in contemporary dress. While the source includes no buildings, two mud-walled and thatch-roof structures alert the viewer to the scene’s Eastern Cape context. Also, unlike the medieval source where the dogs are greyhounds, here they resemble the Africanis – a generic term for indigenous dogs in rural areas of South Africa.43 Reference to a further element in the local milieu, the mouth of the Keiskamma River (which gives its name to the project) appears towards the lower right of the work. Although the river in the first tapestry is depicted as abundant with fish, the viewer learns in the second tapestry that the region is battling a drought (Plate 5). Its narrative is as follows: ‘The countryside is dry and the crops are failing. Rural people who have no set, regular income are very dependent on rain for the food they can grow. Hence to try to bring the rain the huntsman set out to catch the Ground Hornbill.’44 In contrast to the tapestry considered to be second in the Hunt of the 89

Craft and Heritage

Unicorn sequence, which depicts lush foliage, a sense of dryness in the environment is conveyed through the use of browns, gold and rust for leaves and flowers and, in the foreground, stylized wilting crops. But the arrangement of motifs is nonetheless similar to the medieval work. The men are lined up towards the top of the format while one individual, lower down and on the left, indicates he has spotted the target of his hunt, the ground hornbill, which, like the unicorn in the Cloisters work, is depicted at the centre of the format. In the third tapestry according to the narrative in the Keiskamma Art Project’s publication: ‘The Ground Hornbill flies across the river. Hamburg is situated on the beautiful Keiskamma River. This river is shown here with all its birds, fish and natural beauty’ [Plate 6].45 The close parallel between the source, where the unicorn jumps across the stream while the huntsmen are in pursuit, and the Keiskamma Art Project work, where the ground hornbill flies across the stream, is reinforced through the positioning of background details. But the oak tree in the foreground of the corresponding Hunt of the Unicorn work46 is replaced by a local one – seemingly a milkwood, indigenous to southern Africa – while the castle in the top-right corner is substituted by two structures characteristic of buildings in rural communities of isiXhosa-speakers. The fourth tapestry depicts the entrapment of the hornbill (Plate 7). In the catalogue accompanying the first version, the following narrative is included: ‘The Hornbill is surrounded by dogs and men with sticks. It cannot escape.’47 Here, however, none of the hunters wield sticks, perhaps because such actions were perceived in retrospect as off-putting to contemporary audiences as well as unnecessary, given that the killing of the bird is depicted in the fifth tapestry. The scene is also much less violent than in the medieval work, where the unicorn – who has suffered a wound to its side – kicks desperately to fend off huntsmen seeking to stab him with their long spears. Also, while the shape of the dog gored by the unicorn in the medieval work is imitated directly, presumably to create the implication that he is being pecked by the hornbill desperate to fend off this attack, the canine here does not suffer any obvious injury. An additional detail is noteworthy. Whereas one of the men in the corresponding Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry is shown holding back his hound by gripping its collar (towards the top, just right of the centre), in this tapestry a kneeling young huntsman (left, just below the centre of the format) is shown with his arm lightly round his dog who listens to his commands and thus does not need forcible restraint. The label accompanying the fifth tapestry in the first version by the Keiskamma Art Project included the following description: ‘The men carry the dead bird home and hope that the rain will come.’48 In the reworking in the third version, however, the project has more closely imitated the corresponding tapestry in the Hunt of the Unicorn series, where two separate scenes are juxtaposed (Plate 8). Towards the top left of both, the unicorn or hornbill is killed by a huntsman wielding a spear. And the carrying home of the dead unicorn or hornbill is depicted in the foreground. Throughout the series, various birds with local significance are included, reinforcing iconographic meanings. In the fifth tapestry, for example, a Bokmakierie, a type of shrike endemic to South Africa, is depicted towards the bottom right-hand corner, 90

Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries

immediately facing the dead ground hornbill. As with the ground hornbill, the capturing of this bird is associated by isiXhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape with the capacity to bring about rainfall.49 Relatedly, towards the lower left side, just in front of a white dog with black patches, appears an African Hoopoe. According to Godfrey, it gets its isiXhosa name, uboboyi, from the sound of its cry and that ‘the early return of this bird in spring’ is indicative ‘that winter is past’.50 Given the iconography elsewhere in the work, it would presumably be suggestive in this particular context of the onset of the first spring rains. If in the Hunt of the Unicorn sequence, the final tapestry depicts the unicorn restored to life, the final Intsikizi Tapestry shows a resurrected ground hornbill (Plate 9). The description of this tapestry in the first series, which applies equally to the third series, is as follows: ‘This scene represents our hope and vision of people living in harmony alongside nature and surviving and flourishing in a restored, pristine world. We show the Ground Hornbill thriving in the forest alongside rural people.’51 Whereas the medieval tapestry depicted the unicorn tied to a pomegranate tree in its circular enclosure, its parallel in the Keiskamma Art Project’s version is a kraal – an enclosure for cattle – shown towards the top left-hand side of the work. Suggestive of good order within the homestead, the cattle kraal is also the domain for sacrifices to ancestors – rites that continue to be observed today in rural communities.52 In this instance the bull in its kraal is suggestive of an appropriate sacrifice, in opposition to the ground hornbill, associated with the forest, which is implied to be more correctly left to live out its life without interference or threat from humans. Embroidered on a fabric dyed gold, the work parallels the final tapestry in the Hunt of the Unicorn sequence where gold predominates in the exquisite mille-fleur pattern which serves as a backdrop to the unicorn, pomegranate tree and enclosure.

Conclusion Continuing to be viewed as a bringer of rain, the southern ground hornbill is nonetheless sighted only rarely and is not ceremonially hunted to elicit its supernatural intervention in the natural world. The Intsikizi Tapestries are not, then, the depiction of a contemporary practice and, as with the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, are metaphorical in meaning. If the miraculous resurrection of the unicorn in the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries has associations with the Passion of Christ, the resurrection of the ground hornbill speaks of an impetus to ensure the conservation of the fauna of the Eastern Cape and aspirations for a natural world that sustains humans as well as other life forms. But in suggesting that customs and practices among the amaXhosa are adapted, the Intsikizi Tapestries also make an important point about heritage itself. Revealing that inherited beliefs are dynamic, they make evident that ‘heritage’ is not a static set of norms and traditions passed down from one generation to another but rather a series of beliefs and customs that are continuously in process and invention. 91

Craft and Heritage

Acknowledgements Thank you to the editors, Elaine Cheasley Paterson and Susan Surette, for inviting me to contribute a chapter to this important volume. My thanks to Carol Hofmeyr and Cebo Mvubu for engaging with me about the Intsikizi Tapestries. Thank you to Paul Mills for taking photographs of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries and the third series of Intsikizi Tapestries, and to Sirion Robertson for photographing the first two series at the National Arts Festival in 2015. Research for this chapter was made possible through generous funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. Please note, however, that any opinions, findings and conclusions expressed in this chapter are my own and the NRF does not accept any liability in regard to them.

Notes 1

Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 6.

2

See L. Kemp, and M. W. Bruford, eds. Southern Ground-Hornbill Population and Habitat Viability Assessment Workshop – Final Report. IUCN SSC Conservation Planning Specialist Group, 2017, Pdf.

3

Two examples of influential articles where these misconceptions are unpacked are Sidney Kasfir, ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow’, African Arts 25, no. 2 (1992): 40-53+96-97 +, and Larry Shiner, ‘“Primitive Fakes”, “Tourist Art” and the Ideology of Authenticity’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 2 (1994): 225–34.

4

The SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture is located at 33 Twickenham Avenue, Auckland Park, Johannesburg – an off-campus site of the University of Johannesburg.

5

Keiskamma Art Project, The Intsikizi Tapestries: Keiskamma Art Project (Hamburg: Keiskamma Trust, 2015).

6

Robert Godfrey, Bird-Lore of the Eastern Cape Province (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1941).

7

Brenda Schmahmann, The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihoods (Cape Town: Print Matters Heritage, 2016), 184.

8

It was founded by German legionaries in 1857 – hence its name. These legionaries were persuaded to establish various settlements to serve as a buffer against amaXhosa peoples whom the British were fighting in a series of Frontier Wars. See ELG Schnell, For Men Must Work: An Account of the German Immigration to the Cape (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1954).

9

GP Cook, ‘Scattered Towns or an Urban System?’, in Ciskei: Economics and Politics of Dependence in a South African Homeland, ed. Nancy Charlton (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

10 Schmahmann, The Keiskamma Art Project, 11–14. 11 Brenda Schmahmann, ‘After Bayeux: The Keiskamma Tapestry and the Making of South African History’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 9, no. 2 (2011): 158–92. 12 Brenda Schmahmann, ‘A Framework for Recuperation: HIV/AIDS and the Keiskamma Altarpiece’, African Arts 43, no. 3 (2010): 34–51. 92

Heritage in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Intsikizi Tapestries 13 Brenda Schmahmann, ‘A Material Paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Creation Altarpiece’, De Arte 48, no. 2 (2013): 21–45. 14 Brenda Schmahmann, ‘Patching up a Community in Distress: HIV/AIDS and the Keiskamma Guernica’, African Arts 48, no. 4 (2015): 14–29. 15 Schmahmann, The Keiskamma Art Project, 30. 16 This was evident in two interviews about the Intsikizi Tapestries in Hamburg. I interviewed Cebo Mvubu, the primary designer of the tapestries, on 20 January 2016. I also interviewed Carol Hofmeyr at her home on 21 January 2016. 17 Margaret Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976), 220–1. 18 Adolfo Salvatore Cavello, The Unicorn Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 13. 19 Ibid., 14. 20 Ibid., 15. 21 Ibid., 17. 22 James J Rorimer, ‘The Unicorn Tapestries Were Made for Anne of Brittany’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1942): 7–20, argues that the works were made to celebrate the marriage of Anne of Brittany (1476–1514) to her second husband, Louis XII (1462–1515), on 8 January 1499. He bases this hypothesis on the inclusion of the letters ‘AE’ in the tapestries – the first and last letters of Anne’s name – as well as various iconographic details pertinent to her. Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries, 163–74, offers a detailed critique of Rorimer’s arguments. She suggests that a tradition within the family that they belonged to Jean II of La Rouchefoucauld, and his spouse, Marguerite, may have some merit but cannot be conclusively proved. She also points to the fact that the letters FR, which appear on one of the tapestries, may refer to Francois I de la Rochefoucauld as the original owner. John Williamson, The Oak King, the Holly King, and the Unicorn: The Myths and Symbolism of the Unicorn Tapestries (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 11–13, proposes that the commission may perhaps have been by the Effiat family on the grounds of a similarity between the sixth tapestry in the cycle and another tapestry they commissioned. 23 Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries, 176–218, suggests this in her detailed chapter on the making of the tapestries and this viewpoint is accepted by Williamson, The Oak King, 6. 24 Cavallo, The Unicorn Tapestries, 47. 25 Ibid., 77. 26 Interview with Carol Hofmeyr, 21 January 2016. 27 I ascertain this sequence of events from my interview with Hofmeyr on 21 January 2016. 28 Notably, however, whereas a prior parody such as the Keiskamma Tapestry also consisted of various component embroideries constituting a sequence, this early work was conceived as a single work which could not be split up: purchased in its entirety by Standard Bank, the entire sequence – all 120 metres of it – is on permanent loan to parliament. In contrast, while the first series of Intsikizi Tapestries was developed as a chronological narrative, the project decided to make its component embroideries available for purchase as separate entities. Happily, in 2018, the third series – like the second – was purchased in its entirety by a private collector. 29 Interview with Cebo Mvubu. 30 Ibid. 93

Craft and Heritage 31 They are listed as the designers in Keiskamma Art Project The Intsikizi Tapestries, 50. They were also identified as the individuals who did the drawings of plants in information supplied to me by the Keiskamma Art Project when the third series was first shown in Johannesburg. 32 Godfrey, Bird-Lore of the Eastern Cape Province, 66. 33 Ibid. 34 Quoted in Jaap Gijsbertsen, ‘Birds in the AmaXhosa World: An Ethno-ornithological Exploration of the Cultural Significance of Birds, and Its Potential for Conservation in South Africa’ (MSc thesis, Wageningen University, Netherlands, 2012), 43. 35 Gijsbertsen, ‘Birds in the AmaXhosa World’, 59. 36 Interview with Cebo Mvubu. 37 Gijsbertsen, ‘Birds in the AmaXhosa World’, 59. 38 Mvubu implied that this practice of using hornbills to train dogs was – fortunately – being abandoned. It was unclear to me whether this change in behaviour was motivated by a conservationist impetus or if this was simply because ground hornbills are rarely sighted nowadays and therefore not in fact readily available for use in this way. Interview with Cebo Myubu. 39 Michelle Cocks, Tony Dodd and Susi Vetter, ‘“God Is My Forest” – Xhosa Cultural Values Provide Untapped Opportunities for Conservation’, South African Journal of Science 108, no. 56 (2012): 5. 40 This approach can be discerned in the ‘Southern Ground-Hornbill: Population and Habitat Viability Assessment Workshop’. The working group on Anthropogenic Interactions expressed a goal to use Indigenous knowledge systems and to ensure ‘appropriate implementation and adequate feedback loops’ into communities (56). 41 For more details about the fabric, see Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Isishweshwe: A History of the Indigenisation of Blueprint in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2017). 42 Keiskamma Art Project, The Intsikizi Tapestries, 6. 43 Johan and Edith Gallant, ‘Africanis: The Aboriginal Dog of Subequatorial Africa’, 2012. http://www.africanis.co.za/. 44 Keiskamma Art Project, The Intsikizi Tapestries, 10. 45 Ibid., 14. 46 Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries, 128–9. 47 Keiskamma Art Project, The Intsikizi Tapestries, 18. 48 Ibid., 22. 49 Ibid., 24. 50 Godfrey, Bird-Lore of the Eastern Cape Province, 64. 51 Keiskamma Art Project, The Intsikizi Tapestries, 26. 52 Schadrack Mvunabandi, ‘The Communicative Power of Blood Sacrifices: A Predominantly South African Perspective with Special Reference to the Epistle to the Hebrews’ (PhD diss., University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 2008). Like many people in the Eastern Cape and South Africa as a whole, most isiXhosa speakers – including members of the Keiskamma Art Project – view Christian and customary beliefs as alternative spiritual options with different kinds of value and purpose. Most people in the project thus participate in Christian as well as customary rituals without synthesizing the two belief patterns. 94

CHAPTER 5 LATIN AMERICAN AND LATIN-CANADIAN TEXTILE PRACTICES: ART, ACTIVISM AND DIASPORIC IDENTITY

Nuria Carton de Grammont and Maria Ezcurra

Introduction In recent years, large international clothing brands have deliberately copied the embroidery and textile designs of various artisans in Latin America. The fashion of plagiarism, like many other cases of the appropriation of crafts in the global market, jeopardizes the cultural sustainability of crafts and the communities that have traditionally practised them and makes evident the lack of adequate legal protections. Recent debates about cultural appropriation rethink the parameters of authorship and responsible consumption in order to protect cultural heritage.1 However, textiles as a craft practice have also been used from different cultural and artistic perspectives as a mechanism to denounce social, gender and identity violence. In this chapter, we are interested in exploring how textile arts, historically related to domesticity and femininity, have become forms of communication and protest against authoritarian regimes and social violence in Latin America since the mid-twentieth century. This form of artistic activism has become a powerful personal and communal practice that continues to be updated today through Indigenous collectives, artisans, artists and activists. We are interested in understanding the development of craft as an artistic process that allows the interweaving of affections, experiences and interests, particularly in the context of the Latin American diaspora in Canada. This text explores how traditional textile practices have been used to safeguard personal and collective memories, becoming a form of activism and resistance against social violence perpetuated by the dictatorships of the Southern Cone and later in the socalled drug war in Mexico, Colombia and Central America, as well as through the imposition of neoliberal policies and the subsequent economic crises in the region. Today, Latin-Canadian artists such as Giorgia Volpe, Sarabeth Triviño, Laura Acosta and Maria Ezcurra (co-author of this chapter) have engaged with textiles, including weaving, embroidery and beadwork, from formal and conceptual perspectives as a mechanism of identity and cultural claiming. The artistic use of these techniques, far from being a cultural appropriation, is intended to valorize certain intercultural relations and the exchange of knowledge and textile practices, resulting in a new geo-aesthetic narrative that accounts for the territorial construction of North-South cultural identities.

Craft and Heritage

The diverse forms of textile crafts these women artists have claimed and adopted in their work have allowed them to reconfigure the symbolic narratives of the Latin American diaspora in Canada to give meaning to their political, social and cultural legacies from postcolonial and feminist perspectives. These narratives not only give an account of the North-South migration processes, but also of the cross-border mobility of knowledge and the artistic and artisanal activities that participate in the territorial construction of cultural identities. Embroidering and other textile practices have not only served to resist inequitable power relations through art and activism but have also functioned as a critical learning practice to confront normative conventions, such as social, identity and gender stereotypes.2

Embroidering against violence, authoritarianism and censorship in Latin America Textile craft practices have had a distinctive cultural development in Latin America. From the first years of European exploration and conquest of the American territory, chroniclers like Fray Bernardino de Sahagún paid special interest to Indigenous textiles in their accounts of the natural and cultural biodiversity of the conquered territory.3 This cultural legacy – which has been subsequently transmitted and modified by many generations with the introduction of new weaving techniques, materials, ways of dressing and designs – configure the contemporary textile craft scene in Latin America. María Elena del Solar – an anthropologist specializing in Indigenous textiles from Latin America – states that the choices of certain colours, techniques and designs for the creation of a garment, including their dimensions or final finishes, confer upon it distinguishing characteristics that tie it to a particular place, social status, ritual or domestic function. In this sense, textile crafts are carriers of identity and belonging.4 At the same time, textiles contain social memories and meanings that resist erasure, giving sense to the past in order to signify the present. What makes craftwork a living cultural heritage is its ability to be in continuous transformation. The techniques, materials and designs used in traditional handcrafts are transmitted from generation to generation through complex learning processes, incorporating practices, social uses and rituals, which are preserved and transmitted orally or through imitative gestures, while they can also be innovative, granting new meanings to their creation. In this sense, J. M. Arevalo referring to C. L. Prats says that ‘heritage is a permanent resource of the past to interpret the present and build the future’. Thus, in this essay the concepts of heritage and tradition shall be mobilized as markers of change, innovation and time.5 The social customs and personal uses that craftspeople give to their creations are diverse. Some communities give their craftwork a commercial value as a strategy to acquire resources and as a way of life, boosting the tourist economy and integrating themselves into commercial circuits of global capitalism, which means not only an improvement in their income but also a symbolic reaffirmation.6 On the other hand, cultural institutions 96

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity

can confer on these crafts value as museum objects that contribute to the construction of national identity narratives.7 But, as anthropologist Gelya Frank suggests, crafts can also acquire a rebellious use, a means of fighting cultural assimilation, as a tool for social justice and a collective practice of social reaffirmation: ‘Craft production, marketing, and preservation have political dimensions that neutral-sounding terms like “material culture” and “folk art” have tended to mute.’8 While clothes are commonly associated with women’s vulnerability and victimization,9 and crafts practised by women are usually perceived as domestic and as such considered as unimportant, women have learnt to incorporate textiles in their art and activist work as a site of agency and resistance.10 Throughout history, numerous groups of women have creatively worked together to share their experiences, raising awareness and claiming justice through textile arts and crafts. In Mexico, for example, El Oasis, an Indigenous group of Rarámuri women from Chihuaha, is actively making and wearing their traditional dresses as a way of promoting the cultural value of their ancestral costumes and practices. Dress becomes a symbol of identity that they use to resist the pressure exerted on them by the majority Mestizo population to conform to a more Western style.11 In the UK miners’ strike of 1984, Women against Pit Closures was a political movement that supported the miners with their stitched banners. Palestinian women embroidered the Palestinian flag and silhouettes of the country as patterns in their ‘Intifada dresses’ after Israeli soldiers confiscated the flags of their country. In South Africa, women represented the horrors of human rights abuses in tapestries that they wove during the apartheid regime. Through the Soviet-Afghan War, women designed traditional rugs in which they combined old botanical and geometric designs along with depictions of hand grenades, tanks and helicopters related to the armed conflict of their country.12 Women’s handcrafts in various regions of Latin America also have a gender and personal connotation, and there are many examples of women who have undertaken craft production within their own private spaces for social prestige or to position themselves politically in their communities. In the context of the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that developed in Latin America in the twentieth century, there were several cases of women’s collectives that used textile art, such as embroidery and weaving, to organize themselves against censorship and as forms of resistance to the centralization of power. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) in Argentina, the arpilleras in Chile and the Embroidery for Peace project in Mexico show how these textile practices became fundamental mechanisms for reflecting and creating a sense of belonging and collective identity.

Embroidering for the disappeared The Madres de Plaza de Mayo13 (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) are noted for wearing white kerchiefs on their heads as a symbol against the torture and ‘disappearance’ of thousands of people opposing the dictatorial regime during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’. The group was formed when they began assembling peacefully every Thursday at the Plaza de Mayo in 97

Craft and Heritage

Buenos Aires to protest the disappearance of their children by the military government and to demand information on their whereabouts. Some of them walked alone or in pairs to evade being arrested for disorderly conduct, as the dictatorship prohibited people from gathering in public places. They carried pictures of their missing loved ones and wrote pleas for justice on their clothes and kerchiefs, along with their children’s names, birthdays and dates of disappearances. Some of the kerchiefs were embroidered in blue thread with the slogan ‘Aparición con Vida’ (Bring Them Back Alive), meaning that they would not accept the deaths of their children until they discovered what happened to them and their murderers were held responsible.14 Defying the historical expectations of women and motherhood in Latin America, they presented a powerful moral symbol, raising awareness and gaining international attention over the violations of human rights occurring in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. By publicly displaying their sorrow and challenging the military government through the textiles they transformed and wore, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo turned into ‘one of the most visible political discourses of resistance to terror in recent Latin American history’.15 In this context, embroidery and textiles became a powerful tool for the Madres de Plaza de Mayo for publicly displaying political statements in a personal way. The kerchiefs that they embroidered and wore on their heads empowered them and became an intrinsic part of their identity as a movement that stood up for the disappeared students and also for one another. In 1977, some of these mothers formed another organization called Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo intended to find babies born to their imprisoned daughters during the ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina, many of whom were illegally adopted by people deemed ideologically safe by the government.16 The Abuelas still work closely with the founders of Madres de Plaza de Mayo towards the shared goal of discovering the identities of the disappeared through DNA identification. As of 2020, their collective efforts have resulted in the recuperation of 130 grandchildren.17 By transforming these personal losses into a collective experience of grief and bringing attention to human rights violations through craft and performance, both the Madres and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo greatly contributed to the reconstruction of Argentine civil society and Latin America at large.18 In Chile, women made complex needlework tapestries or patchworks called arpilleras to portray the human rights abuses and the disappeared victims during Pinochet’s repression between 1973 and 1990.19 This heritage craft soon became the basis of an activist movement that united women who creatively explored and represented the violence, repression and privations they experienced throughout Pinochet’s dictatorship. Through their sewing, embroidering and stitching, the arpilleras became a powerful form of protest that conveyed information about the social circumstances of these women, allowing them to become active participants of change.20 These sewn tapestries gave them a purpose to continue with their lives while raising international awareness of Chile’s human rights violations. Preserving the memory of the desaparecidos (the disappeared ones), these textiles are still considered a powerful symbol of women’s resistance in Chile’s strongly conservative and patriarchal society, displaying the power of craft and the arts in social movements.21 98

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity

In Mexico, a group of women called Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains) are also working on a participatory project named ‘Bordando por la paz: Un pañuelo una víctima’, that involves sewing and embroidering white handkerchiefs to create a textile memorial for every victim of the drug war.22 The members of Fuentes Rojas gather in the plaza de Coyoacán, in Mexico City, every Sunday afternoon, inviting participants to embroider with them on a white cloth the names and descriptions of each of the thousands of dead victims of the war against drugs. They use red thread to refer to a person who was murdered, purple thread is used for femicides and green thread symbolizes the hope that a disappeared person will still be found.23 Through craft, this activist group shares people’s experiences with the ongoing violence resulting from the drug trade and the consequent ‘war on drugs’ and other forms of repression that have become widespread across Mexico (and the rest of Latin America).24 Similar to the Chilean arpilleras or the kerchiefs of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Fuentes Rojas embroider a handkerchief per victim intending to bring awareness and participating in a shared symbolic act of peace, in this case, for Mexican society. All these initiatives exemplify how heritage textile practices, especially needlework, gendered feminine craft practices in the past, continue to be redefined and repurposed by women as an activist strategy, also known as ‘craftivism’.25 Like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the ‘Bordando por la paz: Un pañuelo una víctima’ project brings the domestic into the public setting, inviting us to acknowledge and materialize the thousands of murders and disappearances that have taken place in Mexico since 2006, which have not been acknowledged by a government that, with impunity, has played an important part in the ongoing epidemic violence affecting the country. Besides inviting the parents, siblings, friends and colleagues of the people killed or disappeared during the drug war, the project has expanded to other cities in Mexico and around the world, where everyone is welcome to embroider words and images over a handkerchief.26 The goal of Fuentes Rojas is to make a memorial of embroidered handkerchiefs for every victim of drug-related violence in Mexico, a number estimated in over 150,000 pieces and one that keeps growing daily.27 The women involved in this great collaborative effort reveal and resist with their needles the culture of impunity and silence adopted by the Mexican government, and the dangers faced by journalists, activists and any person who tries to denounce it publicly. With every stitch, they expose the increasing normalization of violence while acknowledging each victim, who would otherwise remain unknown. In this way, ‘Bordando por la paz: Un pañuelo una víctima’ becomes a reflective action, through which every stitch allows participants to remember and therefore humanize the victims at the same time that it also ‘gives dignity and humanity to the stitchers’.28 The kerchiefs of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Chilean arpilleras and the handkerchiefs embroidered by Fuentes Rojas for Bordando por la paz: Un pañuelo una víctima are all projects carried out by women through processes of making craft. By reclaiming, repurposing and redefining traditional techniques usually restricted to the so-called feminine, private and domestic domains, these groups of women became active agents of change, rather than passive subjects, ‘engaging themselves in a powerful, innovative, creative, and compelling practice’.29 99

Craft and Heritage

Migration and cross-border identity in Latin-Canadian art Latin-Canadian artistic practices, particularly in Quebec, emerge from a Latin American diaspora in Canada, most from countries under pressure of authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships. With the coup d’état in Chile and the fall of the socialist president Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, the arrival of militants, intellectuals and professionals of all kinds increased the presence of the Latin American community in Canada, mainly in the province of Quebec and in the city of Montreal.30 During the 1980s, displaced and political refugees arrived from Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Central America, particularly El Salvador and Guatemala, and later from Colombia and Mexico through the so-called war against drug trafficking that affected – and continues to affect – poor communities as well as middle- and upper-class communities.31 This wave was followed and enriched by a contingent of ‘economic refugees’, as Victor Armony calls them, who settled in the 1990s in search of job opportunities, due to the economic pressure exerted by neoliberal policies of the region, particularly from Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Mexico.32 These contingents have brought with them individual and collective memories of the migratory process, in which both the place of origin and the host society give meaning to a new cross-border cultural identity. They also bring with them suitcases loaded with memories and their personal belongings to start a new life in Canada, including wearable textiles and other crafted objects to decorate their new domestic spaces and use in everyday tasks. These objects reactivate histories by recalling the land, customs and traditions of their places of origin, but also acquire new meaning in the migratory context. Although the Latin American diaspora has been studied from a historical and sociological perspective, little research has been conducted about the diffusion and circulation of its cultural and artistic production. From the 1990s until today, the work of established and emerging Latin-Canadian33 artists has made an important contribution at the national and global level to the cultural and artistic sphere, as a cultural movement with its own aesthetic, formal and conceptual characteristics. At this point, it is important to mention that – beyond an issue of origin – for the authors, Latin-Canadian art refers to the mobility of artistic narratives between Canada and Latin America, and the historical migratory relationship that crosses the continent. This category points both to the capacity of a self-constructive identity, as well as to the relationship of cultural identities between the South and the North of the Americas. Far from being a homogeneous phenomenon, derived from a culturally uniform imaginary about Latin America, this emerging movement reflects the sociocultural complexity and the heterogeneity of its migratory variations.34 The artistic practices of Giorgia Volpe, Sarabeth Triviño, Laura Acosta and Maria Ezcurra comprise the artisanal wealth and textile traditions that cross the continent, such as embroidery, weaving, macramé and beading, to adapt these craft practices for different audiences, interlocutors and social actors. More than appropriation or exploitation of human resources and material goods, these artists’ interdisciplinary practices are both a personal exploration and a creative strategy that recovers and articulates the rich cultural heritages of their countries of origin, participating in the construction of new and complex North-South cultural identities. 100

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity

Interweaving collective rituals and meeting spaces Multidisciplinary artist Giorgia Volpe activates the spectator’s participation in the creative process to strengthen spontaneous community bonds through the mediation of objects, daily tasks and traditional practices. Originally from Brazil, where she studied arts at the University of Sao Paulo, Volpe came to Quebec in 1998 to pursue an MFA at the University of Laval.35 Since then, Volpe has been employing textiles to create spaces of encounter through collective performances that involve passers-by, residents and the local community at large. In her installation Fil de lin, fil du temps (2005),36 she invited the community of Portneuf County along with women from the local Les Cercles de Fermières (Circle/Community of farmers’ wives) to stimulate their memories by embroidering them onto white blankets.37 Territoire Textile (2017), a large-scale mural entirely made up of recovered textile materials in the municipality of Haute-St. Charles, was made by Volpe in that same municipality in collaboration with Les Cercles de Fermières of Val Bélair, Loretteville and St-Raphaël.38 Les Cercles de Fermières is an organization that emerged in Quebec in the early twentieth century, to counteract the perceived threat of rural exodus to urban centres. Inspired by a strong sense of family and community within a largely French-Canadian national identity, rural women recovered and transmitted traditions that were considered part of a French-Canadian artisanal and cultural heritage, including textiles.39 While the origin of Les Cercles de Fermières has been historically attributed to a collaboration between the Catholic Church and the Quebec government, several authors claim its emergence was also the result of a popular movement led by women who were looking for social recognition in the public sphere.40 Volpe expanded this organization’s intergenerational goals into a cross-cultural context, mobilizing a rich exchange of knowledge through the appropriation of collective spaces. More than a nationalist claim to identity, Volpe’s practice may be understood as the recognition and valorization of culturally diverse artistic practices, as seen in La Grande Manufacture (2018), which points to women’s history of industrial textile work in Quebec City. In the Place de l’Amérique Française, Volpe brought together fifteen women from different cultural backgrounds and professional horizons to exchange their experiences and knowledge about artisan work with the public. The idea behind these micro-political actions is to activate our social awareness through collective work, as a way to strengthen ties, weave self-reliance and contribute to social change. In this sense, knitting, embroidering, weaving and other textile techniques become for Volpe collective rituals and exercises to rescue social, individual and affective memories. In other cases, the recovery of waste, garbage and discarded objects is Volpe’s starting point to produce a series of participatory works that create monumental public installations that are appropriated in various ways by the public. In this context, Meeting Point (2008–2016) is an installation that started with an open call for the recovery of non-biodegradable plastic bags to make a huge braid that measures more than 1 kilometre long that was later woven into a spiral ‘rag’ rug (Figure 5.1). It was inspired by the tapis tressé, a popular traditional braiding technique employed by women, usually using fabrics recovered and recycled from other sewing and domestic activities. Since 101

Craft and Heritage

Figure 5.1  Meeting Point, Giorgia Volpe (2008–2016)

the early colonization of North America, braided carpets were part of Quebec’s folklore. Inspired by historic Indigenous weaving techniques, braided carpets were used to warm the floors of the houses of the early settlers in the cold seasons.41 This cultural métissage is the starting point to a piece that Volpe began in her kitchen and presented for the first time in the context of an artistic residency at Dare-Dare, a multidisciplinary art dissemination centre in Cabot Square, Montreal.42 Meeting Point travelled for eight years to various parts of the province of Quebec, where people continued braiding it in public parks, artists’ centres, dance halls, schools, and circus workshops, accumulating experiences, meetings and dialogues. The rug functioned as a meeting place that people used for dancing, picnics, rest, acrobatics and even to give lectures. It was also used for a meeting of Indigenous communities of the Americas in 2008, which took place in the Parc Hector-Toe-Blake in Montreal, which is also the location of the bust of Simon Bolivar, ‘El Libertador’ (the liberator) who led the fight for independence of many Latin American countries from Spain. Meeting Point was later transported to the Musée National des Beaux Arts du Quebec in June 2016, where it became a ribbon that was cut at the opening of the Pierre Lassonde pavilion. In this way, the 12-foot braided work generated improvised, intimate and collective experiences within public spaces, moving beyond the control and limits of institutionalized spaces. Volpe’s nomadic rug activates space through use, resources and citizen strategies. 102

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity

The métissage of artisanal techniques acquires a particular meaning in the work of the artist Sarabeth Triviño. She uses macramé, knitting, crochet and beading to make textile installations that offer sensory experiences and that take on a political dimension. Of Mapuche Indigenous origin, the largest ethnic group in Chile, she and her siblings learned from their mother how to wash, spin and weave the wool from the family’s sheep based in the region of the lakes in southern Chile. Under pressure for centuries from South American states and the Catholic church to assimilate, and facing loss of their historic lands, many Mapuche have migrated to urban centres where they also face cultural loss.43 Upon moving to Viña del Mar with her family, Triviño studied weaving at a technical school while working in a textile factory and completed her studies in pedagogy of special education which qualified her as a teacher for children with a variety of disabilities. This experience in both artisanal and industrial textile settings, as well as her work in sensory education, has influenced her creative process by offering rich and diverse aesthetic and conceptual perspectives. In the constructed space of the installation Ruka (2016–2017) viewers are invited to interact with Triviño’s work through all their senses (Plate 10). In this piece, the artist employs techniques of macramé and crochet, using materials such as sisal, wool and cotton of different colours, to create three hanging textile sculptures that represent the rukahas (or rucas), which in the Mapudungun language refers to the vernacular dwellings that for centuries formed an important part of the cultural identity of the Mapuche people.44 Materiality and shape vary according to the area where a rukaha is located, but it usually acquires an oval form and incorporates materials collected in situ, such as wood, boards and rods, while the roof is made of jonquil or tall grass. The traditional Mapuche house is a collectively constructed domestic space that represents the basic unit of the territorial identity of the Meli Wixan Mapu (the four cardinal directions of the Earth), based on the cosmogony of this Indigenous group located in the south-centre region of Chile and the southwest of Argentina. The Wajmapu sacred place (ancestral territory) merges through textiles with the space, knowledge and weaving practice that Mapuche women have been responsible for keeping alive through oral memory.45 ‘Thus, the Mapuche wixal (loom) has become a key tool for the economic, cultural and political autonomy of the Mapuche people/nation’ and as a ‘women’s strategy of resistance against the male hegemonic power (whether state/non-state based, Indigenous/non-Indigenous)’.46 In this context, the flexible constructions of Triviño allow the viewers to immerse themselves in a sensorial experience where both a spiritual and a physical dimension converge, vindicating the craft and political work of women to defend their ancestral territory in the context of the exploitation of natural resources in Latin America. This work is meaningful in the face of waves of assassinations and disappearances of environmental, Indigenous and social leaders, as in the 2016 case of the Honduran feminist and environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who had been fighting to keep hydroelectric dams and mining concessions off Indigenous territory.47 ‘La minería canadiense mata’ (Canadian mining kills) was the slogan that the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network activists used to confront the World’s Premier Mineral Exploration & Mining Convention, which took place in Toronto a few days after Cáceres’s murder. 103

Craft and Heritage

Canada, an international mining leader, has spread its miner-state model beyond its borders, allowing ‘the enrichment of a mining oligarchy by putting the state apparatus at its service’.48 Triviño’s immersive textile spaces, in which colour and texture contrast, seek to create a phenomenological experience through the affirmation of a space of political repositioning in the face of the violent dispossession of ancestral territory, where the abuses committed by the multinational mining industry have provoked hundreds of social conflicts in Mapuche territory and other Indigenous territories in Latin America.49 Triviño’s cultural and political repositioning is also found in the discs she created with beading techniques she learned in Quebec from local Indigenous women artists. Beadwork is a technique widely used among Indigenous peoples who historically and currently have incorporated beads into their clothing and textiles for official and religious ceremonies, cultural events and social gatherings. Beading is a way to strengthen relationships and community knowledge where interpersonal and intertribal relationships are maintained.50 Artists such as Sherry Farrell Racette, Dayna Danger and Nadia Myre have worked with beading and other traditional media that function as living practices where ‘the ancient and the new co-mingle’, becoming a form of claiming space for Indigenous women in Canadian art history.51 In that sense, according to Lana Ray, beading can be understood as a form of storytelling, a collective theoretical framework that fosters individuality within the context of relational accountability and nation-building.52 From a different perspective, Triviño similarly uses beading and the crochet technique she learned in Chile to make works of different shades and textures that allow her to approach the intercultural dimension of the migratory process. The works Constellation I and Constellation II (2016) are circles of different sizes that represent cartographies of the intercultural cosmogony of the immigrant,53 used to collect traditions of different geographies and lived experiences.54 In these maps, the elements of nature (water, earth, fire and air) constitute the account of an Indigenous cosmos that culturally interweaves the north and south of the American continent. They can also be interpreted as cross-border mandalas that reflect the patient and meticulous care invested in the detailed and meditative elaboration of the pieces. For the artist, the repetition of the gesture has a therapeutic dimension that involves healing the body, seen as a territory bled by the violence of cultural colonialism, the expropriation of the sacred territory and cultural appropriation.55 It is a form of including Indigenous traditions in the history of art from both Canada and other countries of the Americas.

Masks and textiles to dislocate cultural and gender stereotypes The use of textile strategies to address cultural rearrangements issuing from the processes entailed in migration has also been the subject of investigation of the Colombian-Canadian transdisciplinary artist Laura Acosta.56 Her multicoloured and multiformed amorphous masks refer to the disarticulation and uprooting of her 104

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity

own cultural identity. The intention is to playfully transgress migratory space with these masks, elaborated with the crochet technique that Acosta has learned from the Wayúu women of the Colombian Guajira region who create belt, bags, hammocks and bride ribbons with this practice.57 The Wayúu tribe, located in northeast Colombia and northwest Venezuela, are not subjected to political frontiers. Seminomadic, they move freely between both countries, but at the same time are subject to discrimination and neglect from both governments. Acosta’s performances are based on the creation of a textile garment that alters the regular movements of the body, either by obscuring vision, adding weight or limiting the natural extensions of the extremities.58 While wearing her garments, the performer has to invent a new and personal way of navigating the space while negotiating with the textile object, as in Perra Egoísta (2011–2013) (Plate 11) or HOMX LUDENs (2013–2015).59 In this sense, Acosta’s work seeks to explore the wearer’s corporal dislocation to reinvent daily movements and a sense of belonging, and to understand the social environment, while also questioning sexist prejudices and traditional notions of gender. To make these garments that distort the body, Acosta adapts the automatic drawing used by Surrealist artists such as André Breton, as a means of expressing the subconscious, to spontaneously crochet without a fixed pattern or expectations about the final result. The idea behind this process is to recover the dramatic exaggeration and relief of traditional masks – like those found in Colombia’s carnivals, such as the Barranquilla carnival,60 where costumes and masks are fundamental components that accompany the dances and litanies, to create a spontaneous effect that breaks the routine of the ordinary. Through the art collective Rosa Bear, Acosta invited several multidisciplinary artists to inhabit her masks in different ways, creating what she calls ‘Street Operas’, which are absurd and improvised public interventions, without a beginning or an end, that invite passers-by to react and interact in different ways with them. For the artist, these collective performances are social and political actions that have the ability to reveal the structures of oppression that govern our bodies. They are also a way of appropriating public spaces, such as the metro stations of Montreal that are ideal settings for these performances, where all kinds of bodies are in transit and are able to explore the limits of public and private, the intimate and the collective, the dysfunctional and the established order. Beyond concealing the identity of the participants, the mask becomes a medium to freely explore the space, emancipate the body and recognize the existence of other subjectivities. Finally, Maria Ezcurra, born in Argentina, raised in Mexico and currently living in Canada and a co-author of this chapter, has used dress and textiles to develop a series of installations, sculptures and performances that explore the physical, emotional and social implications of being an immigrant woman. Repurposing textiles is Ezcurra’s way of exploring and reshaping her own personal, cultural and social identities, affected by her own story and heritage and constantly changing relation to place. Her work reviews but also subverts cultural and gendered stereotypes. Made with dozens of nylon stockings, cut at the seams and extended on the wall like animal skins, Invisible (2005/2016) denounces the normalization and invisibility of racial and gender-based violence in Mexico and globally (Figure 5.2). Similarly, In Your Shoes (2010) was made 105

Craft and Heritage

Figure 5.2  Invisible, Maria Ezcurra (2005/2016)

with recovered and donated shoes, most of them unpaired. For Ezcurra, these shoes involve a series of personal stories, dreams and quests that symbolically represent the hunt for the North American dream: the continual search for the greener grass of our neighbours and the inevitable loss that comes with the detachment from our own roots. The piece serves as an invitation to understand and empathize with the reasons for migration, whether personal, economic, social, political or environmental. Migratory experiences have also been the subject of the installation Reflections (Sur Gallery, Toronto, 2016), conceived as a labyrinth made with reflective emergency blankets. While struggling to find their way out of this labyrinthine installation, visitors, seeing only fragmented parts of their own reflections, are lost within themselves. Considering on the one hand the colonial history of Canada and, on the other, Canada’s still controversial immigration policies, Reflections speaks to both the geographical and reflective journey that displacement involves, a journey born of the cultural negotiations involved in mobility in an era of globalization. This installation is simultaneously attractive and critical, exploring both personal and cultural identities and making visible otherwise unnoticed aspects of history and society.61 106

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity

Like many other immigrant women artists living and working in North America, through their textile work and traditional use of fibres Ezcurra, along with Volpe, Triviño and Acosta, shares the heritage and traditions of their home countries, which have been historically excluded from the Western canon of art.62 These artists reveal multiple narratives around the notion of immigration by exploring, exhibiting and embracing uncomfortable issues of belonging, displacement, diaspora and cultural adaptation. Integrating historical arts and crafts into their interdisciplinary practice and incorporating an activist approach to issues of cultural identity, tradition, globalization and sustainability have allowed them to reconcile their lost heritages with the new cultures they have adopted.

Conclusion Historical and contemporary textile crafts invoke personal values and meanings, cultural heritage, community influences and family traditions. These diverse craft practices highlight the dynamics and social relationships of those who produce them. As Teresa Ramos Maza underlines, if crafts have been carriers of the diversity and cultural richness of many ethnic groups, they can also be a reflection of interculturality, reproducing labour and territorial dynamics.63 We would add that textile crafts as interdisciplinary practices exercised by diverse artists weave, in the public and the domestic spheres, alternative narratives with official histories that are imposed to legitimize social violence in Latin America. Textilework, as a form of activism involving a plurality of actors and agents with multiple claims and demands, reveals the fabric of struggles and reclaims the meaning of memory. As Elizabeth Jelin suggests: ‘The memories of those who were oppressed and marginalized – those who were directly affected by deaths, enforced disappearances, torture, exile and confinement – arise with a double pretension, that of giving the “true” version of history based on their memory and also to claim justice.’64 This textile legacy acquires a politically subversive quality as it gives meaning to the past and recovers an alternative historical memory to the official governmental version of the social struggles of Latin America. From this perspective, arts and crafts are social and cultural processes that interrogate and dialogue with each other to generate new narratives, which in the case of the LatinCanadian diaspora account for migrations and cross-border relations between the South and the North. These narratives also involve respect for historical work and knowledge of various textile techniques transmitted from generation to generation that have their own ongoing history and evolve over time. Drawing on textile arts’ use in the last century by Latin American women to reveal and resist social violence and authoritarian regimes, Volpe, Triviño, Acosta and Ezcurra are also aware of how problematic the practice of plagiarism and other cases of cultural appropriation can be for Indigenous communities. Their contemporary works reformulate the historical meanings of heritage textiles to highlight the cultural resistance of these thriving artistic practices. This Latin-Canadian art examines traditional art 107

Craft and Heritage

productions through the lens of symbolic displacements and cultural diasporas and is an important starting point to consider the political in the practice and writing of the history of Canadian cultural production. In this way, the notion of a Canadian cultural heritage is extended beyond the politics of multicultural representation to be understood as a complex network of transcultural tensions and negotiations where tradition and knowledge are understood as living practices.

Notes 1

G. Barrera Jurado, A. Quiñones Aguilar and J. Jacanamijoy Juajibioy, ‘Riesgos y tensiones de las marcas colectivas y denominaciones de origen de las creaciones colectivas artesanales indígenas’, Apuntes 27, no. 1 (2014): 39.

2

M. Ezcurra and C. Mitchell, ‘(Ad)dressing Sexual Violence: Girls and Young Women Creatively Resisting through Dress’, in Disrupting Shameful Legacies Girls and Young Women Speak Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence, eds. C. Mitchell and R. Moletsane (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Brill/Sense, 2018), 155–76.

3

Fr. B. De Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España: Y fundada en la documentación en lengua mexicana recogida por los mismos naturales (1956), quoted in Historia de la Literatura Nahuatl, Tomo I Book I, ed. A. M. Garibay K (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1971), 75, note 9, 56.

4

M. E. Del Solar, La memoria del tejido: Arte textil e identidad cultural de las provincias de Canchis (Cusco) y Melgar (Puno). (Lima: Soluciones Prácticas, 2017).

5

C. L. Prats, ‘Concepto y gestión del patrimonio local’, Cuadernos de Antropología 21 (2005): 17–35, quoted by J. M. Arévalo, ‘El patrimonio como representación colectiva. La intangibilidad de los bienes culturales’, Gazeta de Antropología 26, no. 1 (2010), http://www. ugr.es/~pwlac/G26_19Javier_Marcos_Arevalo.html.

6

N. García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1989); C. Good-Eshelman, Haciendo la lucha. Arte y comercio nahuas de Guerrero (Mexico: FCE, 1988); L. Stephen, ‘La cultura como recurso’, América Indígena 4, México (1990): 117–57.

7

N. García Canclini, Las culturas populares en el capitalismo (Mexico: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1982).

8

G. Frank, ‘Crafts Production and Resistance to Domination in the late 20th century’, Journal of Occupational Science 3, no. 2 (1996): 56.

9

P. C. Hipple, ‘Clothing Their Resistance in Hegemonic Dress: The Clothesline Project’s Response to Violence against Women’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 18, no. 3 (2000): 163–77.

10 C. Mitchell and M. Ezcurra, ‘Picturing (as) Resistance: Studying Resistance and WellBeing of Indigenous Girls and Young Women in Addressing Sexual Violence’, LEARNing Landscapes 10, no. 2 (2017): 207–24. 11 Victoria Blanco, ‘Traditional Dresses as Resistance: Rarámuri Women in Chihuahua, Mexico, Have Made an Indigenous Style of Dress a Means of Fighting Assimilation’, The New York Times (2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/style/raramuri-tarahumaradresses-mexico.html.

108

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity 12 M. Agosin, ed., Stitching Resistance: Women, Creativity, and Fiber Arts (Kent, England: Solis Press, 2014). 13 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, http://madresfundadoras.blogspot.ca. 14 R. Koepsel, ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo: First Responders for Human Rights’, Humanitarian Briefs, Case-Specific Briefing Paper Humanitarian Assistance in Complex Emergencies, University of Denver (2011), https://www.du.edu/korbel/crric/media/ documents/rachelkoepsel.pdf. 15 D. Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 16 Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, http://www.abuelas.org.ar. 17 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. 18 C. Sosa, ‘On Mothers and Spiders: A Face-to-Face Encounter with Argentina’s Mourning’, Memory Studies 4, no. 1 (2010): 63–72. 19 Dayna L Caldwell, ‘The Chilean Arpilleristas: Challenging National Politics through Tapestry Work’, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, Paper 665, 2012, http:// digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/665. 20 J. Adams, ‘Art in Social Movements: Shantytown Women’s Protest in Pinochet’s Chile’, Sociological Forum 17, no. 1 (2002): 21–56. 21 E. Moya-Raggio, ‘Arpilleras: Chilean Culture of Resistance’, Feminist Studies 10, no. 2 (1984): 277–90. 22 Bordando por la paz, Un pañuelo una víctima, http://bordamosporlapaz.blogspot.ca. 23 Danielle House, ‘Following the Threads to Mexico’, StitchedVoices, 10 June 2018, https:// stitchedvoices.wordpress.com/2018/06/10/following-the-threads-to-mexico/. 24 According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Latin American History, ‘The drug trade in Mexico and efforts by the Mexican government – often with United States assistance – to control the cultivation, sale, and use of narcotics are largely 20th-century phenomena. Over time, U.S. drug control policies have played a large role in the scope and longevity of Mexico’s drug trade. Many argue that these policies – guided by the U.S.-led global war on drugs – have been fruitless in Mexico, and are at least partially responsible for the violence and instability seen there in the early twentieth century’, affecting mostly the civil society. From https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-230. 25 Maureen Daly Goggin, ‘Threads of Feeling: Embroidering Craftivism to Protest the Disappearances and Deaths in the “War on Drugs” in Mexico’, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, Paper 937, 2014, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/937/. 26 Ibid., 2. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 7. 29 Ibid., 10. 30 J. Del Pozo, Les Chiliens au Québec. Immigrants et réfugiés, de 1955 à nos jours (Montréal: Boréal, 2009). 31 V. Armony, ‘Los Latinoamericanos en Québec: una realidad particular’, in Ruptures, Continuities and Re-learning: The Political Participation of Latin Americans in Canada, eds. J. Ginieniwicz and D. Schugurensky (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, 2006).

109

Craft and Heritage 32 Patricia Martin, Annie Lapalme and Mayra Roffe Gutman, ‘Refugiados y solicitantes de asilo mexicanos en Montreal: Un acto de ciudadanía dentro del espacio norteamericano?’ in Hacia el otro norte: Mexicanos en Canada, eds. S. M. Lara Flores, J. Pantaleón and M. J. Sánchez Gómez, coordinadores (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales), 231–55. 33 It is important to mention that – beyond an issue of origin – for the authors, Latin-Canadian art refers to the mobility of artistic narratives between Canada and Latin America, and the historical migratory relationship that crosses the continent. This category points both to the capacity of a self-constructive identity, as well as to the relationship of cultural identities between the South and the North of the Americas. 34 N. Carton de Grammont and T. Navallo, ‘Poétiques du déplacement dans la pratique performative latino-québécoise’, in Vues transversales. Panorama de la scène artistique latinoquébécoise, ed. Mariza Rosales Argonza (Montréal: Les Éditions du CIDIHCA/La fondation LatinArte, 2018), 173–223. 35 Giorgia Volpe has participated in more than 140 exhibitions and has made numerous public interventions and artistic residencies in Brazil, Cuba, Canada and Europe. She has won several awards and scholarships in Brazil, the Council of Arts and Letters of Quebec, and the Arts Council of Canada. Her works form part of several collections of contemporary art in Brazil and Canada. http://giorgiavolpe.net. 36 Fil de lin, fil du temps was created for the Biennale Internationale du Lin de Portneuf in 2005. 37 With the same Cercles de Fermières and other participants, Volpe created Tricobus (2006), a woven dress for a school bus done for the Les Convertibles project, which marked the tenth edition of Journées de la culture in the province of Quebec. 38 The textile mural was made with the participation of Danielle Dion, Louise Dion, Claire Blondeau, Céline Roy Fleury, Solange Lemieux, Berthe Moisan, Carole Théroux, Suzanne Godbout, Diane Paquet, Lola Bellefleur, Johanne Talbot, Ginette Gendron, Jocelyne Dostie, Denise Moisan, Réjane Genest, Aline Parent, Francine L’Écuyer. 39 To see more about Les Cercles de Fermières in Quebec, visit: https://cfq.qc.ca/. 40 Y. Cohen, Femmes de parole. Histoire des Cercles de fermières du Québec, 1915–1990 (Montréal: Le Jour éditeur,1990); C. Devaux, ‘Knit Two Together and Repeat: Breaking with Tradition through Yarnbombing by the Cercles de Fermières du Québec’ (MA diss. Concordia University, Montreal), 45. 41 See ‘Sous nos pieds … Tapis d’autrefois’, exhibition presented at the Musée Beaulne, in Coaticook, Quebec, in April, 2019, https://www.museebeaulne.qc.ca/fr/expositions/sous_ nos_pieds_tapis_dautrefois. 42 Meeting Point (2008–2016) was presented at Dare-Dare Multidisciplinary Art Dissemination Center, located at the time in Square Cabot, from August 1 to 15 August 2008, http://www. dare-dare.org/fr/evenements/giorgia-volpe. 43 The Mapuche people constitute approximately 10 per cent (more than 1,000,000 people) of the Chilean population. Half of them live in the south of Chile from the river Bío Bío until the Chiloé Island. The other half is found in and around the capital, Santiago. There are also around 300,000 Mapuches living in Argentina. During the Pinochet era, all Mapuche land was privatized and to a large extent sold out to wealthy landlords and foreigners. Pinochet also introduced new laws, which declared that there were ‘no indigenous people in Chile, only Chileans’. https://www.mapuche.nl/english/mapuche.html. 44 The installation Ruka (2016–2017) was presented within the framework of the exhibition Pendant qu’il fais mauvais, a show of students who finished their undergraduate studies in

110

Art, Activism and Diasporic Identity visual and media arts at UQAM, Atelier Jean Brillant, April 14 to 23, 2017. The two smallest installation structures measure 121 cm in diameter and 182 cm the largest. 45 S. M. Garcia Gualda, ‘El tejido como herramienta de negociación identitaria y transformación política de las mujeres mapuce’, De Prácticas y Discursos 2, no. 2 (2013): 1–13. 46 Ibid., 2. 47 Berta Cáceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Cáceres became a student activist and in 1993 cofounded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) to address the growing threats posed to Lenca communities by illegal logging and fight for Indigenous rights, particularly for land and natural resources. She won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, for ‘a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam’ at the Río Gualcarque. https://www. goldmanprize.org/recipient/berta-caceres/. 48 W. Sacher, ‘El modelo minero canadiense: Saqueo e impunidad institucionalizados, Mexico’, Acta Sociológica 54 (2010): 49–67. 49 Ibid; Pierre Beaucage, ‘Les minières canadiennes contre les peuples autochtones au Mexique’, Nouveaux Cahiers du socialism 18 (Autumn 2017): 140–4. 50 S. Cotherman, ‘Art Traditions of the Anishinaabe: Bandolier Bags from the Collection of the Madeline Island Museum’, Wisconsin Magazine of History 93, no. 4 (2010): 28–37. 51 Sherry Farrell Racette, The Flower Beadwork People (Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2009), 23. See also Scarscapes (2010) or Meditations on Black Lake (2012). Nadia Myre and Dayna Danger created a series of black leather BDSM masks that have been elaborately adorned with beadwork. Her Masks (2016–), however, seek to challenge sexual taboos within First Nations communities, which are often linked to violence and colonial domination for the conquest of physical and geographical territories. These works are discussed in Nuria Carton de Grammont, In/Visible: Body as Reflective Site (Dayna Danger, Kama La Mackerel, Hannah Claus, Nadia Myre, Sandeep Johal and Maria Ezcurra) (Montréal: Centre des arts visuels Galerie McClure, 2019), 17. 52 L. Ray, ‘Transforming the Academy through the Use of Beading as a Method of Inquiry’, International Review of Qualitative Research 9 (2016): 363–78. 53 The work Constellation II was presented in the exhibition Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction, Art Mûr Gallery, 15 July to 26 August 2017. 54 Sarabeth Triviño has been living in Montreal with her family since 2007, when she came to work as a professional artisan and became a member of the Conseil des métiers d’art du Québec (CMAQ). She affirms that the experience of immigration has allowed her to rediscover her Mapuche identity along the path of cultural intersection that she discovers in Canada, thanks to the knowledge and adaptation of the North American Indigenous craftsmanship. Nuria Carton de Grammont interview with Sarabeth Triviño, 10 May 2018. 55 It is important to note that this therapeutic dimension of art is set in motion by Triviño through workshops for people with different types of disabilities that she taught as a sensory stimulator teacher in Chile and at the Center d’Apprentissage Parallèle in Montreal. 56 Inspired by her experience as an immigrant, a refugee and a hybrid citizen, Laura Acosta’s creative research revolves around the different forms of living, embodying or inventing the social space. She has taken part in artistic residencies in Argentina, Colombia and Canada, where she has worked with various groups of people in the development of public performances through collaboration and improvisation. https://www.laura-acosta.com.

111

Craft and Heritage 57 The Wayúu tribe gained international recognition for the colourful crochet mochilas (bags) made of colourful yarn with intricate patterns and motifs that share their cosmological view of the universe and their traditions. 58 Nuria Carton de Grammont interview with Laura Acosta 23, 2018. 59 Perra Egoísta (2011–2013). Public performance and textile installation. La Plata, Argentina. Performed by Emilia Benitez. https://www.laura-acosta.com/project08. 60 In 2003 the Barranquilla Carnival was proclaimed by UNESCO as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/carnival-ofbarranquilla-00051. 61 For more information about Reflections (2016) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QNveJVELaoU. 62 A. Ługowska, ‘The Art and Craft Divide: On the Exigency of Margins’, Art Inquiry/ Recherches sur les arts 16 (2014): 285–96. 63 T. Ramos Maza, ‘Artesanas y artesanías: indígenas y mestizas de Chiapas construyendo espacios de cambio’, LiminaR. Estudios Sociales y Humanísticos 2, no. 1 (2004): 66, 50–71. 64 E. Jelin, Trabajos de la memoria (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2012), 42–3. Translated by the authors from the Sanish original: ‘Las memorias de quienes fueron oprimidos y marginalizados – en el extremo, quienes fueron directamente afectados en su integridad física por muertes, desapariciones forzadas, torturas, exilios y encierros – surgen con una doble pretensión, la de dar la versión «verdadera» de la historia a partir de su memoria y la de reclamar justicia’.

112

SECTION II SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCE

Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson

Economic sustainability has understandably been a persistent and important issue for many craftspeople and one inseparable from cultural and environmental sustainability. Awareness of these intersections is reflected in emerging anthropological, sociological, heritage and craft research and discourse, along with UNESCO heritage programmes that address crafter communities and projects undertaken by the World Craft Council and national craft associations. Associated with sustainability is a community’s economic and cultural resilience in the face of such institutionally sanctioned and/or commercially driven initiatives that can threaten, diminish or challenge the long-standing working methods, materials and designs of craftspeople. Craftspeople’s desire for economic well-being means they have a complex working relationship with sustainability and resilience, occasionally embracing imposed guidelines, sometimes opposing them and often negotiating with them. Several chapters in this section recognize the resilience of communities grappling with the consequences of decolonization by tracing how makers have adapted their craft practices and products to ensure cultural and environmental sustainability as well as economic benefits. Key to the dynamics of resistance, negotiation and adaptation is the importance of the individual craftsperson’s voice, one that needs to be attended to and validated, an approach recognized by all the authors in this section. These five case studies consider the historic and contemporary concerns of craftspeople, many of them women, along with their strategies as they promote the sustainability of their practices, products and communities, even while negotiating with institutional and family heritages and market structures. In ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers: A cultural history of cheese in early twentiethcentury Ireland’, Eleanor Flegg uncovers her family’s heritage, a cheesemaking venture started by her great-grandmother in the early twentieth century, to reveal the dynamics of social sustainability, the limits of the terms ‘heritage’ and ‘craft’ and the ephemerality of these. She argues for this hidden history of cheesemaking as a recuperative agent for women’s heritage within the context of a national drive towards self-determination in Ireland. Lisa Binkley employs Richard Wagamese’s notion of ‘sweetgrass solidarity’ as a heritage lens through which to explore a craft tradition in ‘Piecing heritage in transition: The Lakota Sioux star quilt as a symbol of pan-Indigeneity’. She traces the coverlet across its different contexts of construction and meaning-making, from its nineteenth-century origins within Lakota Sioux culture, through its evolution as a pan-Indigenous symbol across various communities during the reservation period in North America, to its current dissemination throughout Indigenous geographies. Binkley argues the Star blanket is a contact zone holding the promise of reciprocity

Craft and Heritage

and reconciliation, a material representation of Indigenous identity and resilience and a powerful political agent sustaining a cultural heritage. That (re)built environments might evoke memories of a rich history is the focus of Giedrė Jarulaitienė’s ‘A cart before a horse: How the subfield of traditional workmanship is transforming the field of heritage conservation’. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Jarulaitienė contends that institutionalized notions of ‘authorized’ heritage were complicated by builders using embodied craft knowledge in a series of new out-buildings in Kaffestuggu courtyard in the World Heritage Site of Røros, Norway. She elaborates how this project became a force for change within heritage discourse and policy in Norway due to the positive local public response to the historical accuracy that emerged through the skill of the project’s carpenters. Magdalena Buchczyk’s chapter, ‘Becoming heritage smart – negotiating the dilemma of craft practice in a ceramic centre’, claims that the Romanian potters of Horezu have become ‘heritage smart’, an assertion substantiated through her careful documentation of the potters’ designs, fabrication and marketing resilience within shifting contexts. Despite an official heritage narrative of unbroken familial ceramic production in Horezu, Buchczyk’s research exposes ruptures and shifting manufacturing strategies as the potters negotiate constraints and opportunities in sustaining economic and cultural viability, even while their pottery has been framed and reframed under socialist and free-market governments, industrial production, designations such as folk and artizanat, and most recently, as an intangible cultural heritage. Chamithri Greru and Britta Kalkreuter are concerned with decolonizing strategies in their chapter ‘Postcolonial and global heritage narratives from communal and individual perspectives in Dumbara weaving – Sri Lanka’. Recognizing the ongoing economic and aesthetic power of the ‘Western culturally-elitist point of view’ within Sri Lankan craft communities who negotiate between their own design heritages and recent innovations, Greru and Kalkreuter harness historic evidence and oral testimony to argue for decolonizing the design industry. They suggest this could be attained through careful attentiveness to the suggestions and concerns of craftmakers and consideration for the cultural sustainability of their practices and designs.

114

CHAPTER 6 BLESSED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF CHEESE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND

Eleanor Flegg

The park was divided from the Home Pastures by a sunk fence and a causeway across it allowed the cows to come to the milking place, where my Mother used to sit under a great ash tree to keep the milk records as the milk from each cow was weighed on the scales hanging from a convenient branch.1 Irish artisanal cheese rarely falls within the remit of cultural history but is publicly articulated in terms of both heritage and craft. Artisan cheese, as an industry, seeks cultural credibility. It uses both craft and heritage credentials as part of a deliberately constructed national food culture, to give the product a flavour of ‘authenticity’.2 Bord Bía, the Irish Food Board, describes The Craft of Cheesemaking in steps, with woodcut illustrations underpinning the handmade nature of the process.3 Likewise, the language of heritage is used to describe artisanal cheese in terms of tradition. The National Dairy Council’s animated video The History of Cheese links the cheese-eating proclivities of the pre-1700 Irish with modern cheese production.4 Such attempts to market cheese in terms of history can seem tenuous; until the proliferation of small cheese industries in the 1970s, Ireland did not have a strong tradition of cheesemaking. And yet farmhouse cheese was made in Ireland at various times. This chapter tells the story of one of these ventures. My great-grandmother made cheese on a farm in County Limerick between 1915 and 1919. Her name was Mabel O Brien (1868–1942), and she was a townswoman born and bred (Figure 6.1). Her father, Sir Philip Crampton Smyly, was a physician and they lived on Merrion Square in Dublin. In 1902 she married Dermod O Brien (1865–1945), an artist who, shortly after their marriage, inherited the estate of Cahirmoyle, near Rathkeale in West County Limerick. Cahirmoyle was a typical Irish ‘Big House’, the country home of a landed ascendency family, surrounded by a home farm and estates inhabited by tenant farmers.5 The house was built in the manner of a Venetian palazzo; it looked magnificent, but it leaked.6 Life at Cahirmoyle was not extravagant. One of their guests described it as ‘plain living and high thinking. The living was ample but, except on occasion, plain … nor was there more cream than was just necessary’.7 Before Mabel took up cheesemaking, the milk from their herd of around sixty-five shorthorn cattle was sent to Ardagh Creamery to be made into butter.

Craft and Heritage

Figure 6.1  Mabel O Brien, Sean O’Sullivan. Photo: Eleanor Flegg

Dermod was more interested in art than farming and remained in Dublin to pursue his career but, largely for reasons of economy, moved his family down to Cahirmoyle. He and Mabel wrote to each other every day that they were apart and this is how the documentation of her cheesemaking survives. Visual art is a respected form of heritage and Dermod became an influential figure within the Irish art establishment; his correspondence is preserved, archived and now publicly available.8 Mabel’s letters to her husband, her notes and correspondence on cheesemaking have probably survived by default; they are her heritage and my family’s heritage, but also Ireland’s heritage. Cheese is not deemed tangible heritage (it has long been eaten) and, while the skill of cheesemaking is definitely a craft and could be considered intangible heritage, this particular enterprise was short-lived. Mabel’s cheesemaking ended with the sale of Cahirmoyle in 1919. She had no significant successors and the movement that she spearheaded did not survive the political and economic turmoil of the 1920s. Cheesemaking did not become widespread in Ireland until the 1970s and, when Veronica Steel, widely credited as the instigator of Irish artisan cheesemaking, began making cheese on the Beara Peninsula in 1976, she had to start from scratch.9 Mabel’s cheesemaking had left no perceptible legacy, its heritage intangible and lost. While only the story remains, it is one that asks us to consider the ephemerality of heritage and craftsmanship. 116

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

Unexpectedly, Mabel took to farming. Soon, she was more involved, and more interested, in ‘the estate at Cahirmoyle, and the farm, and its management, and the intricacies of rural life’ than her husband.10 Dermod’s painting, The Morning Milk, shows a romanticized pastoral scene of Mabel, with small children, crossing the pasture to record the milking (Plate 12). But Mabel meant business. In May 1918, Mabel wrote to Dermod: ‘We weigh all the milk now every day, not each cow’s but each milker’s lot and then I note in a book the total and how much goes to the Creamery and how much to other things and thereby grabbed a little extra for my cheese this morning.’11 A few weeks later, she records dressing a cow’s infected leg: ‘The cow is not in the least grateful and has to be pursued and held by the nose by John and spancelled by Mrs Flynn and then I try to dress the leg and find it exceedingly difficult to get anything to stick on.’12 It was not for nothing, Lennox Robinson wrote, ‘that she came from doctoring Smyly blood’.13 Lennox Robinson (1886–1958), playwright, poet and protégé of Dermod, arrived at Cahirmoyle for lunch in the summer of 1915 and stayed for four years.14 Initially, Mabel confused him with a representative of the Department of Agriculture, who had come to Cahirmoyle to advise her on the health of her goat, Isaac of York.15 Lennox Robinson executed a subtle revenge in his play, The Whiteheaded Boy (1916).16 Through the fictional character of Aunt Ellen, he teases Mabel about her experiments in farming. One year, Aunt Ellen keeps goats; another year she makes a fortune-growing tobacco.17 Like Mabel, Ellen is keen on the co-operative movement. ‘Co-operation. They say it will be the salvation of Ireland,’ Aunt Ellen proclaimed.18 Just as Mabel’s correspondence survives by default, so too Robinson became her chronicler. In his biography of Dermod, Palette and Plough (1948), he reflected: She who in earlier years could read her Dante with perfect understanding but hardly knew the difference between a heifer and a bullock, was now able to deal firmly with the question of a puckawn19 that was going sadly bald. She who had only recognised milk when it was splashed out from a tin on her Dublin doorstep was now to become the pioneer of cheese-making in Ireland.20 Mabel approved of Lennox Robinson, also known as ‘The Lynx’. In February 1916 she wrote to her husband: ‘The Lynx is the one I like best of all your menagerie. In fact, I love him very dearly.’21 She also liked his plays. ‘Think of our using a literary genius like that to lay down dung in our garden. He does that well too though and I am sure it is better for him than spirit-rapping in Dublin.’22 Mysticism was popular within the literary establishment largely through the influence of the poet WB Yeats. In Mabel’s opinion, it was ‘all my eye’.23 And yet it was another mystic, George Russell (1867–1935), a poet and artist writing under the pseudonym ‘AE’, who became her link to the cooperative movement. In Ireland, co-operation was spearheaded by Horace Plunkett and, from 1894, organized through the Irish Agricultural Organisational Society (IAOS).24 The movement was dominated by creameries of which, by 1900, there were 191 across the country.25 Russell, who had a practical streak, was editor of The Irish Homestead, the weekly publication of the IAOS between 1905 and 1930.26 117

Craft and Heritage

The connection with The Irish Homestead, where Mabel’s discourse on cheese was published, and with the organizers of the co-operative movement, came through her husband. Lennox Robinson described the dynamic: ‘Dermod would be very useful in Plunkett House sitting on innumerable committees with Sir Horace Plunkett in the chair … and AE only a floor above them. But it was Johnny Mac and Mabel O Brien and a hundred and more like them all over Ireland who were really doing the work.’27 John McCormack, known as Johnnie Mac, was the steward at Cahirmoyle and ‘a passionate co-operator’.28 Robinson describes him as ‘big in body and big in mind. His great sturdy honest figure surges into the middle of my picture. He was steward, he was general advisor and friend’.29 It is unlikely that Mabel would have attempted cheesemaking without the support of John McCormack. ‘Johnnie is a great man’, she informed her husband. ‘I wonder if Mrs Johnnie likes him better than I do.’30 In 1910, he and Mabel organized a co-operative store where the labourers could buy their provisions at honest prices ‘and not be at the mercy of the local huckstering shops’.31 In 1915, just before the advent of cheesemaking, she wrote to Dermod: ‘ I have had a great discoursing with Johnnie about cheese and we have already established an imaginary trade and done some bargaining about the price of a cheese mill for me and finished cheese for the farm.’32 The idea of cheesemaking came from the unlikely alliance of John McCormack and M Delrenne, a Belgian refugee who arrived with his wife in late 1914. Soon after his arrival, Mabel wrote to her husband: M Delrenne is ‘perfectly cracked about farming … His eyes gleamed as he talked about draining and subsoils and sowing clover with oats and flax to follow’.33 And again, three days later, M Delrenne ‘says we should certainly make cheese, he knows how himself and is quite ready to teach us’.34 John McCormack was willing to listen to him and considered that ‘the sale of whole milk and cheese would be more profitable than the sale of milk at the price we get it for at the creamery’.35 Most Irish cheese of the time was manufactured on farms but, in 1910, a creamery proprietor attempted the manufacture of Caerphilly cheese in Ireland.36 A leaflet published by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland described the experiment as ‘so successful that the proprietor continued cheesemaking. Since then a number of factories have commenced and … the results have been extremely satisfactory’.37 In the summer of 1914, Mabel visited one of these cheese factories, recently established by Messers Cleeve in a derelict mill near Askeaton. What appealed personally was the lack of all bewildering machinery. The appliances seemed to be of the simplest. Vats, moulds and presses – nothing more elaborate than these. The process of making too so far as I could judge involved no strain upon the intellect. It was exactly the industry for me I thought and, that evening, on our return home we spent much time making elaborate calculations as to the relative profits of butter and cheese-making.38 The department had also experimented with Cheddar cheesemaking at their Agricultural Station at Ballyhaise and was in a position to instruct new enterprises.39 In 1915, Mabel 118

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

described the process in The Irish Homestead: ‘As I had not the faintest idea of how to set about the making of cheese, I wrote to the Department of Agriculture for advice and instruction, and received in return for my letter a bundle of pamphlets and the promise of a visit from the Department instructor to inspect our premises and give advice.’40 In January 1918, she wrote to her husband: ‘A Mr Corson called this morning to talk about cheese-making. He says that the room off the linen room would do beautifully for cheeses and that Cheddar is the best to go for.’41 The utensils were purchased from the Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society (IAWS) for a total expenditure £17. 7s. 7d: ‘The milk I obtained from our own farm. My vat contains 32 gallons comfortably, and on the morning of 3 August, milk and instructor arrived almost simultaneously and my lessons began.’42 No one, she observed, ‘can learn cheese-making from a book or without a teacher, and I need only say that my whole household was in a state of breathless excitement while the lesson was in progress’.43 Contemporary cheesemaking is rarely articulated in the language of craft. Possibly this is because it is not supported by craft agencies, and the institutions that support a practice often come to define it. Cheese, in Ireland, falls under remit of the dairy industry and articulated in the language of food. But, while food writers frequently invoke craft as a cipher for quality, craft studies tend to prejudice non-perishable objects.44 Craft institutions support the makers of wooden cheese boards and handcrafted cheese knives but not the cheesemakers themselves. Nevertheless, cheesemaking shares many of the attributes of craft: it requires skill in making that needs to be passed on in person, rather than from a book and, like many crafts, it includes elements of science. Mabel found the process fascinating from beginning to end: ‘The excitement of testing for acidity makes the heart of the cheesemaker stand still, as with one eye on the clock and the other on the cupful of blended milk and rennet in which the test is made … A mistake at this point has serious consequences.’45 The next moment of interest was when the rennet had done its work and the smooth white junket is ready to be cut by the long many-bladed knives which pass evenly through it leaving rippling wavy lines in their track. Then comes a delicious experience when bare arms are plunged over elbows in the warm whey, full of little slippery particles of curd, and one searches into corners for strips that have evaded the knives in order to break them very gently so as not to let the precious butter-fat escape.46 Then followed the ‘scald’ during which a wooden rake was used to stir the curd and whey with ‘a curious rhythmical motion, a dreamy process, during which one watches the little soft white lumps of curd become creamy in colour and elastic in texture’.47 The whole process, she concluded, was supposed to take five hours but in her experience took longer. Mabel’s first batch of cheese was made in August 1915. She was forty-seven years old and the mother of five children, aged between thirteen and four. ‘I made 24 Cheddar truckles and sat them in two rows of twelve on a long table in my cheese room …. I used to gaze at 119

Craft and Heritage

my cheeses by day and dream of them at night.’48 The cheese, when it was considered ripe enough to be cut, was ‘quite good to eat’.49 She wrote to The Irish Homestead to tell what she had done and the result of her letter surprised her. ‘Orders for cheese simply poured in upon me and my twelve Cheddar truckles vanished like smoke.’50 In October 1915 she informed her husband: ‘I shall have to spend the rest of my life stirring curd in a cheese vat. My cheese is selling like anything. I fear the August lot will all have gone before the October lot is ripe.’51 Even at this early stage, Mabel envisaged that others would take up the making of cheese. What was really wanted was ‘not more cheese customers but more cheesemakers’.52 In order to achieve this, she sought to overcome the ‘two objections urged against cheesemaking in this country, two great cheese heresies … which have, I fear, deterred a good many people from taking it up. The first is that cheese cannot be made in Ireland; and the second is that Irish people will not eat it when made’.53 The first heresy, she argued, could easily be proved untrue: All cheesemakers in Ireland are requested to send in a return of the amount they have made every year to the Department and are told approximately what amount was made in the whole country during that year … In 1914 about 654 tons of cheese were made in Ireland, in 1915 the return was 920 tons, while for 1916 though the exact figures have not yet been published. I was told on very good authority that about double the amount was made as in 1915. Of course it is not nearly enough yet, still 1800 tons of cheese is not a bad record for a country in which we are told it cannot be made at all.54 Regarding the ‘second great heresy, that Irish people would not eat cheese’ she wrote that, although she had once met with ‘an old man who told me, with the utmost politeness, that “with respect to me” he could “see no difference between cheese and soap” but his case was exceptional. Our own labourers eat it with avidity and we have a considerable trade with farmers and cottagers’.55 Cheesemaking, she wrote in The Irish Homestead, could be ‘carried on by quite an ordinary woman in an ordinary house and without interfering unduly with ordinary occupations … I trust the United Irishwomen will take the matter up and introduce the art of cheese-making into every farm in Ireland before the war is over’.56 The Society of United Irishwomen (UI), founded in 1911, was inspired by Horace Plunkett’s cooperative movement and aimed to give women a role in the social transformation of Ireland. Mabel wrote to their secretary and ‘before very long the UI Instructress was sent down to us to learn the art … Since then she has gone through Ireland from county to county leaving a trail of little cheeses in her wake and stirring up a fine enthusiasm wherever she went’.57 By 1917, the United Irishwomen had given demonstrations in ‘home cheesemaking’ in the ‘Wexford, Waterford, Tipperary, Queen’s County, Carlow, Kilkenny, Limerick, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Sligo’ as well as Donegal.58 The United Irishwomen, as part of the co-operative movement, participated in the drive to national self-determination through agriculture and Mabel, although no nationalist had strong feelings about the naming of cheese. To her mind, ‘Cheddar’, 120

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

which is an English cheese and named for the part of England where it is made, was ‘a misnomer for cheese made in Ireland’ and she looked forward to a day when Ireland might evolve a distinctive cheese of its own ‘and such names as “English Eniscorthy” and “Scotch Foynes” may appear in the London price lists’.59 Ireland, at this time, was still under British Rule, Britain was at war and the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries promoted cheesemaking as a wartime economy. In 1916, a letter from RA Anderson, secretary of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), to Mabel contained enclosures from the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, London.60 One of these advocated ‘the advisability of establishing one, or more, migratory Cheese Schools’.61 On 2 July 1917, C Walker-Tisdale of the Wensleydale Pure Milk Society Ltd, England, wrote to Mabel regarding a sample cheese: ‘[I]t is an excellent one and I have seldom tasted one of better flavour, and the finish and appearance is all that can be desired.’62 The following year, she sent a sample to the Army and Navy Canteen Board, who replied ‘saying they would take all the cheese I could send them’.63 Mabel also taught cheesemaking at Cahirmoyle with mixed results. A typewritten certificate dated 8 June 1917, signed by Mabel and witnessed by Lennox Robinson and RA Anderson, was issued to Dame Dorothie Coddington of Oldbridge, Drogheda, ‘who attended here, ostensibly to learn cheesemaking, from 24 May to 2 June 1917’.64 Not once did she ever produce anything which by the greatest stretch of imagination could be called cheese, but during her brief stay at Cahirmoyle, she succeeded in turning out a strange substance of a viscous and clammy character … this mass of coagulated curd, when thrown on the floor of the cheese room, bounded with almost inconceivable velocity to the ceiling. It is still (8th June) bounding up and down on the cheese room floor though the height of its ‘leps’ is gradually diminishing.65 Knowing how to make Cheddar, Mabel discovered it was possible to learn how to make other cheeses from printed or written directions.66 Some of the simpler forms of cheese were ‘very easy to make and extremely useful’.67 One of these began life as ‘Pressed Cheese No. 1, a form of which is familiar to most of us United Irishwomen, as “bucket cheese” is a particularly good one to make in these lean months when old stores are exhausted and the new season is scarcely considered begun’.68 The great point about it, Mabel continued, ‘is that it ripens quickly and is ready to use a month after it is made whereas Cheddar takes three months to ripen properly’.69 The length of time that Cheddar took to ripen had been identified as one of the barriers to cheesemaking in Ireland: ‘The manufacture of cheese of the old Cheddar type … involved the locking up of so much capital that farmers and owner of creameries have been slow to embark in the industry.’70 Bucket cheese evolved into Ardagh cheese, a recipe of Mabel’s own design, which was published as a leaflet by the United Irishwomen.71 Prizes were offered for Ardagh cheese in the United Irishwomen’s county shows and certificates awarded to participants. In 121

Craft and Heritage

the Royal Dublin Society Show held in Ballsbridge in 1918, there was a total of 125 entries from 100 exhibitors in the following classes: Cheddar cheese, Ardagh cheese, Irish Wensleydale, goat’s milk cheese, any good hard cheese and any good soft cheese.72 Mabel also made blue cheese, to which end a mouldy boot was kept in the passage outside her cheese room. The mould (Penicillium glaucum) was just right for her blue cheese.73 She was invited to become a member of Cheese Control, a scheme to establish a special brand for Irish home-made cheese, of guaranteed purity and uniformity of quality.74 The scheme was organized by the United Irishwomen and its objective was to establish a brand for Irish cheese of guaranteed quality for the use of co-operative creameries.75 The Caerphilly cheese, then produced by the creameries, was not a success. In June 1918, Mabel wrote to Dermod that ‘the Creameries are getting a bad name for the quality of their cheese’.76 And then, a few months later: ‘The Caerphilly tradition is a rotten one and we ought to have a cheese of our own.’77 Anderson agreed: ‘The more I see and hear of Caerphilly the less I like it. It is a bad cheese at best and it is very liable to go wrong and when it does, it goes very wrong.’78 Together, Anderson and Mabel planned to ‘standardise Ardagh cheese and adopt it as the cheese produce of our cheese factories’.79 They enlisted the support of Mr Corson, Mabel’s original instructor in cheesemaking, who worked for the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland and was ‘quite prepared to adopt Ardagh if it can be made of a uniform size and if it can be standardised’.80 In November 1918, Anderson impressed on Mabel that ‘[i]f you are going to make Ardagh cheese, you will have to make it of distinctive size and shape and not so that it may be confounded with Caerphilly, which I regret to say has earned for itself a very evil reputation’.81 Ardagh cheese almost became standard production in Irish co-operative creameries, but its production was hampered by administrative strife. In November 1918, the Department of Agriculture admitted to Mabel that ‘we can do nothing to restrain the appointment of incompetent and badly trained cheesemakers and I am sorry to say that some of these are getting positions which will cost the creameries concerned, as you say, a lot of money and spoil their reputation’.82 By May 1919, John McCormack reported troubles at Ardagh creamery: ‘He thinks the whole thing ought to be shut down in January and then start fair with a new manager and staff, but even if this was done some changes ought to be made much sooner for Ardagh cheese will make or lose its character this year.’83 When Cahirmoyle was sold in 1919, the enterprise was abandoned. Doubtless there were other barriers to its success, which may or may not have been overcome, but without Mabel’s energy behind it there was no hope for Ardagh cheese. The O Brien family moved back to Dublin, and Mabel never made cheese again. Now, her letters are her most tangible legacy. As her descendent, they are part of my heritage. Mabel and I never met. She died in 1942, twenty years before I was born, but reading her letters, I realize that I have inherited her syntax; her phrases are instantly familiar, her sense of humour immediate. I can catch the undertow in her language. I can hear what she is trying not to say. 122

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

Although cheesemaking continued in Mabel’s absence, the energy of the farmhouse cheese movement quickly faded. With Ireland wracked by the War of Independence (1919 to 1921), closely followed by a bitter Civil War (1922–1923), people had other things than cheese on their minds. When the dust finally settled, the fledgling Irish Free State was preoccupied with more pressing matters than the subtle agricultural changes that cheesemaking required. The skills that Mabel and the Irish Countrywomen’s Association had fostered did not have deep roots; the craft lacked heritage and was not sufficiently embedded in Irish culture to survive. Ireland went back to being a country that ate very little cheese. The artisan cheese movement, which began in the 1970s, has fared better. With the interest and support of a wider food movement, and both state and semi-state bodies designated to nurture small producers, Irish artisan cheese is now part of the cultural matrix. Having become a tradition that depends on skilled making, it encompasses both heritage and craft, but there is no sense of continuity between the pioneering artisan cheese of the late twentieth century and the farmhouse cheese that was made more than fifty years before. The cheesemakers of the 1970s had to start from scratch.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the staff in the Manuscripts room of the National Library of Ireland for their patience and support, and especially Peter Kenny, who archived the O Brien of Cahirmoyle collection, for drawing my attention to Mabel O Brien’s letters.

Notes 1

Brigid Ganly, Cahirmoyle Chronicle 1, unpublished family memoir, c. 1990.

2

Rhona Richman Kenneally, ‘The Greatest Dining Extravaganza in Canada’s History: Food, Nationalism and Authenticity at Expo 67’, in Expo 67, Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally, Johanne Sloane, and Toronto, Buffalo (London: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 34.

3

‘The Craft of Cheesemaking’, Bord Bía, http://www.bordbia.ie/consumer/aboutfood/ farmhousecheese/pages/cheesemaking.aspx (accessed 12 October 2016).

4

‘The History of Cheese’, National Dairy Council, http://www.ndc.ie/cuyl/#history (accessed 12 October 2016).

5

Cahirmoyle was famous as the former home of the nationalist and Young Ireland leader William Smith O Brien (1803–1864). It is listed in Ireland’s National Inventory of Architectural Heritage. National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, Cahermoyle House Nursing Home, Cahermoyle, Limerick. https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildingssearch/building/21902812/cahermoyle-house-nursing-home-cahermoyle-countylimerick.

6

The house had been rebuilt in 1871 on the footprint of an earlier building by Dermod’s father, Edward O Brien, to designs by J. J. McCarthy (1817–1882).

123

Craft and Heritage 7

Lennox Robinson, Palette and Plough (Dublin: Richview Press: 1948), 168.

8

National Library of Ireland (NLI) Collection List No. 64, ‘PAPERS OF THE FAMILY OF O BRIEN OF CAHIRMOYLE, CO. LIMERICK’.

9

Veronica Steele (2012), ‘The History of Milleens and the Irish Farmhouse Cheese Industry’, Milleens Cheese Ltd., HYPERLINK http://www.milleenscheese.com/MC-HL-09-QSHISTORY.html.http://www.milleenscheese.com/MC-HL-09-QS-HISTORY.htm (accessed 30 June 2018).

10 Robinson, Palette and Plough, 166–7. 11 Mabel O Brien (MOB) to Dermod O Brien (DOB), 16 May 1918. 12 MOB to DOB, 27 July 1918. 13 Robinson, Palette and Plough, 169. 14 Robinson had been appointed organizing librarian in Ireland by the Carnegie Trustees and was briefed to re-organize derelict libraries in Limerick and Kerry and to superintend the building of new ones in Newcastle West and Dingle. 15 Robinson, Palette and Plough, 165. 16 The Whiteheaded Boy (1916) was written at Cahirmoyle and dedicated to Mabel O Brien as ‘Aunt Ellen’. 17 Lennox Robinson, The Whiteheaded Boy (1916), 20. 18 Ibid., 21. 19 A puckawn, Pucan gabhair, is a male goat in Irish. 20 Robinson, Palette and Plough, 165. 21 MOB to DOB, 5 February 1916. 22 MOB to DOB, 16 December 1915. 23 MOB to DOB, 10 June 1915. 24 Carla King and Liam Kennedy, ‘Irish Co-operatives from Creameries at the Crossroads to Multinationals’, History Ireland 2 no. 4 (Winter, 1994): 38. 25 Ibid. 26 Daniel Mulhall, ‘George Russell – A Literary Witness to Irish History’, History Ireland, July– August 2017, 34. 27 Robinson, Palette and Plough, 175. 28 Ibid, 174. 29 Ibid. 30 MOB to DOB, 21 November 1910. 31 Robinson, Palette and Plough, 174. 32 MOB to DOB, 17 February 1915. 33 MOB to DOB, 5 December 1914. 34 MOB to DOB, 9 December 1914. 35 MOB to DOB, 13 December 1914. 36 Caerphilly cheese is a soft crumbly paste cheese made from cow’s milk that originated in Wales and was popular at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was considered a farmhouse cheese. Thalassa Skinner and Laurel Miller, Cheese for Dummies (Toronto: J. Wiley & Sons Canada, 2012), 22.

124

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers 37 A Poole Wilson, Cheese-making in Ireland, Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland, c.1915. 38 MOB, undated typescript. 39 ‘Cheddar, hard cow’s-milk cheese named for the district of its origin in the southwestern county of Somerset, England. Cheddar is one of England’s oldest cheeses. The original, so-called farmhouse variety remains in limited production in modern times.’ Britannica Academic, ‘Cheddar’, https://academic-eb-com.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/levels/collegiate/ article/cheddar/22738. 40 MOB, ‘Cheese making’, The Irish Homestead, 16 October 1915, 687. 41 MOB to DOB, 18 January 1915. 42 MOB, ‘Cheese making’, 687. 43 MOB, undated typescript, c. 1917. 44 Glenn Adamson, The Craft Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg: 2010), 25. 45 MOB, undated typescript, c.1917. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 MOB to DOB, 6 October 1915. 52 MOB, undated typescript, c.1917. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 MOB, undated typescript. 56 MOB, The Irish Homestead, 687. 57 MOB, undated typescript, c.1917. 58 The Irish Homestead, 5 May 1917, 325. 59 MOB, The Irish Homestead, 23 December 1916, 809. 60 James Kennelly, ‘Normal Courage: Robert A. Anderson and the Irish Co-operative Movement’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 100, no. 399 (2011): 319–30. 61 The Encouragement of Cheese-making as a Means of Increasing the Supply of Home-Produced Food, Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, London. 62 C Walker-Tisdale of the Wensleydale Pure Milk Society Ltd, England, to MOB, 2 July 1917. 63 MOB to DOB, 25 May 1918. 64 A typewritten certificate issued to Dame Dorothie Coddington of Oldbridge, Drogheda. 65 Ibid. 66 MOB, undated typescript, possibly an address to the United Irishwomen. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Poole Wilson, Cheese-Making in Ireland, c.1915.

125

Craft and Heritage 71 There is no relationship between the cheese produced by Mabel O’Brien and the Ardagh Cheddar currently produced for the supermarket Aldi using milk from three Irish creameries, two of which are in Cork and one in Kilkenny. Conor Pope, The Irish Times, ‘Milking the Tricolour to Boost Sales in Supermarkets’, Monday, 7 January 2013. 72 With sixty-eight entries, Ardagh cheese was by far the most popular. 73 Donogh O’Brien, unpublished family memoir, c.1990. 74 MOB to DOB, NLI, MS 36,821. 75 IAOS Cheese control, IAOS publications No. 29 (New Series). 76 MOB to DOB, 1 June 1918. 77 MOB to DOB MS, 4 September 1918. 78 Anderson to MOB, 5 September 1918. 79 Ibid. 80 Anderson to MOB, 14 September 1918. 81 Anderson to MOB, 6 November 1918. 82 Poole Wilson to MOB, 23 November 1918. 83 MOB to DOB, 22 May 1919.

126

CHAPTER 7 PIECING HERITAGE IN TRANSITION: THE LAKOTA SIOUX STAR QUILT AS A SYMBOL OF PAN-INDIGENEITY

Lisa Binkley

Introduction When Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde blanketed Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015, the robe was given as a gesture of hope that the prime minister would remain committed to his promise of working towards ‘a nationto-nation relationship that addressed key policy commitments in education, justice, and reconciliation’, following the recent requirements set forth by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)1 (Plate 13). The blanket consisted of a patchwork quilt featuring an intricate tessellated star pattern, culturally significant to the Lakota Sioux of North America’s Great Plains since the end of the nineteenth century and an important symbol of pan-Indigenous culture and heritage recognized by many Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples across Canada and the United States since the 1950s. For the Lakota Sioux the star blanket has embodied cultural and political meaning: it replaced the buffalo robe, a cloak originally gifted to warriors returning from battle and signifying leadership and service to community. With the gifting of the blanket and the honour bestowed upon Canada’s political leader comes an expectation of reciprocity, one that carries the underlying hope that his government would, indeed, follow through with his promise of full commitment to building nation-to-nation relationships between the state and Indigenous communities. This effort by the prime minister and the Canadian government to work with Indigenous peoples to improve social and economic conditions signalled a new direction in moving forward from over a century of fraught and violent treatment of Indigenous peoples under government-imposed policies that sought to assimilate them into settler society while eradicating their cultures.2 As evidenced with the gifting of Trudeau’s star blanket, underlying contemporary social, cultural and political meanings of pan-Indigeneity have emerged from the quilt’s earlier meaning as a symbol of the Lakota Sioux. The idea of the patchwork coverlet extends from its original conceptualization, a buffalo hide, oft embellished with a painted star, thought to be bulletproof and gifted to Sioux chiefs upon return from battle. Over what has been referred to as the reservation period in the United States, the once starpainted buffalo cloak was eventually replaced with the patchwork quilt. This material replacement would have been as a result of the near extinction of buffalo following overhunting by settler groups, the introduction of patchwork quilting by missionary and

Craft and Heritage

church groups and increased access to manufactured cloth from merchants. Since the mid-nineteenth century and early documentation of blanketing ceremonies, through its transition to a symbolic patchwork quilt and eventually to its gifting to Canada’s prime minister, the star blanket has maintained its culturally significant meanings of hope, leadership and heritage, while more recent interpretations include a promise of reciprocity and reconciliation. Trudeau’s star blanket as tangible heritage links it to a history of the intangible heritage of North American Indigenous peoples and particularly to the resilient women who adapted craft skills and materials. In an effort to gain a better understanding of the significance of the star blanket as a material representation of Indigenous identity, political agency and heritage, it is necessary to explore the coverlet across its different contexts of meaning-making. These extend from its origins within Lakota Sioux culture, through its evolution as a panIndigenous symbol across various communities in the United States and Canada during the reservation period, to its current dissemination across Indigenous geographies, distanced from its home territory. Analysis of the star blanket from its origins as a painted hide to its most recent articulation as a patchwork quilt underscores its significance as a symbol of Indigenous resilience and as a material representation of cultural heritage that is both static and fluid. Furthermore, exploration of the star quilt reveals how it has become a vehicle through which Indigenous peoples communicate Indigenous ideologies and traditional knowledges: a virtual contact zone of Indigenous and Western political agendas. Its evolution from hide to quilt over the past 150 years is a sign of its resilience as integral to the cultural heritage of the Lakota Sioux and indicative of how it has become a beacon of pan-Indigeneity and a symbol of Indigenous-Western social, cultural and political relationships. In a current climate of political division and racism, Trudeau’s star blanket offers tangibility to the ideas of expectation and reciprocity, when a signed document may not seem adequate.3

Adopting heritage: Authenticity and hybridity in Lakota Sioux star blankets The star blanket was adopted by the Lakota Sioux in the late nineteenth century as an extension of the painted buffalo robe. An 1891 photograph presents Chief Red Cloud’s wife Pretty Owl sitting on a star blanket on the couple’s bed in their home (Figure 7.1). It is unknown whether this particular quilt was worn by Red Cloud for ceremonial purposes, was gifted to him or was used as bedding; however this was not the first time Red Cloud was blanketed: Fanny Kelly, a young Euro-American settler captured by the Oglala Sioux in 1868, described in her memoirs how, as the contingent of Sioux warriors and their captures returned to camp, Chief Red Cloud, leader of the Oglala people, was blanketed with a painted buffalo robe by his wife.4 Between 1866 and 1868, Red Cloud led his people to battle in defence of settler encroachment on the community’s territory, ending with the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which eventually led to the establishment of the Great Sioux Reservation.5 Kelly, originally from Canada, offered an early account of her family’s experiences as they attempted to engage in the unlawful practice of 128

Piecing Heritage in Transition

Figure 7.1  ‘Home of Chief Red Cloud, Pine Ridge Agency, S.D.’ Red Cloud’s wife is seated on the bed in their log house. The bed is covered with a star quilt, and a sword hangs on the wall. An American flag with forty stars hangs on the wall behind her. Red Cloud’s wife is Pretty Owl. claiming land in Oglala Sioux territory not intended for settlement, an area now known as South Dakota. Chief Red Cloud’s blanket was an extension of his earlier 1868 buffalo robe, which might have resembled other buffalo robes held by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and featured feather-like or diamond-shaped designs organized in a series of concentric rings that radiate from a centre (Figure 7.2). These buffalo robes would have inspired the adoption of the particular eight-pointed tessellated star quilting pattern introduced by settlers (Plate 14). Significant to Sioux cosmology, the star and circle design elements depicted in the quilt pattern reflect the values of bravery and generosity. The star motif is known to the Lakota people as the ‘Great Spirit’s Breath’ and represents the nation’s ancestors, the Star people.6 The circle pattern is significant to all Indigenous peoples for its relationship to Indigenous world views that all living things are connected. Curator George Horse Capture (Gros Ventre) of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Centre, Cody, Wyoming, has identified similarities between the eight-pointed star design made for ceremonial patchwork star blankets and painted designs on buffalo hides, beadwork, quillwork and ghost dance dresses in Plains Indian cultures. Other significant elements in the coverlet’s patterning important to Sioux life include the number four, which points to the four stages of life (infancy, youth, maturity and old age), the four classes of animals (flying, crawling, four-legged and two-legged), four parts of plants (roots, stem, leaves and fruit), four sections of time (day, night, moon and year), four great values for men (bravery, generosity, strength and wisdom) and four ideals for women (bravery, generosity, truthfulness and mothering)7 (Plate 14). 129

Craft and Heritage

Figure 7.2  Lakota Sioux Painted Buffalo Robe, 1875–1890, National Museum of the American Indian, 12/2158 The star blanket and the concept of patchwork quiltmaking were introduced to the Lakota Sioux during the mid-nineteenth century by Euro-American settlers moving into the mid-west. Also recognized as the Bethlehem Star or Lone Star made by settler and missionary women during the nineteenth century, the coverlet’s distinctive eight-pointed star patterning would have been appealing for its relationship to Christian religions. As migrants to the Plains regions, Christian missionaries who were intent on teaching ideas of household domesticity ‘promoted European domestic arts, including quiltmaking and other forms of needlework’ to Indigenous communities.8 As further noted by quilt historian Marsha MacDowell, several groups were particularly vital in conveying quilting to Native peoples. Most active by far, the Dakota Presbytery set up an extensive system of missions and mission schools, sponsored the formation of Ladies’ Aid Societies (where sewing skills were shared), and encouraged the making of quilts and the formation of quilting bees.9 Numerous references in missionary diaries and letters, mission records and newsletters, and in oral histories point to the substantial influence that Christian denominational mission churches and schools had in introducing quiltmaking to Indigenous peoples. Whether Mennonite missions on Hopi land, Mormon missions in Utah and Nevada, Quaker mission schools in Pennsylvania or Catholic missions in frontier outposts, these Christian evangelical and educational efforts were instrumental in introducing and sustaining these crafts.10 For example, on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Sioux women engaged in the practice of quiltmaking were mentioned in the Holy Rosary Mission’s newsletter, when the priest canvassed the surrounding congregation for onspaspa, 130

Piecing Heritage in Transition

pieces or scraps of cloth, for the purpose of making quilts.11 In her earlier inquiry into star quilts in South Dakota, Birgit Hans referred to ledger details from McLaughlin & Spangler General Merchandise store at Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation, noting how a ‘member from a well-known Native family from Cannon Ball, purchased, 25 yds Blk Calico, 4 spools thread, and 10 yds of canton flannel’.12 While cloth supplies intended for clothing were somewhat rationed to Indigenous peoples through government policies, scraps and remnants would have been used to make patchwork quilts. It became customary for Lakota women to have at least one-star quilt in their possession, which, upon marriage, was taken to their matrimonial home and viewed as an integral part of the belongings they owned as they transitioned to married life.13 For many women, as they prepared for matrimonial life, it was common practice to make one decorative quilt and prepare up to thirteen patchwork tops, which would eventually be quilted as needed in the home.14 To construct the star blanket, makers sewed together a series of elongated diamonds that when stitched together created a larger elongated diamond. Once these larger diamonds were completed, they would be sewn together from a centre point, forming an eight-pointed star – two points facing in each of four

Figure 7.3  War Bonnet, South Dakota State Historical

Society

131

Craft and Heritage

directions. Close examination of the details of the feathered rings and elongated diamond shapes painted on buffalo robes reveals how artists might have visually connected the elongated diamonds as representations of feathers. As a completed motif, the circular design emerging from diamonds made by the same colour or tone offers an abstract interpretation of the war bonnet regalia worn by Sioux warriors (Figure 7.3). Seamed together through the process of making patchwork, inspired by the Sioux buffalo robe, the star blanket serves as a form of contact zone, a space of rich intercultural exchange drawn from ‘both cultural traditions: Aboriginal materials, techniques and forms that have come together with European pictorial representations in new modes of expression’.15 Reflecting their own experiences, Indigenous quiltmakers across the United States and Canada have adapted for their quilts various forms of cultural and artistic expression, such as beadwork, rug weaving and basket weaving patterns, within which ‘design, approach and colour, reflect close spiritual ties to the natural world’.16 However, since contact between the Sioux people and Euro-American settlers, especially over the course of the reservation period, the meaning of the star blanket has expanded to include ‘specific tribal and pan-Indian meanings’,17 revealing close relationships to the past, forwarded through oral histories and traditional knowledge, while also extending to other Indigenous cultures across the United States and Canada. The star blanket has become an expression of the resilience and collaboration between Indigenous peoples within the contexts of colonialism, industrialization and assimilation.

Heritage of resilience: The star blanket, 1950s–1970s During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the meaning of the star blanket developed into a symbol incorporating cultural customs, while also reflecting resilience and change. Following the Second World War, changing social conditions and an advancing industrial complex in North America and Europe set into motion various circumstances that applied pressure on Indigenous peoples to assimilate into Western society. Although this pressure had been aggressively pursued by government officials in both the United States and Canada for over a century, the post-war period marked an era of urgency as Western nations rigorously sought to establish an inter-relational economy, facilitated by the Bretton Woods Agreement and the Marshall Plan.18 As part of these initiatives, the growth of American and Canadian industries and the ensuing factory employment attracted returning soldiers, especially those who were coming back to the poverty-stricken conditions of the reservations. This promise of employment became an attractive alternative to the progressively difficult conditions of reservation life, drawing many Indigenous peoples off reserve to larger urban centres, where some happily found work, while others found themselves in the unfortunate conditions of living on the streets.19 With the outmigration of many of the communities’ men, including these returning soldiers, to urban centres, Indigenous women and the elderly increasingly relied on food stamps, rations or charity to feed their families and clothe their children and 132

Piecing Heritage in Transition

grandchildren. To raise money, Indigenous women handcrafted items to sell, continuing supplemental labour practices that had begun in the late nineteenth century as conditions on reservations worsened. In one case, the North Dakota Catholic missionary, Indian Sentinel, advertised such goods: ‘Baskets, beaded chains, hammered silver bracelets and rings, Navajo runners and chair drapes made in attractive varieties.’20 The making of craft objects to sell became supplemental, albeit minimally, to government subsidies in the United States and in Canada. Although craft labour has offered added income for some families, it has also placed makers in a precarious economic position, exploiting those who desperately need money to survive, while being forced to rely on settler agents for supplies. For example, in British Columbia, Coast Salish women have developed what is popularly known as the Cowichan sweater, for the purpose of selling to tourist centres and settlers.21 While this has become a source of added income for knitters, they were often obliged to purchase wool from settler-traders, who sold it for high prices and, adding to this, bought completed sweaters from the Coast Salish for low prices. Similar conditions have existed in Arizona with Navajo weavers.22 In the Red River Valley region of Manitoba, Métis women historically sewed and beaded for settlers and fur traders,23 and in Kahnawake, Quebec, Haudenosaunee women have long been making beaded handbags for tourists and settlers.24 While turning to craft production and seeking work off reservations, Indigenous families in the United States and Canada have, for generations, found themselves destitute and at the mercy of government regulations, which have also forced many to submit to the loss of their children in accordance with state/provincial and federal social welfare system policies. Such policies resulted in the removal of children to foster homes off reservation, and for many permanent adoption. For instance, in Canada the government was responsible for what has become referred to as ‘the sixties scoop’,25 the forcible removal of Indigenous children from family homes for the purpose of relocating them to foster care with the intention of having children attend mainstream schools, often far from family and community.26 Families were threatened with dire consequences if they resisted this intervention. As an example, Margaret Johnson from the Eskasoni Reserve in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was forced to send nine of her twelve children to Schubenacadie Indian Residential School (IRS) during the 1960s or face the revocation of food stamps for the rest of her family.27 At the same time, the Canadian government was carrying out secret and forced hysterectomies of young Indigenous women.28 Furthermore, under section 12 (1)(b) of the Indian Acts Amendments (1951), the government reinforced the sexual discrimination of young Indigenous women by removing status if they married non-Indigenous men,29 leaving many women without ties to their community and without a community to which they could return in the event the marriage failed. Indigenous feminist scholars, such as Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck and Angie Morall, argue that because Indigenous women experienced lower incomes, higher rates of gender-based violence and less political representation compared to Indigenous men and non-Indigenous women, the economic conditions of the 1960s imposed yet another insurmountable obstacle for many ‘to maintain any sense of traditionalism’.30 133

Craft and Heritage

In the 1950s and 1960s, in what could be viewed as displays of solidarity and resistance, Lakota quiltmakers responded to these external pressures by widening their focus on the production of star quilts, as an expression of maintaining and disseminating a representation of cultural tradition and as an added source of income from sales outside their community. Shirley O’Grady noted, ‘my great-grandmothers, all our greatgrandmothers and grandmothers made patchwork quilts. It was only in the 1950s that some people brought home some star quilts from the Sioux ladies … and then, all the ones that were sewing in my reservation picked up that star quilt’.31 It is unknown if the star quilts that O’Grady refers to were purchased or received as gifts; however, her recounting of the acquisition of quilts by women on her reservation in the Michigan Peninsula during the 1950s pinpoints a time when star quilts became increasingly popular outside of Lakota Sioux territory. Although star blankets as either gift or tourist item were essentially made using the same pattern, the meaning of the blanket was profoundly influenced by the relationship between its maker and its intended recipient. Whether gifted or purchased, star blankets have been made to offer emotional and physical warmth and comfort to their users, but gifted blankets were ‘produced by members of tribal societies primarily for their own or their fellow members’ use, with the intention to satisfy the material or spiritual needs of the community’.32 Quilts that were made for sale to tourists as utilitarian were objectified, imbued with a different intention, providing visitors with a keepsake of their time on the reservation. Often made with less care than give-aways, these quilts that were made with the tourist in mind incorporated bright colours and were considered more appealing to the consumer.33 The popularization of star blankets as stylish geometric patchwork creations gained momentum during the 1960s with the rise of second-wave feminism, increased fascination with non-objective art and a concomitant renewed awareness about quilts.34 This quilt revival engaged a new generation of young women, artists and quiltmakers, who fused their interests in quiltmaking as conceptual art and evolving feminist ideologies, confronting dominant discourses of patriarchy, domesticity and empowerment. In Western discourse, the relationship between second-wave feminism and the use of textiles and needlework has been widely discussed by scholars such as Rozsika Parker in her ground-breaking book, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984), and Patricia Mainardi’s poignant article, ‘Quilts: The Great American Art’, presented in the Feminist Art Journal (1973), where the author states: Needlework is the one art in which women controlled the education of their daughters, the production of the art, and were also the audience and critics, and it is so important to women’s culture that a study of the various textile and needlework arts should occupy the same position in Women’s Studies that African art occupied in Black Studies – it is our cultural heritage. Because quilt making is so indisputably women’s art, many of the issues women artists are attempting to clarify now – questions of feminine sensibility, of originality and tradition, of individuality vs. collectivity, of content and values in art can be illuminated by a study of this art form, its relation to the lives of the artists, and how it has been dealt 134

Piecing Heritage in Transition

with in art history. Quilts have been underrated for precisely the same reasons that jazz, the great American music, was also for so long underrated – because the ‘wrong’ people were making it.35 As the so-called second wave of feminism unfolded and women across Western cultures were effectively engaging in the movement to demand a place within a predominantly patriarchal society, many Indigenous women were confronted with their own challenges posed by historical and contemporary government policies, including the aforementioned forcible removal of children and gendered and cultural disenfranchisement.36 While mainstream feminist discourse has predominantly addressed ideas of patriarchy and, in turn, women’s empowerment during the 1960s and 1970s, Indigenous women have been largely absented from this conversation. Thus, a pan-Indigenous and feminist rereading of star blankets deserves attention: this object of Sioux cultural heritage expanded its meaning to serve as an agent of its female makers, building on its tradition as a token of bravery and honour of service for its male recipients.

Disseminating heritage: Powwows and pan-Indigeneity The reconceptualization of the star blanket emerged in concert with the surfacing of a new form of powwow in the United States and Canada, which brought together various Indigenous nations as a public display of cultural expression and solidarity between Indigenous peoples. Valda Blundell notes how in Canada, ‘after World War II, Prairie Indians followed the lead of Native groups on the American Plains, increasingly mounted celebrations of dancing, drumming, and singing on their own reserves, manifesting as a form of Pan-Indigenous dance and apparel’.37 By the late 1960s, there were thirteen reservebased summer powwows in southern Saskatchewan alone38 and an inaugural ceremony hosted by the Wikwemikong First Nations (Anishinaabe) on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, Canada, invited dancers and drummers from all nations.39 Through the ceremonial elements of drumming, dance and song, the powwow served as a source of medicine for Indigenous participants.40 For example: ‘the meaning of drums is articulated to the “memories of memories” defined as traditions, or as “an infinite sequence of rememorizations, of bricolage and debricolage.” The personification of a drum weaves through “the tribal memories and solace of heard stories” to emerge in the ambiguous, reconstructed knowledge and practice of “new simulations of survivance.”’41 Through drumming, memories and cultural heritage are embodied and passed on while intertwining new memories. This new form of powwow emerged as an expression of Indigenous human rights and a public display of resistance within the contexts of post–Second World War and the rise of the countercultural and the second-wave feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. With amendments in 1951 to the Canadian Indian Act, and the adoption in 1978, of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, in both Canada and the United States, legislative changes reversed previous laws that had restricted the public expression of spiritual ceremonies.42 Despite the imposition of these previous legal restrictions, which had been 135

Craft and Heritage

enacted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by both federal governments, most Indigenous nations had managed to maintain some form of ceremony under the cloak of secrecy and away from the watchful eyes of government-appointed Indian agents. To many Indigenous communities, the powwow became an opportunity to embrace a shared sense of cultural and political purpose and affective empowerment, which, according to Robert Allen Warrior, came to be referred to as ‘the sweetgrass meaning of solidarity’.43 Richard Wagamese describes ‘sweetgrass solidarity’ as the idea that heritage, traditions and meanings are there for the purpose of exploring and, thus, open to the possibilities of maintaining older traditions while creating new ones.44 The presence of star quilts at contemporary powwows, where a collection of coverlets are intended as giveaways and others are intended for sale, brings together the elements of tangible and intangible heritage, while also serving as an expression of change. Deemed illegal by the 1880s in the United States and in Canada, the current practice of giving away star quilts to Indigenous participants at some powwows and other ceremonial gatherings constitutes an identity of generosity by the host community and contributes to strong bonds of kinship shared between Indigenous peoples. Kim Taylor notes about the practice of giveaways that ‘goods are paraded around the arena, placed in a pile, then given away one item at a time, beginning with star quilts, which are placed on top of the pile’.45 It has also become commonplace at contemporary powwows for vendors to set up temporary retail spaces to sell goods to non-Indigenous attendees. At several recent powwows in the Maritime region of Canada, vendors have displayed and sold star quilts, reinforcing the relationship between pan-Indigenous identities and the connection between star quilts and contemporary ceremonial celebrations. It has been interesting to note that star quilts at ceremonial gatherings in the Maritime Provinces are relatively new, possibly having been borrowed from mid-Western gatherings, which various Indigenous communities have attended in recent years.46 It is at these sites that Indigenous peoples share in cultural practices such as the ideas and teachings centred around ribbon skirts, Sundancing and designs used in the making of regalia. In one sense, the sharing of these cultural symbols could be interpreted as the cultural borrowing of one Indigenous community by another. And, although this idea of sharing cultural signs and symbols might contribute to the idea of pan-Indigeneity, it has become a way for tribal communities to engage in a practice of collaborative resistance and solidarity, which has become significant in the current climate of change and reconciliation. Like many Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada who have experienced a legacy of absence where generations of cultural practices have been lost, the idea of sharing cultural practices has become somewhat of a lifeline to the past, a past many are desperate to recuperate before any more cultural knowledges have been lost.

Politics of heritage: Blanketing expectations As star blankets have evolved as agents of pan-Indigeneity, they carry forward meanings of leadership and service, while also expressing more recent articulations of hope in anticipation of some form of political and cultural recognition and reciprocation. The 136

Piecing Heritage in Transition

2015 blanketing of Trudeau by the Assembly of First Nations on behalf of Indigenous peoples across Canada was intended as a gesture of hope that the recently elected prime minister would honour election campaign promises that pledged to dedicate more than 3 billion dollars in new funding for Indigenous education (including money for infrastructure and post-secondary support for Indigenous students), adoption of all the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (including the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) and a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women.47 The latenineteenth-century sociologist Marcel Mauss argued that with gifts there is always an expectation of reciprocity.48 Thus, when gifted to Trudeau on behalf of the member nations of Assembly of First Nations, the blanket served as a token of expectation, an expectation that the prime minister would indeed follow through with his campaign promises. While the timing of the blanketing ceremony coincided with Trudeau’s recent election, it also closely followed the announcement of the ninety-four requirements set forth by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which examined the intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools in Canada. Trudeau, who has been an important political advocate for Canada’s Indigenous population, was the first Canadian prime minister gifted a star blanket, emphasizing the significance of the TRC’s findings and highlights the current attention placed on Indigenous peoples within a Canadian context. This is not the first time a politician has been gifted a star blanket imbued with silent intentions for its recipient. According to Mauss, when gifts are exchanged across cultures they serve to form a relationship between individuals and/or community members and are permeated with an unwritten undertone of obligation as well as reciprocity.49 Over the last three decades, the star blanket has adopted a particularly political undertone that denotes the expectations of reciprocity that accompany its traditional meanings of leadership and service. Although Trudeau’s blanketing might have been the first such occasion in Canada’s history, it is certainly not the first time a non-Indigenous politician has been blanketed. In 1986, the Vietnam Veterans’ Association from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota gifted a star quilt to United States Congressman Tom Daschle for his leadership and service to the Native Veterans’ community.50 In this case, the gifting of a star blanket to Daschle might have been viewed as an unspoken expectation that he would carefully consider his position on the upcoming discussions concerning the abrogation of Indian treaties.51 For those politicians that have received the star blanket, the honour bestowed upon them during a formal ceremony distinguishes them as willing participants in efforts to rectify unethical legislation of the past and to a renewed approach of equality ‘where multiple sovereignties exist in the same geographic space without exploitation; where self-determined Indigenous governments are engaged as constitutional partners; where there are material redistributions of power that give force to Indigenous rights’.52 Under these circumstances, the star blanket has become a symbol of political agency, representing the heritage of the past through its adoption of the star motif to its adaption in patchwork quilting, while currently navigating a contemporary environment defined by cultural transformation.53 137

Craft and Heritage

Conclusion The star blanket has become a symbol of pan-Indigenous heritage during the second half of the twentieth century, emerging from its Lakota Sioux ancestry. Initially considered an emblem of leadership and service, this particular quilt pattern has become an agent of resilience for Indigenous peoples across Canada and the United States. In a climate where an awareness of reconciliation and cultural appropriation has come to the forefront, the borrowing of the Lakota Sioux star-painted buffalo hide, with its radiant feather-like configuration, and the settler-missionary Star of Bethlehem quilt, with its radiant star form, have transformed into this new symbol of pan-Indigeneity. As a form of cultural heritage, widely recognized across Canadian and American Indigenous and nonIndigenous communities, this symbol has come to represent ideas of reciprocity between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous political entities. This has been the case in both the United States and Canada with the gifting of star blankets to Congressman Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Lakota Sioux territory, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. While the star quilt is recognized by Indigenous communities and regularly given recognition as part of Lakota Sioux heritage, it has also become synonymous with the cohesive strength of Indigenous peoples. For many Indigenous communities, the ideas brought forth by reconciliation have also highlighted the importance of tribal identities, renewed inquiries into Treaty rights and more open dialogues about colonial pasts. Representations of pan-Indigenous ceremony and tangible heritage are beacons of the change and the resilience of Indigenous peoples in an ever-changing political climate.

Notes 1

The TRC findings were the results of an extensive inquiry into the Indian Residential School System that brought to the surface the violence imposed on Indigenous children forced to attend residential schools and the subsequent life-long effects of inter-generational trauma ultimately caused by the Government of Canada’s aggressive efforts of assimilation. For more information on the TRC findings: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ‘TRC Findings’, 2015, http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html.

2

John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999). According to Milloy, residential schools operated in Canada since the nineteenth century and after 1880 under government policies, with the last residential school remaining in operation until 1996. It has been estimated that over 150,000 First Nation, Inuit, and Métis children attended residential schools with a large percentage of these children dying while in the care of school and church officials.

3

In Canada, there has been a long history surrounding the ambiguity of Treaties between the Crown and Indigenous peoples. Although many treaties were signed by both Crown and Indigenous peoples, ongoing debates persist about the validity of written agreements, such as the Peace and Friendship Treaty (1726) and the Royal Proclamation (1763), which acknowledged hunting and fishing rights of Indigenous peoples. These agreements, which have been in existence for over two centuries, were challenged during the twentieth century

138

Piecing Heritage in Transition by members of the Mi’kmaq community, who were charged and convicted under federal law for hunting and fishing without licenses issued by the government and outside of the season designated by the government. For more on this, see Olive Patricia Dickinson, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Daniel Paul, We Were Not the Savages: Collision between European and Native American Civilizations (Black Point, NS: Fernwood Press, 2006). 4

Fanny Kelly, Narrative of My Captivity among the Sioux Indians (Hartford: Mutual, 1972), 61.

5

Tension over the Euro-American settlement at Wounded Knee had been growing during the second half of the nineteenth century with migrants settling on what had been established as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in what is now known as South Dakota. With tensions rising over the government’s disregard for Treaty provisions under control of Indian Agents and a misunderstanding of the Ghost Dance gathering as a threat to settlers, military troops launched a campaign between 1866 and 1888, resulting in the deaths of more than 150 Lakota people. Jack Utter, Wounded Knee, The Ghost Dance Tragedy (Lake Ann, Mich: National Woodlands Pub, 1991). Also see the response from Red Cloud to the devastation suffered at Wounded Knee (1890): Chief Red Cloud, ‘Red Cloud’s Speech after Wounded Knee’ (CommonLit, 1890), https://www.commonlit.org/texts/red-cloud-s-speech-afterwounded-knee.

6

Author unknown, ‘Star Quilts’, Aboriginal Perspective, aboriginalperspectives.uregina.ca. (accessed 5 May 2019).

7

Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine, The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983 [1935]), 33. Chief Flying Iron, 1935: 33.

8

Marsha MacDowell, ‘North American Indian and Native Hawaiian Quiltmaking’, in To Honor and Comfort: Native Quilting Traditions (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1997), 38.

9

Ibid., 5.

10 Ibid. 11 Beatrice Medicine, ‘Lakota Star Quilts: Commodity, Ceremony, and Economic Development’, in To Honor and Comfort: Native Quilting Traditions, eds. Marsha MacDowell and C. Kurt Dewhurst (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1997), 111. 12 Birgit Hans, ‘The Star quilt on the Northern Plains: A symbol of American Indian identity’, North Dakota History 77, nos. 3 & 4 (1991): 33. 13 MacDowell, ‘North American Indian’, 33. 14 Aimee E. Newell, ‘Tattered to Pieces’: Amy Fiske’s Sampler and the Changing Roles of Women in Antebellum New England’, in Women and the Material Culture of Needlework & Textiles, eds. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 57. 15 de Stecher, ‘Souvenir Art’, 38. 16 Jacobs, ‘The Quiltmakers of Akwesasne’, 151. 17 Marsha MacDowell, ‘Native Quiltmaking: History, Traditions, and Studies’, in Women and the Material Culture of Needlework & Textiles, eds. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 132. 18 The Marshall Plan was initiated in 1948 by the United States in an effort to assist in the rebuilding of Western European economies following the Second World War. As part of this plan, the United States focused on removing trade barriers between participating nations and modernizing industrial development. Through trade, it was believed that Western nations could prevent the spread of communism and prevent another devastating war.

139

Craft and Heritage For more on the Marshall Plan, see Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 19 Coll Thrush, ‘The Crossing over Place: Urban and Indian Histories in Seattle’ (PhD diss., University of Washington, Seattle, 2002), 307. For more on issues of the urban conditions of Indigenous peoples following the Second World War, see Evelyn J. Peters, ‘“Our City Indians”: Negotiating the Meaning of First Nations Urbanization in Canada, 1945–1975’, The Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2002): 75–92. 20 Hans, ‘The Star Quilt on the Northern Plains’, 33. 21 Sylvia Olsen, Working with Wool: A Coast Salish Legacy & the Cowichan Sweater (Winlaw, BC: Sono Nis Press, 2010). 22 Kathy M’Closkey, Swept under the Rug: A Hidden History of Navajo Weaving (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2008). 23 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Sewing for a Living: The Commodification of Métis Women’s Artistic Production’, in Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Myra Rutherdate and Katie Pickles, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 17–46. 24 Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 31. 25 Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996), 90. 26 For more on the forced removal of Indigenous children from family homes and communities and the residential school system in Canada, see Milloy, A National Crime. 27 ‘Lottie Johnson, Eskasoni First Nation’, Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, www. mikmaweydebert.ca/ … /Lottie-Johnson-profile-July2015-Final_13Oct2015.pdf. 28 For a thorough discussion on this subject, see Karen Stote, An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women (Blackpoint Nova Scotia; Winnipeg Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing, 2015). 29 Valda Blundell, ‘Echoes of a Proud Nation: Reading Kahnawake’s Powwow as a PostOka Text’, Canadian Journal of Communication 18, no. 3 (1993): n.p. See also Indigenous Foundations.arts.ubc.ca, ‘Bill c-31’, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/bill_c-31/. 30 Sarah Nickel and Emily Snyder, ‘Indigenous Feminisms in Canada’, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2015. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indigenousfeminisms-in-canada. 31 MacDowell, ‘North American Indian’, 38. 32 Christian F. Feest, Native Arts of North America (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 14. 33 In the case of the quilt gifted to Trudeau, the incorporated colours represent the colours of the Indigenous medicine wheel, red, yellow, black and white. Because it would have been made with the purpose of gifting to Trudeau, its maker embedded this knowledge within the fibres and stitches of this coverlet. 34 Karin E. Peterson, ‘How the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary’, in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. M. E. Buszek (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011). 35 Patricia Mainardi, ‘Quilts: The Great American Art’, Feminist Art Journal (1973), in Janet Catherine Berlo and Patricia Cox Crews, eds. Wild by Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 6.

140

Piecing Heritage in Transition 36 Until 1985, as part of the 1876 Canadian Indian Act, Indigenous women who married nonIndigenous men were immediately stripped of their Indigenous status and were no longer eligible members of their community, which meant they would have no housing, rights, subsidies of other status Indigenous peoples. For more on this, see Janet Silman, Enough Is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1987). 37 Blundell, ‘Echoes’, n.p. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Lynn Gehl, Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2017), 113. 41 Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), 164. 42 Beatrice Medicine, ‘Lakota Star Quilts: Commodity, Ceremony, and Economic Development’, 111. 43 Robert Allen Warrior, ‘The Sweetgrass Meaning of Solidarity’, Soujourners, 1991/1992: 35. 44 Valaskakis, Indian Country, 164. 45 Kim Elise Taylor, Fabrication and Function of Star Quilts on Fort Peck Reservation in Northeastern Montana (Missoula: University of Montana, 1994), 87. 46 This observation was obtained through fieldwork undertaken by the author when she held the position of W.P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada, 2018–19. 47 Ravi De Costa, ‘Trudeau Launches Canada into a Radically New Approach to Indigenous Affairs’, The Conversation, 25 January 2016, http://theconversation.com/trudeau-launchescanada-into-a-radically-new-approach-to-indigenous-affairs-53159. 48 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990 [1922]), 31. 49 Ibid. 50 Medicine, ‘Lakota Star Quilts’, 115. 51 Ibid. 52 Jeffrey Ansloos, ‘The Trickery behind Justin Trudeau’s Reconciliation Talk’, MacLean’s, (21 September 2017), https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-trickery-behind-justintrudeaus-reconciliation-talk/ (accessed Jun 15, 2019). 53 Valaskakis, Indian Country, 184.

141

142

CHAPTER 8 A CART BEFORE A HORSE: HOW THE SUBFIELD OF TRADITIONAL WORKMANSHIP IS TRANSFORMING THE FIELD OF HERITAGE CONSERVATION

Giedrė Jarulaitienė

This chapter presents varying approaches to the idea of traditional workmanship, which shaped the shifting logic of practice in the field of heritage conservation over time in different European countries,1 while particularly focusing on the transformations in the Norwegian field of heritage conservation. The observation that the field of heritage conservation in Norway is currently undergoing another metamorphosis is demonstrated by a specific case study of a controversial construction of an outbuilding at Kaffestuggu courtyard in a small upland town of Røros in Norway, previously designated as a World Heritage Site. The study reveals that the field of heritage conservation was obliged to modify its established logic of practice due to the growing autonomy of the subfield of traditional workmanship. Seeking to explore and understand the process of struggles between the field of heritage conservation and its own creation – the subfield of traditional workmanship, the present study has adopted Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological categories to enable a relational analysis.

Bourdieusian analytical framework The history of the field of heritage conservation has been strongly influenced by the continuing scientific tradition, specific to art history, which, as described by Bourdieu, was largely ‘indifferent to the question of the social conditions in which the works are produced and circulate’.2 In the postface to his translation of Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Bourdieu praised the author’s efforts in overcoming the iconophilic approach to art history and showing the connection between the Gothic art and Scholasticism, which were linked by the same modus operandi, a very peculiar mode of procedure, driven by the same logic of various cultural practices: Those human works that the rib vault, the break of Gothic handwriting, or the flying buttress represent have, to use the language of scholasticism, an intention … This objective intention, which can never be reduced to the creator’s intention, depends on the schemes of thought, perception, and action the creator owes to his belonging to a society, an epoch, and a class.3

Craft and Heritage

Bourdieu adapted Panofsky’s concept of habitus, defining it as internalized schemes of dispositions – a present past that perpetuates itself into the future. The concept of field then was introduced as a mutually dependent antonym – external structuring structure. Different forms of capital (economic, cultural, social, symbolic, etc.) were valued in various fields and thus used as power resources in the internal struggles within these fields.4 The agents, possessing most capital in the form which was commonly acknowledged within a certain field, also acquired legitimizing authority. Not only agents within fields but the fields themselves were also perceived as competing among each other in a society,5 and the positions won were not viewed as static. The fields were regarded as constantly competing and striving to gain the highest degree of autonomy, which was measured by the level of the field’s structuredness and its resistance to external influences. Bourdieu’s theoretical lens, which enables an analysis of socio-historical changes,6 has been adopted in this study of transformations in the field of heritage conservation, a field that has been influenced by the strengthening of its own creation – a subfield of traditional workmanship.

The Gothic revival and the creation of the field of heritage conservation If the observed conversions within the field of heritage conservation, caused by the strengthening position of the subfield of traditional workmanship, could be considered as rather novel in Norway, the fields of heritage conservation in other European countries have already experienced similar challenges throughout history. The subfield of traditional workmanship was initially created to serve the practice of the field of heritage conservation by highlighting the importance of handicrafts versus industrial mass production. However, the subfield of traditional workmanship gradually strove for more autonomy in relation both to the field of industrialized mass production and the field of heritage conservation. The roots of such struggle can be traced back to nineteenth-century France, where E. E. Viollet-le-Duc was a pioneer with his attempt to resist the French academic fine arts tradition of applying decorative elements of Classical architecture, instead emphasizing the role of a building’s material and construction over its aesthetic mannerism. Violletle-Duc saw architectural forms as rational consequences of structural principles, which depend on building materials. Consequently, Viollet-le-Duc approved scrapping subsequent additions in classical styles to medieval buildings, based on his belief that beyond a concern for stylistic unity, the integrity of structural performances needed to be taken into account.7 During Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, there were efforts made to recreate the medieval construction site, together with its operational social system. The critical role was entrusted to the sculptor, who could ‘rediscover, at the end of his chisel, this naïveté of past centuries’.8 According to Viollet-le-Duc, this aim could be achieved by letting craftspeople repeat the same forms and lines so as to break free from a constant

144

Transforming Heritage Conservation

supervision of an architect. Thus, a creator’s intention was to reflect an objective intention due to the commonly acquired and shared habitus, in this instance guided by ‘medieval rationalism’, which in its classical form (meaning not the aesthetic style of Classical architecture but the norms of Gothic ‘classicity’) was perceived as trans-historical.9 The medieval style was not conceived merely as an aesthetic form; it was related to the way it was created and recreated. Therefore, the devaluation of Viollet-le-Duc’s legacy, by associating the concept of stylistic restoration with decorative expression alone, is misleading. As described by his great-granddaughter, Viollet-le-Duc himself ‘could handle all the instruments used by builders and even stonecutters. He could show a workman how to approach a job. He was therefore highly respected because he was not “the architect”, “the gentleman”, and this was most unusual in his time. He was always very close to his workers, in the medieval tradition’.10 The democratization of medievalism by further development of the subfield of traditional workmanship in France, according to the example of the construction-site at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, became impossible due to the 1848 Revolution. In England, on the contrary, the Gothic Revival, in cooperation with socialist organizations, laid the foundations for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Building (SPAB) and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which shared this appreciation of the medieval craftsmanship as a democratic mode of production, as opposed to the capitalist system of mass production. SPAB also encouraged architects to get their hands dirty, by getting in touch with materials and building skills in line with craftsmen. However, the Arts and Crafts movement benefitted from practical collaboration with the SPAB as a source of creative inspiration for contemporary architectural expressions.11 The SPAB’s Manifesto also affected the international field of heritage conservation, by rejecting the editing of the past and advocating for unavoidable changes, ‘wrought in the unmistakable fashion of the time’.12 At the same time, the society assumed its position as a supporter of historical craftsmanship, understood as a rational and technically more appropriate choice for conservative repairs. Similarly, the Italian field of heritage conservation was influenced by Camillo Boito’s principal of historical equivalence. This approach justified the conservation of various historic stylistic traces while legitimizing the use of modern workmanship, which served to distance contemporary interventions from historical fabric in order to prevent historical falsifications.13 Finally, the principle of historical equivalence was embedded in the Venice Charter of 1964,14 which formed the core of scientific restoration and aimed at international adaptability. D. Lowenthal described this perspective by quoting L. P. Hartley: ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’.15 At the same time, Lowenthal emphasized that such an approach to the past was of recent vintage as, until the early-nineteenth century, the past was still considered as part of the present. Namely, the difference of the past is that charming element, which would be lost if the past merely replicated the present and, due to this emerging distance, the field of heritage conservation could legitimate its existence and its development as a possessor of the role of a guardian of the past.

145

Craft and Heritage

German influences in Norway The field of heritage conservation in Norway emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Norwegian Society for Preservation of Norwegian Ancient Monuments was founded by the painter Johan Christian Dahl, according to the German model with which he was familiar. The further development of the field of heritage conservation was also strongly influenced by Romantic Nationalism, originating from Johann Gottfried von Herder’s ideology, which appreciated folk traditions and Gothic architecture as important elements of Germanic national awareness.16 For example, the influential Jacob Falke’s book Die Kunst im Haus was translated into many languages,17 including Norwegian by Nicolay Nicolaysen, another leader of the Norwegian Society for Preservation of Norwegian Ancient Monuments. The ideology of Romantic Nationalism in general, and the ideas of J. Falke in particular, were implemented in Norway by discouraging design modifications considered foreign, such as the Rococoinspired painting technique called ‘rosemaling’, to rural folk handicraft practices that were associated with medieval traditions. Paradoxically, Nicolaysen himself, the socalled arbiter of good national taste, worked towards the rationalization of these timehonoured rural handicrafts by initiating their mass production at urban manufactories situated closer to the intended new customers in towns.18 The belief in a superior quality industrial reproduction of historical forms also guided the logic of architectural restoration practice, even in such exceptional cases as the nineteenth-century restoration of one of the most important national monuments – the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim.19 However, due to the limited levels of industrialization in nineteenth-century Norway, the majority of construction work was still performed manually, mainly employing local materials that were barely processed beforehand. As confirmed by a representative of the national field of heritage conservation, ‘there is a strong presumption that a medieval craftsman who had participated at building a stone church in the thirteenth century would easily make himself comfortable on a construction site at Thorvald Meyers Street 600 years later’.20 The level of industrialization in Norway, however, rose in the first half of the twentieth century and traditional building materials were gradually replaced by industrial ones, which became commonly used both in the new construction as well as in the repair of heritage buildings.

The industrial Swiss chalet style in Røros In the second half of the nineteenth century, the formation of the railway system accelerated the industrialization of construction processes, especially of wooden buildings. The industrialization was accompanied by the introduction of the Swiss chalet architectural style, in which most of the first railway stations were designed. Timber merchants, who financed the development of the railway system, also provided prefabricated building materials.21 The Swiss chalet style was not a mere architectonic expression but also a rationalized and modernized industrial building technique. At the same time, even 146

Transforming Heritage Conservation

though the style carried its foreign origin, it was justified, in accordance with the national Norwegian agenda of the nineteenth century, by relating it to the Germanic region and architectural influences of traditional Swiss mountain farms with slight reference to Gothic architecture, which was sharply opposed to academic neoclassicism.22 The Swiss chalet style spread unhindered in Norway because it was perceived as a familiar and convenient way of building by a wider populace. The same trends reached a remote upland town of Røros, established in 1644 as a copper-mining centre, which had maintained the largely unchanged townscape throughout the years until socioeconomic changes struck it in the second half of the nineteenth century (Plate 15). With the opening of the Røros railway station in 1877, the first extraordinary buildings in the Swiss chalet style were introduced to the town. Simultaneously, a new class of merchants emerged after the Røros Copper-work trade monopoly was lifted in 1842 and innovative constructions in the Swiss chalet style became symbols of distinction of that new social class.23 By then, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the town had been mainly inhabited by representatives of two social classes: mineworkers’ families dwelling in modest urban farms, composed of simple notched-log buildings covered with sod roofs, and a handful of administrative elite at the mining company who resided in larger wooden manors – lesser copies of classical Trondheimian urban mansions, which signified the exceptional social positions held by their owners.24 The Swiss chalet style though was quickly democratized and popularized and thus changed the townscape of Røros dramatically, due to the generally affordable low-cost industrial prefabrication. During the twentieth-century interwar period, the townscape of architectural contrasts was sustained as commercial activities stagnated in the whole area due to a crisis at Røros Copper-works. After the Second World War, however, Røros again embarked on the path of change, but this time the alterations were imposed by the national field of heritage conservation of Norway. During the so-called ‘Halvor Vreim’s period’ between 1937 and 1965, the neo-Gothic and the Swiss chalet styles were denounced, and Røros was about to be reproduced as an ideal example of vernacular wooden architecture with local adaptations of international classical styles. The Swiss chalet style now was perceived as a threat to the original image of Røros and the whole townscape had to be restored back to its pre1880s appearance.25 The aspired ‘true image of Røros’ was the townscape of the eighteenth century when classical styles prevailed and the mining industry experienced its golden age. Consequently, the Swiss chalet style was to be deleted from the history of the town: the original building elements were removed and sometimes they even became substituted with preaged copies, which were stylistically older than the buildings themselves.26

Local and international initiatives for launching the sub-field of traditional workmanship in Røros The antiquing of the Røros townscape during the ‘Halvor Vreim’s period’ was performed through incorporating industrial building materials and techniques which were considered appropriate as long as their aesthetic appearance corresponded to the historic 147

Craft and Heritage

styles preferred.27 However, local initiatives were undertaken, beginning in the 1970s, to study historical building techniques, initiated by the town museum curator Sverre Ødegaard, who opened Antiquarian Workshops at Røros museum in 1974 and employed local craftsmen with indigenously acquired knowledge in traditional workmanship and historic building materials. The Antiquarian Workshops not only specialized in repair works but the centre was also used as a social platform for monthly gatherings of local craftspeople, where their reflections over the performed restorations were consistently shared. The meetings are ongoing, and they have contributed significantly to developing the self-awareness of the local community of craftspeople, which somewhat resembles a medieval carpenters’ guild. Another important factor that enabled the reinforcement of local initiatives was the decentralization of the national field of heritage conservation by establishing the local heritage conservation office, which promoted a closer dialogue between the field of heritage conservation and townspeople.28 There were also simultaneous foreign impulses making a significant impact on the tiny local town. During the European Architectural Heritage Year in 1975, Røros was designated as one of the Norwegian pilot projects and shortly after it was inscribed into UNESCO World Heritage List as ‘Røros Mining Town and the Circumference’.29 The process of nomination, however, was exercised without the participation of the local population.30 The town at that time was experiencing a turbulent economic period as Røros Copper-works went bankrupt in 1977 after having operated for 333 years, and many of the town’s buildings, especially outbuildings, were abandoned as they became non-functional. In 1993, ICOMOS, on behalf of UNESCO, evaluated the situation at the listed World Heritage Site and concluded that ‘the emphasis in restoration seems to have been mainly on the principal buildings along the streets. Courtyards have been given less attention, and a number of outbuildings have fallen out of use and are in a state of disrepair’. It was recommended that ‘the existing building elements, such as windows, doors and wall boards, should, where possible, be conserved and repaired rather than replaced. Traditional techniques and materials should be given priority in new works’.31 The ICOMOS suggestions corresponded to the Principles for the Preservation of Historic Timber Structures, generated by ICOMOS International Wood Committee in 1999. The Committee, contrary to the Venice Charter, expressed distrust in modern industrial materials and techniques used in any work performed on historical timber structures, due to the lessons learnt from experiencing the damaging effects of their technical incompatibility. Modern materials were considered as following industrial rationality – they aimed at tightness and stability, while traditional materials were believed to be elastic and breathable. Thus, the principles encouraged ‘to understand and recreate those choices which former generations had made while taking actions on buildings’. If the damaged parts were to be changed, then ‘the same quality and type of timber materials, processed in the same way as the replaced ones, should be used’.32 These principles of ‘procedural authenticity’ were practised in 1991 on a national scale when state authorities of heritage conservation initiated ‘The Medieval Project’, which aimed at reviving lost knowledge about medieval carpentry in order to repair wooden medieval stave churches. Locally, these same principles were observed in 1994 at the municipal level when ‘The Outbuilding Project’ was launched, which 148

Transforming Heritage Conservation

aimed at repairing outbuildings in Røros by using traditional materials and techniques. Even though the objects of these two projects differed in dates, scale and function, they were tightly linked through the craftspeople who were sharing their experience and knowledge during their common workshops. Norway therefore established the subfield of traditional workmanship, intended to serve the purpose of the field of heritage conservation, which was to correct the perceived errors of former generations by applying traditional techniques and materials in the restoration of wooden heritage buildings.

The reproduction of ‘traditional’ workmanship at the Kaffestuggu outbuilding in Røros The use of historical techniques and workmanship has become an acknowledged practice of restoration within the Norwegian field of heritage conservation and the sustainability of the subfield of such ‘traditional’ workmanship has been recognized as a crucial factor in securing the durability of heritage objects. Thus, the Norwegian field of heritage conservation has become somewhat dependent on the maintenance of the subfield of traditional or historical workmanship, thereby restricting the subfield’s aspirations to more autonomy. One way to control the subfield was to apply restrictions on a craftsperson’s freedom of creativity through the imposed requirements to strictly follow the ‘procedurally authentic’ methods in repairing heritage objects. This requirement was applied even to cases where the so-called authentic technical solution proved to be short-lived.33 Moreover, the activities of the subfield of traditional workmanship were restricted to solely serving the aims of the field of heritage conservation, such that constructions of new buildings by ‘traditional’ techniques and in ‘traditional’ aesthetic appearances were understood negatively as historical falsifications, complicating the question of what constitutes ‘tradition’. The field of building construction was reserved for construction companies and architects, trained and educated in contemporary modernistic styles.34 Therefore, the case of the construction of an outbuilding at the Kaffestuggu backyard in Røros, perceived as traditional in appearance and using traditional techniques, has been chosen for description as ‘the black swan’ example, which is interesting to study as an exception from the prevailing logic of practice within the field of heritage conservation in Norway (Figure 8.1). The new outbuilding at the Kaffestuggu courtyard was a private commission from the local welfare society that sought to expand service space at its café by rebuilding the demolished outbuilding, which had stood in the exact location in the past. Even though the accumulation of economic profit was one of the main motives for the construction, the interviewed representatives expressed their wish to gain cultural and symbolic capital as well; therefore, a historical architectural expression of the building was chosen. The aim to accumulate cultural and social capital was reaffirmed by the choice of the contractor: the whole process of construction was entrusted to the local carpenter, who had extensive experience working with the ‘The Outbuilding Project’. That carpenter possessed an exclusive position within the urban social space in general, as well as within the established subfield of traditional workmanship. He 149

Craft and Heritage

Figure 8.1  The main building of the local restaurant in Røros gradually incorporated other local craftspeople into the implementation of the project, and thus the process of construction became a common expression of creativity for local craftspeople (Plate 16). Even the design process was influenced by the carpenter’s preferences as he refused to build according to the initial drawings, prepared by an engineering company, as the drawings were considered to be applicable to modernistic buildings and industrial building methods. The carpenter began designing the building himself, inspired by visionary proposals made by the above-mentioned local historian Sverre Ødegaard. As a closer examination demonstrates, the project version prepared by the carpenter corresponded most to the recorded historical documentation of the previous outbuilding, which he had not studied beforehand. Thus, his practical experience and knowledge, gained while working extensively with restorations of wooden buildings in Røros, shaped his habitus. The carpenter’s embodied cultural capital was reproduced in rebuilding the outbuilding at the Kaffestuggu courtyard, and, therefore, his proposal closely resembled the actual original construction, even though the achieved historical accuracy was unintentional. The Kaffestuggu outbuilding was implanted into the historical townscape by avoiding contrasting architectural statements of a new construction. Simultaneously, however, that was also the reason why representatives of the field of heritage conservation expressed their discontent with the project – they would have preferred a scientifically proven copy, based on the disclosed historical evidence, or a contrasting building in a modernistic style by following the Venice Charter’s principle of historical equivalence. As informed by the representatives of the field of heritage conservation, they were obliged to approve 150

Transforming Heritage Conservation

of the project in the end because the majority of the local population supported the antiquated architectural design of the carpenter. The project was not only used for demonstrating the growing autonomy of the subfield of traditional workmanship, it was also used as a tool to emphasize the distinctiveness of local architecture by reviving the knowledge and practice of using regional building materials. One such revival involved the choice of local stone slates for the outbuilding’s roofing material. The craftsmen perceived the process of roofing with local materials, in this instance, as a training exercise, because the locally produced slates were of poor quality, soft and less durable. This choice, however, was based on the aim of emphasizing the self-sufficiency of the local subfield of traditional workmanship. The project was also used as an opportunity to highlight the differing logic of practice of the subfield of traditional workmanship, which according to the interviewed craftsmen, was distinctly different from the one dominating the field of heritage conservation. The craftsmen working on the reproduction of the outbuilding expressed their dissatisfaction with the prevailing routines within the field of heritage conservation, such as the

Figure 8.2  The original cladding of the nearby outbuilding that has been copied

151

Craft and Heritage

Figure 8.3  The traces of manual workmanship on the facade of the new outbuilding replacement of original materials with modern substitutes. They referred to the abovepresented former ‘restorations’ in Røros, when, for instance, the disfavoured Swiss chalet style cladding was supplanted with a mass-produced, modern type of ‘carpenter’s’ panelling. Hence, in the case of this outbuilding, the craftsmen expressed counterarguments in their own tacit way, by using irregular panels copied from the nearby standing barn. That way, a distinct logic of practice was demonstrated, which differed from the dominant one within the field of heritage conservation (Figures 8.2, 8.3). The analysis revealed that the Kaffestuggu project could not be labelled as fully ‘procedurally authentic’ because some hidden compromises were made in favour of the time-saving modern building materials and techniques. For example, the displayed manually hewn logs had been sawn first and the traditional stone slates were used to cover up concrete foundations. The interviewed carpenters rationalized such adjustments since the external traditional appearance demonstrated the exceptional cultural capital of local craftsmen and strengthened the position of the subfield of traditional workmanship.

Re-evaluating a pastiche The outbuilding was constructed despite the objections of the authoritative field of heritage conservation which had been following the established policy of modern conservation, rooted in the Venice Charter: ‘any extra work which is indispensable must be distinct from the architectural composition and must bear a contemporary stamp’. The 152

Transforming Heritage Conservation

interviewed agents within the field of heritage conservation expressed their concern that the traditional appearance of the outbuilding at the Kaffestuggu courtyard will mislead ordinary people. There was also critique given that the reconstruction of the outbuilding was poorly founded on historical sources and, therefore, the result was negatively framed as ‘a pastiche’ – an improper imitation of artistic expressions, typical of former epochs. Meanwhile, neither the initiators, nor the developers of the outbuilding project at Kaffestuggu courtyard had considered reconstructing an exact copy of the outbuilding. The creative imitation of historical forms was rather perceived as a proper method of construction and, therefore, the traditional appearance of the outbuilding was chosen. Thus, the rationalization of this building as ‘a pastiche’ was grounded on a similar logic of practice to the one that guided the above-presented construction-site at NotreDame Cathedral in Paris, led by Viollet-le-Duc. The new outbuilding in its traditional appearance was intended to become an imaginative expression of skills and knowledge of the local craftsmen, forming the subfield of traditional workmanship. The emerging misunderstandings of such a rationale indicated that the representatives of the field of heritage conservation shared a rather distinct logic of practice, formed, first and foremost, by the differing structure and legitimized content of cultural capital. The Bourdieusian theory of structuration, however, promotes the understanding that fields are always incompletely solidified structures, where transformations emerge as a result of tensions between them. Thus, the fact that the new outbuilding at the Kaffestuggu courtyard in Røros was constructed, despite the objections from the authoritative field of heritage conservation, indicates that the subfield of traditional workmanship had achieved a greater degree of autonomy due to its gravitation towards the field of large-scale building production and its associations with the local private open market. As the historical overview showed, the field of heritage conservation used various strategies in turn to retain its legitimizing position with regard to the subfield of traditional workmanship, but democratizing strategies have proven to be most successful. In the case of the new outbuilding in Røros, the field of heritage conservation was constrained to adjust its policies as the social survey revealed that the majority of inhabitants in Røros were not concerned with the issue of historical falsification and were rather positive about the aesthetic adaptation of the new outbuilding to the historical townscape. Finally, the representatives of the field of heritage conservation were obliged to consider the aesthetic preferences of the majority, to take into account the strengthening and non-static subfield of traditional workmanship and to concede its own fundamental principle of historical equivalence.

Notes 1

Jen Webb, ‘Theorizing Practice’, in Understanding Bourdieu, eds. Jen Webb, Tony Schirato and Geoff Danaher (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 49.

2

Pierre Bourdieu, The Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 1. 153

Craft and Heritage 3

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticismʼ, in The Premodern Condition. Medievalism and the Making of Theory, ed. Bruce Holsinger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 239.

4

David L. Swartz, ‘Metaprinciples for Sociological Research in a Bourdieusian Perspective’ in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. Philip S. Gorski (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 22.

5

Helena Webster, Bourdieu for Architects (London: Routledge, 2011), 2, 63, 66.

6

Philip S. Gorski, ‘Bourdieu as a Theorist of Change’ in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. Philip S. Gorski (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013).

7

Hans-Emil Lidén, Nicolay Nicolaysen. Et blad av norsk kulturminneverns historie (Oslo: Abstrakt forlag, 2005), 175.

8

Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Laussus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc, Projet de restauration de Notre-Dame de Paris: rapport adressé à M. le Ministre de la Justice et des Cultes (Paris: impr. de Mme de Lacombe, 1843), 8.

9

Bourdieu, ‘Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism’, 239.

10 Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 63. 11 Chris Miele, ‘Conservation and the Enemies of Progress?’ in From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity 1877–1939 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), viii–2. Alan Crawford, ‘Supper at Gatti’s: The SPAB and the Arts and Crafts Movement’ in From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity 1877–1939 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), 114–15. 12 William Morris, Manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Available online: https://www.spab.org.uk/about-us/spab-manifesto (accessed 28 July, 2018). 13 Camillo Boito and Cesare Birignani, ‘Restoration in Architecture: First Dialogue’, Future Anterior 6, no. 1 (2009): 70–1. 14 ICOMOS, ‘Article 12’ in Venice Charter (1964). 15 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xvi. 16 Dag Myklebust, Med vilje og viten: om kulturminnevern i Norge: Riksantikvaren 1912–1958 (Oslo: Pax, 2014), 35. 17 Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875–1905: an institutional biography (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 74. 18 Arne Lie Christensen, Kunsten å bevare. Om kulturminnevern og fortidsinteresse i Norge (Oslo: Pax, 2011), 49. 19 Dag Nilsen, ‘The Cathedral of Nidaros: Building a Historic Monument’, Future Anterior 7, no. 2 (2010): 13, 17. 20 Harald Ibenholt, ‘Sterk, tett og ubrukelig’, in Årbok for Fortidsminneforeningen (Oslo: Foreningen til norske fortidsminnesmerkers bevaring, 2008), 105. 21 Mari Hvattum, ‘Panoramas of Style: Railway Architecture in Nineteenth-century Norway’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 2 (2011): 206. 22 Mari Lending, ‘Den norske iscenesettelsen av modernismen som historie’, Nordic Journal of Architectural Research 19, no. 1 (2006): 21. 23 Karoline Daugstad, Eir Grytli et al., Bergverksbyens omland: om ressursbruk, vern, kultur og natur i Rørosområdet (Trondheim: Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, 1999), 43.

154

Transforming Heritage Conservation 24 Guthorm Kavli, Trønderske trepaléer: borgerlig panelarkitektur nordenfjells (Oslo: Cappelen, 1966), 242. 25 Halvor Vreim, ‘Pleien av et bybillede: gater og hus på Røros’, in Fortidsminner, Vol. 27 (Oslo: I kommisjon hos Grøndahl & Søn, 1944), 22. 26 Sidsel Andersen and Jon Brænne, Kulturminneforvaltningens og planarbeidets historie på Røros: Kulturarv og verdiskaping. Økonomiske virkninger av kulturarven på Røros (Oslo: NIKU, 2006), 26–8. 27 Mette Bye, ‘Histories of Architectural Conservation: Five Case Studies on the Treatment of Norwegian Vernacular Heritage Buildings circa 1920–1980’ (PhD diss., Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, 2010), 420. 28 Erlend Gjelsvik, ‘Lokal kulturminneforvaltning 1988–2010’ in Røros. Refleksjoner etter 30 år som verdensarv, ed. Erlend Gjeldsvik (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2014), 121. 29 UNESCO, ‘Røros Mining Town and the Circumference’, World Heritage List. https://whc. unesco.org/en/list/55 (accessed 27 May 2019). 30 Erlend Gjelsvik, ‘Verdensarvens trange fødsel’, in Røros. Refleksjoner etter 30 år som verdensarv, ed. Erlend Gjeldsvik (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2014), 95–7. 31 Knut Einar Larsen, Evaluation of Røros Bergstad in Norway, World Heritage Convention (Oslo: ICOMOS, Den norske nasjonalkomitte, 1994). 32 Knut Einar Larsen, ‘…hele deres rikdom av autentisitet’, in Årbok for Fortidsminneforeningen (Oslo: Foreningen til norske fortidsminnesmerkers bevaring. 2004), 21. 33 André Korsaksel, ‘Bygde man alltid bedre før’, in Årbok for Fortidsminneforeningen (Oslo: Foreningen til norske fortidsminnesmerkers bevaring. 2008), 113–19. 34 Arne Lie Christensen, ‘folket’, in Årbok for Fortidsminneforeningen (Oslo: Foreningen til norske fortidsminnesmerkers bevaring, 2012), 22–3.

155

156

CHAPTER 9 BECOMING HERITAGE SMART – NEGOTIATING THE DILEMMA OF CRAFT PRACTICE IN A CERAMIC CENTRE

Magdalena Buchczyk

Introduction One balmy summer evening in 2012, I was walking down the Olari (Potters’) Street in Horezu, Romania, observing the sky growing dark on the hillsides. Facades of the houses, many covered in pots produced by their residents, were reddening in the evening light. Some walls even had heritage name plaques and pots were conspicuously displayed around the yard. That evening, the area was very calm apart from the sounds of flocks of sheep in the fields and the noise of residents bustling about in their gardens. I had spent that day in one of the many pottery studios in Olari, talking to the potters, observing the speed and intricacy of their practice and trying to get involved in the work. Once again, I had failed in making a plate of any acceptable form (Plate 17). Katia,1 a jovial potter in her forties with a colourful headband, seemed unbothered by my ineptitude – she assumed that my pottery skills were impaired by my lefthandedness. That day, we were talking about making a living from traditional pottery. As most potters in the Olari area, she was busy making traditional Horezu pottery with its characteristic intricate, flower-like pattern of colourful glazes. As Katia was working on moulding the clay, our conversation moved to her other revenue streams. To my surprise, she showed me a range of photographs of contemporary pottery plates. These pieces were much more minimalistic in their design, all in a dark blue colour with diverse decoration. She made those herself, she explained, on order from an Italian restaurateur who needed bespoke crockery for his place. She emphasized, however, that these pieces were not her primary area of work. She did not want to be seen as a maker of modern ceramics but as a traditional Horezu potter. As I was returning from the studio to my room in the village, that story of her hidden creative work seemed increasingly perplexing. Why not celebrate such a range of skills and forms of artistic production? Why hide contemporary craft practice at the expense of constantly reproducing folkloric patterns? (Figure 9.1) This chapter reflects on Katia’s dilemma and the negotiations around craft production and heritage status in Horezu. Building on anthropological work concerning intangible heritage and craftsmanship it seeks to explore how heritage processes influence this craft.2 In particular, I draw on research

Craft and Heritage

Figure 9.1  Image of the

contemporary pottery commission on the background of traditional pots

investigating craft as a sphere of endemic tensions and embodied articulations of heritage, authenticity and value.3 Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2012,4 I explore different ways in which Horezu potters tried to resolve the problems of being a heritage craftsperson. During this research, I observed potters at work and conducted interviews with makers in their studios and craft markets, as well as members of the former co-operative, folk art curators, Horezu residents and staff in the local tourist office. Based on the accounts and observations, the first part of the chapter situates this dilemma in the recent past of Horezu pottery, the different historical narratives about this craft and the networks in which its heritage had been created. The second part highlights how the space of the studio, stories of skill acquisition, and everyday activities all played a role in the potters’ puzzle. Finally, I argue that the dilemma of the Horezu potter was about becoming ‘heritage smart’, understood as getting a good command of the distributed properties and practices of heritage status. By highlighting this struggle over acquiring such ‘heritage smartness’, I offer an insight into how historical legacies, practices and stories are mobilized in everyday craft. 158

Becoming Heritage Smart

Manoeuvring through the unpredictable There are multiple stories of Horezu ceramics, varying in degrees of continuity and discontinuity. One version is that the craft tradition steeped in an undocumented past traces its origins to the ancient art of Dacian or Roman settlements. Another understanding of this craft history identifies its origin within the centuries old heritage of the nearby monastery, currently a UNESCO World Heritage site. This version became part of Horezu’s application for the designation on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: ‘The production of traditional ceramics of Horezu has retained its specific style for 300 years. It is unique, and highly characteristic … and is produced only in the administrative territory of Horezu’.5 The application stated that key to Horezu pottery uniqueness is not only its three-century long legacy and its geographical specificity but also its undisturbed continuity of material form and craft knowledge. In 2012, Horezu was included in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The listing described a particular repertory of skills and practices defining this craft practice as immaterial heritage.6 It argued that pottery was ‘an activity that has never ceased to exist in Horezu’.7 However, a closer look at the historical context of this craft and Horezu’s past reveals that ruptures were as important to the creation of this pottery as its continuity. In particular, I show how the cracks in its twentieth-century history completely reframed the craft. The first mention of such a historical break, or decline of Horezu pottery, was reported in the 1930s. Barbu Slătineanu, a prominent ceramics collector and connoisseur, wrote about the difficulties of finding artefacts in Horezu.8 At the time, pottery was a seasonal activity, practised alongside agriculture and a cottage industry.9 The work rhythms were linked to specific high-demand periods such as local market days, festivities of the liturgical year including traditional alms giving, offerings and feasts for dead relatives (praznic) and celebrations of remembrance in the springtime and autumn (moşii de vară, moşii de iarnă). The transformation from irregular activity to a professionalized, ongoing ceramic production can be traced to the period after the Second World War, in particular the development of socialist folk art and folklore.10 The elderly potters in Horezu remembered the rise of folk artists (creatori populari) who developed the local character of the pottery. This story of origins emerged also from a conversation with a local curator of ethnography. In the 1960s, she reminisced, quality pottery was scarce. Similar to Slătineanu three decades earlier, she found it almost impossible to collect good-quality pots, when she aimed to obtain objects for a newly established local ethnographic museum. As a result, the frustrated curator decided to commission a potter to create new pieces for display. She explained that at the time, like many others, this maker had left the profession to work in a factory. As part of the commission, the potter had built a kiln for the museum. He then produced over a hundred pieces for display and the gift shop and assisted the curator in acquiring older pieces from his family members.11 The curator argued that this event was a crucial building block in the renewal of the practice on a new scale. 159

Craft and Heritage

Although it is difficult to assess the extent to which heritage institutions triggered the revival of this pottery, the narrative suggests a revitalizing influence of museum collecting practices. The curator’s story also demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between the makers and the heritage practitioners sustaining the craft. A potter, who had worked with museums under socialism, recalled a number of exhibitions presenting her work in Romania and abroad. At the time, her studio was visited by prominent international guests, celebrities and politicians, and her pieces were acquired by prestigious institutions across the country. She was seen as an artist and could even be admitted to the Romanian Academy. For her, working closely with heritage practitioners enabled her aesthetic development and wider acknowledgement. This potter and others who enjoyed the status of a folk artist told stories of a particular engagement with heritage professionals. They recalled that museum employees had been a regular part of the potters’ daily life, and many still kept in touch with museum staff. These long-term relationships extended to the children of the potters and the experts who maintained connections later into their adult lives. Formal and informal encounters formed networks of acquaintance, personal contacts and reciprocal visits and services. Potters remembered, for example, how they hosted visiting curators and their families and just as curators were allowed into the potters’ domestic sphere, the craftsmen were often invited to the city for a museum fair or a public demonstration of pottery techniques.12 This reciprocity created long-standing bonds between the heritage sector and folk artists. Under socialism, potters were incentivized to make new work for state-run folk art events and competitions, and towards this they had a range of grants, awards and travel opportunities at their disposal. Their pieces could become part of international collections or be shown locally in the House of Culture alongside emblematic models and traditional masterpieces. They could participate in the annual ‘Rooster of Horezu’ (Cocoşul de Horezu) fair where Horezu ceramics were on show and on sale. From the 1980s, this local craft fair was incorporated in the national ‘Song to Romania’ (Cîntarea României) festival, a prestigious nationwide programme of folkloric shows.13 Under state socialism, the folk artists’ work formed part of a larger heritage ecosystem in which experts, makers and objects circulated between homes, museums, competitions and cultural events. These complex networks of actors, actions, initiatives, incentives and personal affects constituted this craft as a heritage endeavour.14 However, not all potters were part of this ecosystem. In parallel to the development of folk art, the craft became increasingly industrialized. This buoyant industry was managed through the state-run National Union of Craft Cooperatives (UCECOM).15 Rather than folk art, the UCECOM products were seen as artizanat, or ‘modern interpretations of folk art that was produced for mass consumption’.16 The potters worked according to production targets, making a daily average of 200 pieces of a specific model and size. The production was remembered as very advanced and technically refined: the cooperative had industrial clay mixers, gas-operated kilns and various electric wheels. The process was supervised and quality-checked by master potters, ensuring that the pots met the requirements of the orders from their national and international clients. In the 1980s, for example, orders for the folk art–inspired objects came from all over Romania, the 160

Becoming Heritage Smart

USSR and Western Europe, including France, Italy, Austria and Germany. To meet this demand, the cooperative employed over hundred workers from the surrounding area.17 Interviewing the staff members and potters from the former Ceramics Cooperative (Cooperativa Ceramica), I was informed that the makers praised the stability of artizanat commissions and the well-organized network of state-run folkloric gift shops. They appreciated the quality of education available through co-operative apprenticeships, close relationships with the master craftsmen and craft training in high schools. Work in the Ceramics Cooperative was also well remembered by the museum specialists. For most curators I interviewed, UCECOM’s management of the craft cooperatives was perceived as beneficial for the craft. In the 1970s and 1980s, the organization engaged specialists from the heritage sector to oversee the design process,18 ensuring a degree of connection to traditional production. One of the Bucharest museum experts from the period stated that the employees of the co-operative made exactly the same type of artefacts as folk artists but on a larger scale. In some cases, she reflected, the quality of the co-operative pottery was very similar to that of the pieces made by traditional makers. The two modes of production, both the folk artists’ and the co-operative potters’, were operating in different environments. Whereas the folk artists oriented their practice towards a network of curators, folk art experts and Song of Romania festival judges, the co-operative-based makers were creating pottery for the master craftsmen and UCECOM community with its designers, artizanat experts and state gift shops. At the same time, the work of the artizanat makers and the folk artists differed in the scale of production and the degree of recognition and entitlement. Artizanat producers, for example, did not have access to Academician titles and accolades, and could not present their work as unique, artistic or museum-worthy. This distinction between the groups of folk art and artizanat makers, which I will explore in the sections below, created a legacy that continues to affect the lives and work of the potters. After 1989, both folk art and UCECOM-based production were significantly affected by the post-socialist transformation.19 According to the elderly potters, this was a period marked by a loss of recognition and acclaim. Folk artists had to start to compete with other craftspeople and felt that they lost their unique relationship with the institutions. Increasingly, the potters complained, museums allowed any type of stall into the market, contributing to a decrease in quality and the contamination of folk art. They expressed their dissatisfaction that the museums started bringing together makers of woodcraft, textiles, decorations and even kitsch products and alarmingly talked about the rise of imported kitsch products from Bulgaria and China. Competing in this emerging market demanded a new way of distinguishing oneself to continue to be able to live from the craft.20 Other challenges were faced by the former UCECOM potters. During the transition period, co-operatives and state enterprises were closed down. A large number of potters, previously employed by the co-operative, were left without work and needed to find alternative income. Former artizanat producers tried to find a new way in the post-industrial reality and some set up home-based studios, while others started working as labourers for pottery workshops in the area. A large group left the profession to try their luck in new careers through employment in the local hotel industries, administration or moving abroad.21 161

Craft and Heritage

In the 2000s, local and international tourism and heritage developments turned around the fate of this declining craft. Since Romania joined the European Union in 2007, EU development funds have reached into the region through initiatives such as listing the Horezu Valley as a European Destination of Excellence. Slowly, production picked up with an increase in local tourism. Since then, Horezu has invested a good deal into its tourist resources and has seen a rise in heritage protection organizations, such as the Association of Folk Craftsmen ‘Rooster of Horezu’ (Asociaţia Meşterilor Populari, Cocoşul de Hurez) or the Association for the Promotion of Authentic Heritage in Horezu (Asociația pentru Promovarea Patrimoniului Autentic Horezu or APPAH).22 Between 2010 and 2013, the local government funded the ‘Horezu Rooster – the Bastion of Sustainability of Romanian Ceramics’ project to create a large-scale annual European pottery fair. The ‘Rooster of Horezu’ was meant to become bigger in scale than its previous incarnations and to attract international potters and visitors. In 2012, as a symbolic manifestation of the pottery’s post-socialist renaissance, Horezu was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Horezu heritage became part of a new ecosystem of local, national and supra-national actors, ranging from UNESCO and the EU programmes, the tourism industry and tourist organizations. The potters’ work had to be reoriented towards a new network of heritage professionals and experts. In this ecosystem, the industrial side of this craft had become extinct. Instead, craft became more concentrated in individual studios and constructed in relation to the needs and categories of the market, tourist and heritage industries. The above tangled history of Horezu pottery demonstrates that this craft has been disappearing and reinventing itself through time. As shown by the UNESCO nomination documentation, the historical transformations are unacknowledged and rendered invisible; these documents construct the value of the craft as resting on undisturbed practice. In contrast to this linear narrative, historical ruptures repeatedly led to the reformulation of practice, most recently in the form of the closure of the co-operatives and the roll back of the state-run artizanat and folk art industries. The potters I spoke with had a lived experience of such rupture, unemployment and marginalization and understood very well what was at stake in engaging with the new heritage developments. They knew they needed to navigate this new terrain. Living through discontinuity and steering through changing authenticity discourses and practices often result in distinctions.23 In the next section, I move from the historical accounts to pottery studios to examine what this historically influenced, but also newly experienced distinction or dilemma, of being a heritage potter looks like in everyday practice.

Performing heritage in the studio As I learnt from my time with Katia and other potters, a day in the workshop may involve various activities. Firstly, the clay is extracted from a local hill and transported to the household yard and left (usually over the winter) to homogenize. Later, the raw material is mixed in an electric blender (malaxor) to remove impurities and is rolled into 162

Becoming Heritage Smart

cylindrical sections. The material is then divided into smaller parts and rolled by hand into balls representing the size of the final pieces. At this stage, it is crucial to synchronize the feel of the clay in the hand with a preconceived design of the future pot. Careful estimation is required, as for throwing a vase the potter needs three sizes of clay balls from which (s)he makes the main body, the upper part and the handle. These manual jobs are often done by hourly paid workers, sometimes Roma men and women. Most of these tasks take place outdoors, in the yard or back garden close to the workshop. The next phase of production moves to the household studio (atelier) where the Horezu pieces are moulded and decorated with the use of specific techniques and kit, all part of the UNESCO listing. The studio is predominantly a sphere of work reserved for family members, sometimes supported by other workers, but in the famous Olari Street it is typically open for potential craft demonstrations. Visiting the workspace, tourists can watch a potter at a wheel shaping and decorating the plate. This visually attractive activity takes just a few minutes but has been represented in countless images and videos of this craft, presented in museums, tourist venues, craft fairs and online portals. With great dexterity, turning the wheel with their feet, the decorator applies the glaze with an extraordinary mastery of the brush-like stick. Many studios have a display of the diplomas certifying the potter’s prizes gained in national craft markets or folk art festivals. Studios of renowned potters have small exhibitions, displaying the oeuvre of the family to make their skill and achievements visible (Plate 18). A key part of the studio visibility is the performative application of the characteristic pattern with the help of emblematic tools – the horn and the wire-tipped stick. Ideally, an ‘authentic’ potter would only use certain traditional pigments and apply natural glaze. Departure from the accepted repertoire causes controversy. One of such disputed colours is blue. Although many potters like use it, for heritage professionals the application of a new colour palette is problematic (Plate 18). One of the museum ethnographers based in Bucharest, discussing current developments during a conversation in a café in 2012, noted: We are interested in real ceramics, close to tradition … not things that are not Horezu. There are large numbers of visitors, foreign as well, so the potters are obliged to come to our museum exclusively with Horezu pottery. From the museum perspective, they are obliged to work with tradition.24 For the specialist, potters who innovate do not fulfil their traditional obligations. Those who depart from the repertoire of traditional colour or pattern are seen as purveyors of kitsch. Their substandard products act as a sign of poor taste but also a cause of ‘spiritual pollution’ of traditional practice.25 More practically, however, this designation as ‘nontraditional’ might lead, for example, to exclusion from the heritage networks or lack of access to opportunities for sale and dissemination during museum and pottery fairs. Apart from the use of colour, firing emerged as a particularly contentious issue. This key operation usually takes place on a designated day of the week, lasting about ten hours and requiring constant supervision of the kiln to maintain the right 163

Craft and Heritage

temperature. For many potters, firing is a process indicating technical efficacy. One respondent explained that good command of firing methods represented a degree of mastery and intellectual skill: ‘I fire in a more intelligent way than others, using only 40 per cent as much wood.’ Some potters have started using electrical kilns praising the comfort of not being required to spend long hours in the dirty and hot space of the kiln shed. Some claimed that using an electrical kiln was more intelligent as it helped them focus their energy on developing artistic skills. Others saw modern firing techniques as inauthentic and inconsistent with the traditional character of the craft.26 This was the view of most heritage and tourist professionals. The local tourist office employee argued that non-traditional firing resulted in tangible differences in the materiality of the pots. He mentioned an experiment of leaving old and new plates outdoors and learning that those fired in the traditional kiln were more resistant to the elements. The pieces fired with wood maintained the vivid colour for a longer period. His experiment was a metaphor of the contrast between the enduring, deep-rooted, permanent old and perishable, and the short-lived, unstable and rapidly decaying new. For him, quality and ‘authenticity’ were embedded in the heritage blueprint and the related categories of material purity.27 In contrast to the tourist office employee, potters rarely talked about the quality of their work in terms of the stability of the objects. The demanding reality of day-to-day activities in the studio necessitated solving other problems beyond material markers of ‘authenticity’. On a daily basis, they faced challenges of supply and demand, economic constraints, uneven rhythms of orders, equipment maintenance, transport and other costs. To meet these challenges, they continuously sought improvements in equipment and the production process. They did not necessarily feel obliged to produce pots of a particular colour and pattern. Instead, many derived a sense of professional pride from efficient and intelligent mastery of the process and from avoiding defects.28 Those who departed from some of the traditional processes and introduced mechanized equipment (such as using electric kilns and new pigments) continued to see themselves as bearers of quality and genuine mastery. For them, quality was about knowledge of all phases of production as synchronized process. Being a good potter was narrated as being capable of controlling ‘surprises’, managing the uncertainty arising during modelling, decoration and firing.29 The prime area of self-validation was their command of the interconnected, multi-phase potter’s craft. The potters’ notion of ‘authenticity’ was thus more akin to a distributed property, achieved through multi-phase interactions with things.30 This subjective and malleable sense of mastery was performative rather than fixed to material requirements. Pottery production involves constant management of uncertainty and potential rupture, a negotiation with the dynamics of the process. Therefore, in daily work Horezu potters took pride in developing innovative solutions and efficient ways of working, such that, in doing things differently, they could depart from the heritage repertoire. Those who departed from some of the traditional processes and introduced mechanized equipment (such as using electric kilns and new pigments), continued to see themselves as bearers of quality and genuine mastery. At the same time, they knew that many of the heritage and 164

Becoming Heritage Smart

tourist professionals might perceive such an innovative departure as a breach of material obligations. Makers like Katia who used certain colours and processes were well aware of this problem. Therefore, they needed to manoeuver through the expectations and hid projects like Katia’s contemporary blue plates’ commission. This way, she contrived to show her commitment to the unspoken heritage contract and avoid being excluded from the heritage community. The next section explores how the dilemma of heritage practice is not only negotiated through spatial arrangements and making pottery but also through narratives of learning experiences that need to fit certain heritage frameworks.

Learning to make heritage pots During tourist visits in the studios, Katia and other potters told the visitors about how they came into the profession. They frequently talked about the first memory of playing with clay and family learning that followed from this. In their family, some claimed, pottery production was practised for three or four generations and their working engagement started with childhood pleasure and play. This version of learning was also part of the UNESCO nomination describing knowledge transmission as a form of undisturbed continuity of material form and craft know-how (Figure 9.2).

Figure 9.2  Studio wall covered with pottery diplomas 165

Craft and Heritage

After longer conversations during my fieldwork, however, the potters shared different narratives of learning far from the romanticized notion of playful transmission and family legacy. For example, one potter learned the craft as an adult from his renowned father, a traditional maker. This took place, however, only following a redundancy in his office employment. A female potter decided to take up the profession after many low-paid jobs in the hospitality industry. Another potter, although he had learned the craft in high school, only reconnected with it after factory closure. Following redundancy, he decided to help his father-in-law in the studio. In many of those stories, post-socialist restructuring and the associated economic downturn proved to be significant factors for the take-up of traditional pottery in the area. However, many respondents also learned at an earlier age, during their work in the co-operative and were appreciative of the opportunities for the potters’ development in the UCECOM factory. Following a period of apprenticeship under a master potter, new workers had different responsibilities on the production line, as they were assigned to a working group (echipă) dealing specifically with the extraction and transport of clay, modelling, decorating or supervising the firing process. This way, they acquired a good grip on all stages of production. In contrast to the UNESCO narrative of exclusive family transmission, potters’ ways into the profession were very diverse. Family learning could also take place in later life when other options were no longer viable and pottery became an alternative to the shrinking job market. At the same time, learning at an earlier age was not exclusive to the family environment but was also facilitated by the industrial apprenticeships in the co-operative. Learning in practice was a stop-start endeavour that differed significantly from the linear script propagated by the heritage organizations. Transmission of knowledge is part of the efforts deployed by craftspeople to create value.31 In the narratives of Horezu potters, playfulness of craft transmission was often associated with ideas of personal value around authorship and competing claims about others. For example, one potter was perceived as ‘inauthentic’ because he had been a shepherd. He learned the craft later in his life through working in his neighbour’s studio. By learning to make pottery better than others, he was seen as a trickster. During our conversations, a number of elderly respondents offered stories of skill and design ‘theft’. One ceramicist claimed that her husband created a renowned pattern of fighting roosters as a comment on the competition between the main potters. Another female potter invited me to a small private museum behind her workshop to show how her family had developed most of the patterns used today. In her view, her family could claim sole authorship of most of the ornamental schemes that came later to be known as typical folk art from the area. What seems to be at stake in these competing narratives of transferring knowledge is not only a storyteller’s one-upmanship; it has more to do with the capacity of authenticity discourses and practices to establish distinctions and boundaries.32 As demonstrated in the previous section, Horezu craftspeople were historically divided along the lines of folk art and artizanat. With the post-socialist change in the craft landscape, paired with the rise of tourism and recent heritage developments, both groups of Horezu makers experienced loss of work and status. 166

Becoming Heritage Smart

During the recent revival, as selected potters became part of intangible cultural heritage listings and networks, the gap between studio-based folk artists and their workers started to widen. Following the closure of the co-operative, those who resided in the vicinity of Olari Street became associated with the craft studios. Others, who lived outside the key heritage district, tried to do the same with more or less success. Facing lack of orders, they often ended up working for the Olari workshops in the surrounding area. The geographical boundary of the Olari thus demarcated a hierarchical division between key potters of networked families and others employed as labourers for the heritage makers. At the bottom of this hierarchy were the Roma workers doing the hardest manual tasks. For them, the spatial boundary was most rigid, as they were never fully acknowledged as part of the atelier. Although they worked with clay on a daily basis in close proximity to the studios, they were most detached from this material’s potential economic and heritage assets. Writing about post-socialist Romania, Katherine Verdery demonstrated that discourses about authenticity and claims of cultural representativeness were often weaponized in the competition for resources.33 The potters had good knowledge of the hierarchies and competitive access to heritage and market assets. In this struggle, they deployed stories of learning and apprenticeship to distinguish themselves from others. The stories about the acquisition of craft knowledge acted as devices for sorting the authentic practitioners from other makers, and for narrating one’s value and space in the hierarchy.

Conclusion Katia had a range of rarely acknowledged skills in the heritage context in which she worked. As I learned more about her hidden, contemporary craft, I came to realize that she fulfilled such orders on the basis of photographs alone. Through trial and error, she would use her craft knowledge to create a replica of excellent quality and sometimes further innovate models and patterns. For her, ‘the commercial orientation of modernized patterns’ provided an opportunity for skill development. This part of her craft biography remained concealed to keep her heritage status and to allow her to work with the tourist and museum clientele. Kristin Kuutma noted that creating inventories of cultural expressions is an exercise that ‘generates hierarchies and complicates the position of marginalities’.34 All potters were aware of the economic and symbolic currency associated with the traditional craftsman status.35 The new UNESCO listing was a fresh opportunity. They also knew that this ranking was determined by their status, which they thought involved a form of demarcation from others. They understood that this heritage status needed to be continuously performed and re-enacted in practice. Through mastering these forms of valorization, narrative and practice that involved getting a good command of discourses and practices of heritage status and authenticity, the potters have become ‘heritage smart’. All these measures were deployed to navigate the competitive landscape 167

Craft and Heritage

of the craft and the expectations of their practice Katia and other potters in Horezu faced many dilemmas negotiating the complex terrain of heritage craft. The difficulty was embedded in historical developments and daily practice and situated somewhere between the everyday messiness of the workshop and claims about status and continuity. In 2012, Katia had not yet become one of the smart potters whose work was present in museum collections and who could showcase a string of awards from the craft fairs. She looked up to other men and women in the Olari Street. She knew that she was a marginal practitioner, on the way to becoming a heritage maker. Making pots with the right tools, decorating her studio, hiding traces of work that is non-traditional and telling romantic stories about learning pottery were all part of the texture of everyday working life and the process of adapting to and expressing a ‘heritage smart’ identity. In highlighting Katia’s dilemma, my aim is to suggest that the individual stories and actions of craftspeople cannot be fully explained through notions of subjective or existential authenticity without also giving weight to the particularities of fashioning oneself in relation to the heritage frameworks surrounding the practice. The question of how to be a heritage craftsperson, as the Horezu case illustrated, was caught up in a field of relationships and discourses. This everyday practice and negotiated pursuit of symbolic currency were not divorced from the wider historical and heritage contexts, the prescribed ways of being in this craft, but also from a range of negotiations and creative responses of the makers. Just as navigating the uncertainty of working with the fragile material, traditional potters were also learning to become ‘heritage smart’, carefully crafting themselves on the way of heritage mastery, trying to escape marginalization.

Acknowledgements My thanks go to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the ‘Memory, Identity & Material Culture: an exploration of perspectives on the past through a museum collection of Romanian artefacts’ Collaborative Doctoral Award, of which this research was part. This article owes much to the guidance of Emma Tarlo, Frances Pine, as well as Fiona Kerlogue and the staff at the Horniman Museum and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Last but not least, many thanks to all those in the Horezu community who made themselves available to answer my questions.

Notes 1

All names of the Horezu respondents have been changed and interviews have been made anonymous by request of the respondents.

2

Natsuko Akagawa and Laurajane Smith, eds., Intangible Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Lourdes Arizpe and Cristina Amescuads, eds., Anthropological Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage (Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing, 2013); Christoph Brumann and David Berliner, eds., World Heritage

168

Becoming Heritage Smart on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016); Trevor HJ Marchand, ‘Muscles, Morals and Mind: Craft Apprenticeship and the Formation of Person’, British Journal of Educational Studies 56, no. 3, (2008): 245–71; Marzia Varutti, ‘Crafting Heritage: Artisans and the Making of Indigenous Heritage in Contemporary Taiwan’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 21, no. 10 (2015): 1036– 49; Claire M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola, ‘Designs on Craft: Negotiating Artisanal Knowledge and Identity in India’, in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism, eds. Claire M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 79–98. 3

Michael Herzfeld, Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Siân Jones and Thomas Yarrow, ‘Crafting Authenticity: An Ethnography of Conservation Practice’, Journal of Material Culture 18, no. 1 (2013): 3–26; Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London: Routledge, 2013); Mira Mohsini, ‘Crafting Muslim Artisans Agency and Exclusion in India’s Urban Crafts Communities’, in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism, eds. Claire Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 239–58; Junjie Su, ‘Conceptualising the Subjective Authenticity of Intangible Cultural Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 24, no. 9 (2018): 919–37; Yujie Zhu, ‘Performing Heritage: Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 3 (2012): 1495–513.

4

Magdalena Buchczyk, ‘Heterogeneous Craft Communities: Reflections on Folk Pottery in Romania’, Journal of Museum Ethnography 28 (2015): 28–49; Magdalena Buchczyk, ‘Ethnographic Objects on the Cold War Front: The Tangled History of a London Museum Collection’, Museum Anthropology 41, no. 2 (2018): 159–72.

5

Petrică Oana, Nomination file no 00610 for Inscription on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2011): 2. ich.unesco.org/en/RL/craftsmanship-ofhorezu-ceramics-00610.

6

Teodora Konach, ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage Projects–National Policies and Strategies. The Creation of Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventories’, Journal of Cultural Management and Policy 5, no. 1 (2015): 72.

7

Petrică, Nomination file, 2.

8

Barbu Slătineanu, Ceramica românească (Bucharest: Fundaţia pentru Literatură şi Artă” Regele Carol II”, 1938), 98.

9

Paul Stahl and Paul Petrescu, Ceramica din Hurez (București: Editura de Stat Pentru Literatură şi Artă, 1958).

10 Bogdan Iancu and Catalina Tesar, ‘The Historical Role of Politics in the Constitution of the Present Romanian Market of Peasant Artefacts’, Martor: Revista Muzeului Taranului Roman, no. 13: (2008): 30–45; Vintilă Mihăilescu, ‘A New Festival for the New Man: The Socialist Market of Folk Experts during the “Singing Romania” National Festival’, in Studying Peoples in People Democracies II: Socialist Era Anthropology in South-East Europe, eds. Vintilă Mihăilescu, Ilia Iliev and Slobodan Naumović (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008), 55–80. 11 Personal communication with the curator of the former Folk Art Museum, February 2012. 12 Author interview with potter, 2012. 13 Alexandra Urdea, From Storeroom to Stage: Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2018). 14 Jones and Yarrow, Crafting Authenticity, 2013. 15 Jan Brunvand, ‘The Study of Romanian Folklore’, Journal of the Folklore Institute 9, no. 2/3 (1972): 133–61. 169

Craft and Heritage 16 Gabriela Nicolescu, ‘The Museum’s Lexis: Driving Objects into Ideas’, Journal of Material Culture 21, no. 4 (2016): 476. 17 Personal communication with the co-operative staff member, June 2012. 18 Gabriela Nicolescu, ‘From Border Fetishism to Tactical Socialism’, East Central Europe 45, no. 2-3 (2018): 285. 19 The period following the 1989 Romanian Revolution. 20 Marin Constantin, ‘The Craft-and-Market Process of Artisanship in Post-socialist Romania’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 41, no. 4 (2007): 375–34. 21 Author interview with potter, 2012. 22 Elena Bogan and Elena Ramona Roman, ‘The Horezu Ceramics – between Traditional and Commercial’ Quality–Access to Success Journal, (2013): 208–13; Jon Eugen Savulescuet et al., ‘Strategia de dezvoltare locala a microregiunii Horezu 2014 – 2020’ (GAL Microregiunea Horezu, 2016), http://www.galmicroregiuneahorezu.ro/static/docs/sdl-final.pdf. 23 Herzfeld, Body Impolitic. 24 Author interview with the ethnographer, 2012. 25 Bogan and Roman, ‘The Horezu Ceramics – between Traditional and Commercial’, 212. 26 Author interviews with potters, 2012. 27 Siân Jones ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 2 (2010): 181–203. 28 Author interviews with potters, 2012. 29 Ibid. 30 Jones and Yarrow, Crafting Authenticity, 2013. 31 Varutti, Crafting Heritage, 2015. 32 Macdonald, Memorylands, 135. 33 Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1991), 197. 34 Kristin Kuutma, ‘Concepts and Contingencies in Heritage Politics’, in Anthropological Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage, eds. Lourdes Arizpe and Cristina Amescua (Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing, 2013), 6. 35 Herzfeld, Body Impolitic, 203.

170

CHAPTER 10 POSTCOLONIAL AND GLOBAL HERITAGE NARRATIVES FROM COMMUNAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES IN DUMBARA WEAVING – SRI LANKA

Chamithri Greru and Britta Kalkreuter

Introduction Sri Lanka has long been known for its craft practices, and there is evidence of the presence of textile crafts even before the Indo-Aryan invasion of the island in 543 BC.1 As a postcolonial nation, and after the initiation of an open economy in 1977, the Sri Lankan design sector continues to contribute to global industry, especially through garment manufacturing, and its quest for internationalization has more recently continued through the creation of ‘design cities’ such as Colombo.2 Within this scenario, regional craft often contributes to global design industries, and craft and design in Sri Lanka cannot therefore be considered in isolation.3 This chapter examines colonial, postcolonial, global and local perspectives in constructing a textile heritage in Sri Lanka, namely Dumbara weaving in Talagune, Ududumbara in the Kandy district. The findings are based on ethnographic field work carried out in 2014 and are informed by archival research as well as interviews conducted between 2014 and 2017 with government and other institutional officials involved in Dumbara weaving’s preservation, promotion and development as a distinctly national and cultural craft. In this chapter we propose artisanal strategies for reappropriating, responding to and redefining these multiply constructed narratives of Dumbara weaving heritage – from colonial, post-independent, official, elite-class, design and business practice angles − in order to strategically break free from the oppression of a caste-based system, to improve one’s economic condition and to progress within one’s own communities. We identify issues relating to official heritage narratives as they become contested through identity, labour, professionalization and occupational aspects of craft and design practices. We present examples of subjectively constructed heritage that are evident in Dumbara weaving, and attempt to answer how a heritage narrative can inflect the production and marketing of a local craft in a globalized context, and lead to construction of individual heritage narratives within contemporary and innovative maker practices.

Craft and Heritage

Authenticating Kandyan craft: The highland-lowland dichotomy and hybridized cultures The Kandyan kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands was at the heart of British imperial forces constructing an idea of Ceylonese authenticity and Indigeneity based on pre-industrial and romanticized connotations of its culture.4 This was not limited to the British, but was also to some extent promoted by local orientalists such as the Anglo-Ceylonese philosopher and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy. His approach was distinct from the late colonial approach as he drew upon the British Arts and Crafts Movement in arguing for antiindustrial and anti-materialistic attitudes, with anti-imperial connotations. Coomaraswamy emphasized the importance of village life and communal practices as spiritually, morally and culturally superior to the industrial practices found in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as to craft practised in the low-lands of Sri Lanka – then Ceylon. This led to an exaggerated emphasis on Kandy, as it became seen as more authentic and Indigenous than coastal or lowland regions.5 This idealized image of local village life came to represent nationalism by way of developing a local cultural identity in Sri Lanka, and it is necessary to look at how such views are still promoted today.6 The British viewed craft practices in the lowland and coastal belt as hybridized through prolonged Portuguese and Dutch invasions and claimed they did not represent native culture.7 By locating the artistic expressions of local crafts in ‘a national golden epoch of the distant past that was now lost … [the Kandyan crafts] were clearly separated from the present, from the modern, and could therefore be safely considered as authentic relics of an ancient and spectacular indigenous culture’.8 Design historian Robin Jones asserts that this not only created a debased craft tradition in the country but also provided an opportunity for the British to consider themselves the only revivalists of declining traditions.9 This further marginalized the craft sector and dominated decisions as to what was worth safeguarding as museum pieces and invented traditions.10 One such example was British advice that the ‘Reli Kamise or shirt with frills’ should not be too similar to European dress, in a bid to retain resolutely non-Western attire for the Kandyans, while the cultural identity of the lowlandelite-class Sinhalese, on the other hand, seemed best expressed by a bourgeois hybrid garment of trousers worn under the traditional sarong.11 Ever since, questions of national identity have loomed large over Sri Lankan craft, alongside changing socio-economic preferences from tradition to modernization, from protectionism to liberalization, from rural to urban and from localization to globalization, with anthropologist Caitrin Lynch characterizing these conflicts as stemming from locally constructed perceptions of what is understood as foreign and local. Such views relate to the discussion in this present study of contemporary Dumbara weaving in terms of how various dichotomies affect the craft and design sector in Sri Lanka today, and to what extent such discourses construct the idea of heritage.12 Dumbarra textiles weaving Dumbarra textiles are an example of a weaving practice that is considered indigenous to Sri Lanka. While many of the weaving traditions show an influence from the Indian subcontinent, Dumbara weavers of the beravāyō caste were confined to the country’s 172

Postcolonial and Global Heritage Narratives

Figure 10.1  The landscape of Talagune, Sri Lanka

highlands with a community still in existence in Talagune, Ududumbara in the heartland of the Kandyan region13 (Figure 10.1). Coomaraswamy provided a detailed description of the weaving in Talagune just over one hundred years ago where, on a pit loom called an aḷuva, the weavers produced napkins or towels, clothes for men and women, aprons or bathing drawers for men called diya kacci, shawls, mats and sheets for the locals as well as for the Kandyan Art Association.14 He distinguishes the early cotton cloth of Talagune from the gold-woven Salāgamayō’s fine cloth produced in the lowlands for the nobility when he said, ‘the Sinhalese cotton was of very different quality; no muslin was made, but the best stuffs were thick, soft and heavy like the finest linen’.15 The community of practice Today, Dumbara weaving is confined to about six Buddhist families who since the 1980s have used treadle looms and machine spun yarns, which artisans welcome as time and resource efficient. Elders encourage children to continue the tradition, unlike some other craft practitioners in Sri Lanka (i.e. Winslow’s potters), but a stigma associated with the occupation has led them to change their name.16 As one weaver explained: ‘Our Ge name was yakdessange. Our father changed it because we were looked down upon. So, when we were named he omitted that’.17 However, this does not mean the weavers themselves look down on their craft as something to be abandoned in order 173

Craft and Heritage

to escape the stigma of being low caste. Instead the weavers of Talagune are proud of their traditional practice. Generational knowledge was transmitted within families and a 73-year-old master artisan indicated that the skills acquisition of this craft took place with little systematic teaching, when he remembered: ‘I learnt this from my grandfather. It is not that I purposely did it. I was just hanging around the loom and by watching you get to know how to do things.’18 Now exposed to external markets, and having changed the once informal activity into a rather professional context, weavers still recall making things for their own consumption.19 An artisan talked, for example, about how a child blanket which he made thirty years ago for his newborn still affords him fond memories of making it and a sense of appreciation of his own craft (Plate 19). He stressed that craft practices were endowed with emotional attachment as work stayed within the community.20 Although weaving still resides in the community context, we shall see what has changed dramatically is the relationship with material culture, labour practices, business relationships, the scale of production and the emerging roles of artisan-designers in a new entrepreneurial landscape. Despite many difficulties, the standard of living has improved, and in the artisan’s words: ‘We have come up a lot lately.’21

Identity issues: Traditional weavers versus newcomers Much current practice is geared towards producing commercial craft products in large quantities to meet market demands. Families with inherited weaving traditions have now formed their own production workshops that hire village women as labourers. At the time of the research, only about fifteen women were engaged for daily wages under the guidance of the craftsman. In this employment model the craftsmen keep some of their craft knowledge secret, stating the need to ‘protect our identity’ which they do not wish to pass on to these labourers. It becomes impossible for ‘mere’ makers of this guarded craft to grasp and learn the traditional techniques as it remains confined to the family. Another artisan confirmed resentment about the new makers in the village as he emphasized how this has created design copying and stealing of their traditional identity, worried as he was that ‘[the women workers will] eventually start claiming they are the ones doing Dumbara rata (patterns)’.22 This relationship between weavers and piece workers has also separated out the roles of planner and maker of product in a division of labour associated more with industrial scenarios than artisanal practices. In this situation, the weaver might at times still get involved at certain stages of the making but is mainly monitoring the production line. As in much of post-industrial making, they first design work on paper and then commission others to take the drawing into weaving. Knowledge here is thus no longer expressed and developed through making whereas in the very recent past craftsmen still had the sole responsibility for weaving the entire piece of fabric as a design evolving on the loom (Figure 10.2).

174

Postcolonial and Global Heritage Narratives

Figure 10.2  A design drawn on paper by the artisan, Chaminda, that shows the pattern and the

colour ways

These fragmented relationships have led to some piece workers asking government authorities to train them, and the National Craft Council of Sri Lanka went on to set up a now defunct master-apprenticeship scheme where some traditional weavers somewhat controversially taught incomers, again raising concerns about identity through craft, as weavers worry: ‘We are not saying this on pure selfishness or in a narrow mind. We are the ones who must protect it. What will happen when everybody starts practicing it?’.23 The artisans’ insistence here on meaning to protect their identity and rights is justified by Roy who, referring to Indian case studies, says: When products rich in craftsmanship were commercialized, the intellectual property embodied in these goods acquired market value. And yet neither the power of a patron nor legal rights protect such property. The pervasive threat of ‘free riding,’ in this case the threat of being copied without credit rather than some form of primal emotion, included countless masters to hide knowledge.24 The picture of Dumbara weavers guarding their craft knowledge, right up to the present day, resonates with Tirthankar Roy’s observation of the Indian craft scene at the turn of the nineteenth century, with its universal struggle to streamline into innovation.25 How Dumbara weavers adapt individually and collectively, and what particular artisanal strategies they come up with are illustrated in various craft and design meeting points in the following section. 175

Craft and Heritage

Design interventions Outsiders taking an interest in Dumbara weaving: The weaver’s account Communication is of interest when considering how Dumbara weavers mediate with external buyers and designers, and how they negotiate their heritage craft practices. Families are clearly allied to different buyers and designers whom they appreciate as long-term partners, expressing heartfelt gratitude towards them. The master artisan father of the Gunapala family has three sons and one daughter involved in weaving as full-time weavers and businessmen. He reminisced: We were doing only the traditional designs back in the days, and then [a certain] designer approached us [in the 1990s]. He introduced us to the new designs. He gives us the design he wants to do and we follow it … We were able to get inspired from those designs and make our own to take a new path. His son Chaminda added; [The designer] sir is the one who introduced us to modern designs … It was his designs that compelled us [a second generation] to join weaving as well … He took our products, our name and our identity to a global scale. We owe him a lot for that. The Sumanapala family started producing for a renowned art gallery and shop in Colombo in the late 1980s, and its head explains how the business is sustained on the basis of a mutual understanding between the artisan and the retailer: I met the owner of the shop on a roadside … he asked me if they can find any Dumbara mats [referring to a mat weaving community in the Kandyan region]. I said I have only textiles. Those days I was working on some pieces for Laksala [the state souvenir shop]. I was doing only plain cloths those days. He told me these are rubbish, as they are not authentic Dumbara designs. I then explained to him that it’s too expensive to make the original pieces, and nobody wants to buy them in the local village market. I showed them the blanket I made for my son. Then they were content and said this was what they were looking for, the authentic Dumbara rata (patterns) and he gave me an order immediately. That’s how we started working. These comments reveal how artisans negotiate with designers and buyers, and how the idea of authenticity, traditionalism and modernity is constructed within these relationships. This indicates how businesses can authenticate traditional work, following a revival scheme that takes its cue from the past and places such work within an unbroken tradition that revolves around a ‘salvage paradigm’ and the ‘regional elite’s hypostatization’, which we shall examine in more detail later.26It is of note also that the

176

Postcolonial and Global Heritage Narratives

safeguarding of skills which was central with regards to piece workers does not seem to feature highly when designers or buyers are concerned, as the weavers here openly acknowledge the incomers’ contribution to an evolving weave tradition. So while on the one hand they profess to draw inspiration from such modern designs, and add them to their repertoire, on the other hand the Gunapala weavers point out that what they produce for the designer is not traditional Dumbara rata, they are modern designs instead. Gunapala’s son Kamal confirmed, ‘We have our traditional art within us, so whenever someone asks us to design something based on traditional we can always do those’.27 In Talagune, artisans are also regularly approached by designers and design students on a one-off basis. Summarizing the village’s reaction to this scenario, one artisan said, ‘we direct them to a particular family if we are busy,’ implying that such relationships are regarded as inferior to long-term design and business links. Design interventions, whether long-term or one-off, have shaped and altered the repertoire of Dumbara weaving as well as the role of the emerging artisan-design-entrepreneur, one of whom said: I usually get inspirations from the previous work I have produced. Most of the time I combine those with new ideas that come to my mind. As soon as something comes to my mind, now I have made a habit to draw on a piece of paper, and then I add colors and give it to the workers to produce it.28 Aiming for such an innovation-driven economic model might lead to precarious outcomes. Firstly, as in contrast to the traditional values and meanings associated with these craft design interventions via international designers, external buyers and now design-minded artisans have delimited the constraints in terms of visual language and techniques. Designs do not necessarily remain linked to evolving communities, but instead answer to planned obsolescence in a global market where differentiation through exclusivity and novelty is key. Secondly, when tradition as the realm of the artisan needs to be revived and directed by design and the global market, it is ‘pervasiveness of the past’ within which that design process mitigates the loss of heritage, and it is now the designer, or the buyer who authoritatively speaks about the loss, the revival and the capacity to contemporize heritage in this scenario.29This is evident when the designers of the London College of Fashion wearable technology project describe the use of Dumbara weaving in their massaging shoe. Such vision is said to have started on the basis of rejuvenate[ing] Sri Lankan artisanal fabrics … to increase sales and at the same time … to update these textiles to make them more attractive to a contemporary consumer … [This is due to] the diminishing consumer demand for Sri Lankan indigenous fabrics … [and] the loss of know-how and skills in traditional fabric production, the loss of heritage and the limited capacity for artisans to provide for their families and sustain a fair standard of living.30 177

Craft and Heritage

Figure 10.3  An old piece of

work, said to be more than 100 years old, with traditional motifs

With traditional and modern pieces frequently referred to by artisans, how they and others construct the idea of Dumbara heritage is worthy of further discussion (Figures 10.3 and Plate 20).

Constructing Dumbara’s weaving heritage The production of authenticity When interviewed, the artisans described Dumbara weaving from several different angles. The most trusted source, for them, is Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalese Art book, which some artisans even show to visitors. While oral mythologies on the Dumbara heritage persist, this documented history lends credibility and importance. Similarly, objects displayed in the Kandyan museum and in Colombo’s archives are important to these artisans as they furnish their heritage with historic evidence, to be shown to visitors, buyers and educational institutes in search of authentic textile craft. One artisan remembered that such history was of no value some forty years ago as ‘to be honest, we were not so keen to learn about the history of the craft earlier. We never wanted to ask it from our grandfathers either’.31 178

Postcolonial and Global Heritage Narratives

Similarly, the abandoned pit loom tradition has now been deemed worthy of revival, and two families said they wanted to build a loom as a display unit for interested visitors to Talagune. Another artisan already maintains a pit loom, but only sets it up when visitors ask him to. Even though the pit loom is of no value in commercial terms, for educational and marketing purposes the revival of abandoned practices is seen to have marketing capital, as it contributes to the idea of imagined authenticity and persistence of heritage practices. Artisans’ response to the national and international concerns of handicraft Another occasion for considering age-old techniques is when artisans apply for national craftsmanship awards and exhibitions. At the time of our visit, a master artisan had recently won a lifetime achievement award from the government for services to arts and crafts, several fellow villagers had gained awards from the National Craft Council, and a UNESCO Award of excellence for handicraft was attached to a wall hanging from the year 2004.32 While appreciative of the honour and exposure of such awards and exhibitions, scepticism about the selection process exists amongst artisans: I once submitted two pieces to an exhibition. One was strictly based on traditional Dumbara rata (pattern) and the other was new designs. But in the final event, I received the first place for the new design and not for the traditional one. Even these people who judge don’t know what real Dumbara rata is. The statement reveals the perception that such competitions should honour ‘authentic’ or historic craft rather than innovative pieces, as the National Craft Council encourages ‘artisans to continue their tradition’ along with ‘excellence in work, and contribut[ion] to the community’.33 Interestingly, an interview conducted in October 2017 with one of the panel judges revealed that the selection committee consists mostly of academic and museum staff (almost 90 per cent), and favours such ‘authentic’ or historic crafts. For example, at the national Shilpi Exhibition of the National Craft Council, the evaluation criteria place emphasis on ‘diminishing craft practices’, where special jury awards are presented as a way to encourage such practices in the future while other terms used include ‘Identity and Unique’, ‘Concept and Meaning’, ‘Fascinating and Taste’, ‘Values’, ‘Utility’, ‘Skills/Craftsmanship’ and ‘Holistic Value’. According to Bundgaard such discourses select particular artistic traditions that are rooted in the past, promoting pure artisanship.34 In anthropologist Helle Bundgaard’s terms ‘it is a regional elite’s hypostatization of actual pragmatic choices and practices of local craftspeople … [with] the desire to emphasize the closeness of contemporary production with an unbroken tradition’ that gets exhibited in national exhibitions.35 In 2007, many Dumbara weavers had been invited to reproduce pieces from the archives to be displayed alongside contemporary pieces at the SAARC Museum of Textiles and Handicraft in New Delhi (December 2007 to March 2008).36 The Textiles Traditions of South Asia – Past and Present exhibition was convened by a curatorial team 179

Craft and Heritage

led by Professor Joytindra Jain and was envisaged to send ‘a representative collection’ of textiles tradition of both ‘museum quality pieces’ and examples of ‘living traditions’, including a live craft demonstration.37 The Sri Lankan authorities selected Dumbara textiles to represent Sri Lankan identity (amongst a few other crafts) and included an archival piece, a reproduction of a nineteenth-century textiles piece (interestingly the artisan inserted his name and place of production in Sinhala on the border of the textile), and a contemporary piece that emulated a designer’s piece but was said to be inspired by the artisan’s ‘own environment’. When official heritage narratives support a particular image for museum-worthy pieces in this way, promoting an authentic past and living traditions that constitute rather contemporary adaptations – we witness how artisans can quickly adapt to requirements and strategically promote their identity and craftwork to pursue their own goals (whether collective or individual) for an international audience. These examples also highlight the part played by international and national heritage institutions in shaping the social process of production, evaluation and reception of craftwork where those in power legitimize how and what is recognized as authentic craft. Outsider’s evaluation of Dumbara weaving The (re-)construction of Dumbara heritage also takes place well beyond village level, when government officers, museum and exhibition curators, designers, buyers, retailers, magazines and newspapers describe Dumbara craft practice. Examples include the craft described as having been ‘[r]evived by Dominic Sansoni in the early 1980s’ or when the work of Sinhala weavers is described as ‘using traditional Arabic designs that the family’s been using since the seventeenth century’, without the artisans ever making that non-local connection.38 Those descriptions present a rather academic and authorized view of Dumbara weaving, and they cater to a romanticized vision of an isolated village effort in the idyllic and homogeneous Kandyan region, as expressed 100 years ago by Coomaraswamy. Exploiting that same idealized connotation, contemporary designers have included Dumbara weaving to promote fashions as ethical.39 In addition, government officers believe themselves to be reviving tradition when they introduce upgraded equipment (a spinning wheel with an electric motor) or new product developments, and when they conduct training classes for villagers under master-apprentice schemes. In these situations, the construction of Dumbara heritage is keenly taken on by outside agencies wishing to develop and revive the craft for economic reasons. In doing so they simultaneously situate it as outdated, thus needing revival if artisans are to continue practising it as an economically worthwhile pursuit, while treating its historic credentials as a differentiating commodity for collaborating designers and retailers. It is becoming evident that Dumbara weaving is not defined just by its practitioners, but that it is a collaborative construct of various interested parties, with particular authority enjoyed not just by those with access to markets, but those in control of development funds and agendas. The parameters of government officials determining what constitutes traditional and modern craft in this scenario may well 180

Postcolonial and Global Heritage Narratives

be different from the most pressing needs of craftsmen, a phenomenon not unique to Dumbara craft as it has been observed elsewhere in Asia.40 The multiple construction of Dumbara weaving heritage Our observations showed that weavers considered past, present and future needs to make opportunistic and strategic case-by-case choices in their Dumbara practice. This means one cannot determine what the authentic Dumbara textile may look like, as the craft is subjectively constructed for different purposes for (and by) different groups and individuals: Coomaraswamy’s nostalgic classifications of Dumbara weaving of the Kandyan region are used by weavers mainly as evidence to describe their products as being of a heritage that certain audiences desire. In our interviews, government officials also pointed repeatedly towards Coomaraswamy’s book to describe traditional craft and saw an important role for the state as the paternal protector of the craft sector, while drawing attention to the economic contribution and success of craft activity. This is echoed at policy level not just in the National Design Centre (NDC) but also the National Craft Council (NCC), the two main and allied institutions of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, where innovation is championed as much as the ambition to achieve a ‘nurturing and preserving [of] Traditional Handicrafts for their sustainable existence’.41 Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber describe similar discursive moves, where ‘the very work that serves to naturalize also indexes the rupture it seeks to cover over … [by ways of allowing] private capital [to move] into the domains that the state has relinquished,’ made possible by design mediations.42

Conclusion When Chandima Daskon observed the Talagune weaving community in her 2007–2009 study, she summed up that its weavers had shown resilience towards social, economic and political vulnerabilities of national and global trends, for they had used their cultural traditions as a means and a resource to build livelihood strategies. Although adaptive systems like cultural traditions provide sustainability goals for communities, Daskon’s observation and portrayal of village life showed active resistance to cultural changes.43 She maintained that such adaptations had not altered the ‘traditional way of life’, nevertheless acknowledging traditions as ‘an ongoing, dynamic and natural process’.44 In contrast, our investigations into Dumbara weaving in colonial, postcolonial and contemporary globalized contexts lead us to conclude not only that cultural traditions provide adaptive strategies, but also that tradition’s transformative, adaptive and evolving nature actively supports livelihoods.45 What precisely to invoke as heritage here becomes a choice that is dependent on circumstances, on whether to promote, ignore or alter traditional practices, whether to maintain kinship structures or abandon egalitarian and communitarian values to an extent: in summary, the choice is dependent on what is at stake. Daskon’s observations of a village culture that is self-sufficient has strong family 181

Craft and Heritage

ties and ancestral connectivity aligned with Buddhist precepts while achieving progress, happiness and prosperity could not be wholly confirmed in our observations of a rather contested domain where craft is not a utopia but a heterotopia as identified in other contexts by Soumhya Venkatesan and Greru and Kalkreuter.46 By looking at how heritage practices alter personal presentations and social lives of Dumbara weavers, i.e. how heritage narratives and material cultures are changing, and what shape the new constructions take, we have managed to show how heritage becomes a multi-construct by both grassroots activities and the official, or authorized, narratives. These latter might favour a ‘salvage paradigm’ or ‘elite hypostatization’, adding a nostalgic note and an abstraction to the pragmatic choices artisans make.47 Our analysis of Dumbara weaving illustrates how such discourses still carry colonial and modernistic views about heritage, and design, which take their cue mainly from a Western culturally elitist point of view, where the designer rhetoric appears to hold certain cosmopolitan ideals of a creative class – especially with their ability to initiate revival efforts for declining crafts.48 We do not refute design’s capability in such interventions to positively shape the heritage narrative and craft development discourse, instead we indicate the potential that exists to work towards decolonizing design and heritage by establishing a living link with local ethics, to accommodate the local within innovation and the global in order to more strongly re-present the vernacular in contemporary Sri Lankan craft. Given a context in which cultural heritage operates as a ‘construct’ and a ‘practice’, it seems timely that stakeholders from development officials via designers to businesses understand heritage not as an ‘artificial state of preservation’, but rather a ‘continuing process of self-realization’, that places emphasis on ‘masters’ and not on ‘masterpiece’.49

Notes 1

E. Pararajasingham, Textiles History of Sri Lanka: From Ancient Times to New Millennium (Colombo: Paranan Associate Pvt. Ltd., 2006).

2

Caitrin Lynch, Juki Girls, Good Girls (New York: Cornell University Press, 2007); Sumith Gopura et al., ‘Fashion Education in Sri Lanka: The Nexus between Formal and Informal Education’, International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 12, no. 1 (2018): 23–34; Paul L. Knox, Cities and Design (Oxon: Routledge, 2011).

3

D. G. K. Dissanayake, Srimala Perera, and Thushari Wanniarachchi, ‘Sustainable and Ethical Manufacturing: A Case Study from Handloom Industry’, Textiles and Clothing Sustainability 3, no. 2 (2017): 1–11.

4

Robin Jones, ‘British Interventions in the Traditional Crafts of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), C. 1850–1930’, The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 3 (2008): 383–404.

5

Jones, ‘British Interventions’, 383–404; Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

6

James Brow, ‘Utopia’s New-Found Space: Images of the Village Community in the Early Writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy’, Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 01 (1999): 67–86.

7

Jones, ‘British Interventions’, 383–404.

8

Ibid., 387–8.

182

Postcolonial and Global Heritage Narratives 9 Ibid. 10 Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (London: Hurst and Company, 2006). 11 Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age, 62; Anoma Pieris, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser under the Cloth (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 7–8. 12 Deborah Winslow, ‘Pottery, Progress, and Structural Adjustments in a Sri Lankan Village’, Economic Development and Cultural Change 44, no. 4 (1996): 701–33; Lynch, Juki Girls, Good Girls. 13 Sirinimal Lakdusinghe, ‘Our Ancestors Who Exported Textiles’, Vidura, National Science Foundation 19, no. 1 (1997): 20–4; Ananda Coomaraswamy, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden: Essex House press, 1908). 14 Ibid., 233–4. 15 Another weaving caste – according to Coomaraswamy, the weavers were South Indian descendants and were disfavoured by the Kandyan kings, where they settled on the Southcoast of Sri Lanka as cinnamon peelers and eventually were employed by the Portuguese and Dutch. See Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon (London and Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1913). 16 Winslow, Pottery, Progress, and Structural Adjustments, 722. 17 Chaminda, interviewed by Chamithri Greru, 14 September 2014. House or family name in Sri Lanka that is associated with caste system. The name of the village is unchanged; all persons’ names are pseudonyms. 18 Gunapala, interviewed by Chamithri Greru, 14 September 2014. 19 Adopting to external markets and new technology is viewed sanguinely, and is regarded as a common phenomenon from as early as the twentieth century in South Asia. See Tirthankar Roy, ‘Out of Tradition: Master Artisans and Economic Change in Colonial India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 4 (2007): 963–91. 20 Sumanapala, interviewed by Chamithri Greru, 15 September 2014. 21 Ibid. 22 Chaminda. 23 Ibid. 24 Roy, ‘Out of Tradition’, 974–5. 25 Ibid. 26 Helle Bundgaard, Indian Art Worlds in Contention: Local, Regional and National Discourses on Orissan Patta Paintings (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 39–40. 27 Kamal, interviewed by Chamithri Greru, 14 September 2014. 28 Chaminda. 29 Bundgaard, Indian Art Worlds in Contention, 39; Alicia Ory DeNicola and Lane DeNicola, ‘Rescue and Redemption: Design Schools, Traditional Craft and the Nation-State in Contemporary India’, Cultural Studies 26, no. 6 (2012): 787–813; Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson- Weber, ‘Designs on Craft: Negotiations, Artisanal Knowledge and Identity in India’, in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization and Capitalism, eds. Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 30 Chitra Buckley and Thushara Sabreen, ‘The Happy Feet Wearable Fashion Project: Co Creation and Collaboration’, in Advanced Fashion Technology and Operations Management, ed. A. Vecchi (Hershey PA: IGI Global, 2017), 121. 183

Craft and Heritage 31 Kamal. 32 UNESCO, Unesco Country Programming Document for Sri Lanka 2013-2017 (New Delhi: UNESCO, 2013). 33 National Craft Council, ‘Vision and Mission of the National Craft Council-2013’, accessed 15 April 2018. 34 Bundgaard, Indian Art Worlds in Contention. 35 Ibid., 40. 36 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. 37 Describing Jain, a prominent Indian cultural historian and museologist, Greenough says that while Jain was the director of the Indian craft museum in New Delhi, he promoted live craft demonstrations by inviting artisans to display their skills and work for a month at the museum. However, Greenough also points out a strict preservationist dimension in Jain’s approach to traditional craft, as he was sceptical about the fusion of craft work, and thus recommended practising the craft in its traditional form without ‘uproot[ing]’ the craftsman or ‘spoil[ing]’ their techniques and without ‘alter[ing] their attitudes towards sales’, which otherwise he believed would lead to ‘a dangerous outcome’. Jain was also invited to advocate the anthropological importance of craft documentation for students at the National Institute of Design at the inception of its textiles course in 1970s. See Paul Greenough, ‘Nation, Economy and Tradition Displayed: The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi’, in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 238; National Handicraft & Handlooms Museum, Textiles Tradition of South Asia (Past and Present) – An Exhibition of Textiles from SAARC Countries, edited by National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum (New Delhi: Ministry of Textiles, Government of India, 2008). 38 Barefoot, ‘Barefoot Crafts’, Barefoot, accessed 23 May 2017; The Island, ‘Barefoot Celebrates Fifty Years’, The Island Online, accessed 3 May 2017. 39 The Sunday Leader, ‘Dressing up for Sldf Fashion Awards’, The Sunday Leader, accessed 5 June 2017. 40 Bundgaard, Indian Art Worlds in Contention. 41 National Craft Council, Vision and Mission, 2013. 42 DeNicola and Wilkinson-Weber, Designs on Craft, 96–7. 43 Chandima Daskon, ‘Cultural Resilience – The Roles of Cultural Traditions in Sustaining Rural Livelihoods: A Case Study from Rural Kandyan Villages in Central Sri Lanka’, Sustainability 2, no. 4 (2010): 1080–100; Chandima Daskon and Tony Binns, ‘Culture, Tradition and Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Exploring the Culture–Development Interface in Kandy, Sri Lanka’, Community Development Journal 45, no. 4 (2010): 494–517. 44 Daskon, ‘Cultural Resilience’, 1094. 45 Marzia Varutti, ‘Crafting Heritage: Artisans and the Making of Indigenous Heritage in Contemporary Taiwan’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 21, no. 10 (2015): 1036–49. 46 Chandima Daskon, ‘Significance of Cultural Values in Securing Asset Portfolios of Rural Communities’, Sri Lanka Journal of Social Science 38, no. 1 (2015): 43; Daskon, ‘Cultural Resilience’, 1084. For a parallel account concerning the contested nature of artisanal work in India, see Bundgaard’s Indian Art Worlds in Contention. As she says, harmonious, co-operative spirit has little to do with village life, as competition has emerged as a main characteristic there. See also Soumhya Venkatesan, Craft Matters: Artisan, Development and the Indian Nation (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009); Venkatesan, Craft Matters.

184

Postcolonial and Global Heritage Narratives 47 Bundgaard, Indian Art Worlds in Contention. 48 See Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Oxon: Routledge, 2006); Tony Fry, ‘Design for/by the Global South’, Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (2017): 3–37; Arturo Escobar, ‘Response: Design for/by [and from] the Global South’, Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (2017): 39–49; Elizabeth (Dori)Tunstall, ‘Cultural Respect, Not Social Responsibility: The Seven Principles of Design Anthropology’, in Developing Citizen Designers, ed. Elizabeth Resnick (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Elizabeth (Dori)Tunstall, ‘Decolonizing Design Innovation: Design Anthropology, Critical Anthropology and Indigenous Knowledge’, in Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, eds. Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 49 Susan Pearce, ‘The Construction and Analysis of the Cultural Heritage: Some Thoughts’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 4, no. 1 (1998): 9; Barbara Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett, ‘Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production’, Museum International 56, no. 1–2 (2004): 53.

185

186

SECTION III COLLECTIONS AND CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

Susan Surette and Elaine Cheasley Paterson

Both heritage and craft are supported by institutional structures that validate public and private collections. Whether these institutions are international, such as the UNESCO Heritage Site and Intangible Cultural Heritage designations or the World Craft Council’s craft city programme, national, such as English Heritage or national Folk Museums, or more regional, such as smaller public and private specialty museums, all have a role to play in supporting people’s heritages. Such organizations are spaces around which swirl competitions for authorizing the value of people’s cultures and histories through their object collections and craft performances. Competitions for recognition often involve confronting cultural and social marginalization based on gendered, classist and ethnic production and the use and inclusion in collections signal recognition for the objects, makers and collectors. These five chapters benefit from critical heritage scholarship aimed at acknowledging the complexity of ethnographic concerns for notions of authenticity, effects of tourism and global marketing, historical memory and political agency and performance, among others. They also engage in meaningful ways to unpack the close ties of craft to gender, skill, tradition, community, commodity and nostalgia. By purposefully drawing together the ongoing and intertwined legacies of craft and heritage, the authors infuse the cultural sites and institutions under consideration with dynamism, continued relevance and social engagement. The chapters in this section argue for the vitality of heritage and craft as living, moving discourses constantly subject to change. They suggest ways institutions have expanded their remit beyond preservation and collection to pedagogy and social activism, whether through engaging with critical heritage ideas and funding structures to shift a site’s narrative or by exhibitions that activate a site’s heritage. In ‘Canadian women china painters: Artists and amateurs’, Rachel Gotlieb applies Susan Pearce’s notion of ‘domestic heritage’ to women china painters in Victorian Canada. Focusing on a donation to the Gardiner Museum, an institution with a longstanding emphasis on ceramic ‘art’, her recuperative project recognizes how the politics of gender are entwined with marked shifts in re-evaluating social and material histories in curatorial and museum practices, even while pointing out how far this still needs to go. Elaine Cheasley Paterson also argues for institutional transformation in ‘Crafting civic engagement? How heritage lottery funding reframed Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village’ by carefully tracking how the Watts Gallery changed its curatorial emphasis from easel painting to ceramics and other decorative arts and crafts in response to funding opportunities offered through the UK’s National Heritage Lottery. Within the context of increased recognition of women’s contribution to the arts and crafts, the importance of

Craft and Heritage

community economic development and changing British demographics, she suggests enhanced engagement strategies to better serve its contemporary clientele. Maris Gillette’s chapter, ‘Craft as performance in China’s porcelain heritage capital’, examines how the new phenomenon of the ‘virtuoso performance’ of traditional porcelainmaking rests uneasily with the city’s historic industrial porcelain production, even while thoroughly integrated into the tourist industry. Focusing on the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum and the Sanbao International Ceramic Art Institute, Gillette traces the political and economic decisions in China that have affected the social and monetary situations of Jingdezhen potters whose responses involved a reskilling that ultimately highlighted the return of expert handcraftsmanship. In ‘Craft narratives from heritage sites in Uganda’, Maureen Muwanga Senoga uses her case study of the Kasubi Royal Tombs of the Baganda to emphasize how this architectural treasure is ultimately connected to wide-ranging heritage approaches through awareness of the sustainability of raw materials, skilled craftwork and informal transmission of cultural knowledge by means of oral histories. Her account of mat, basket and pottery-making for the royal compound recognizes how gendered and clan-based tasks are woven into intergenerational knowledge transmission. Juliette MacDonald’s chapter, ‘Hunting for lost crafts: The contemporary value of intangible cultural heritage in Scotland’, discusses the various ways contemporary craftspeople accessed collections of the Inverness Museum & Art Gallery and the Highland Folk Museum to respond to their Scottish tangible and intangible heritage in two exhibitions, Hunting for Lost Crafts and Naked Craft. She applies the term ‘taskscapes’ to draw out connections among the museum collections to historic and contemporary local land use and economic and environmental concerns. Macdonald argues, as do others in this volume, for recognition of craft as a social connector.

188

CHAPTER 11 CANADIAN WOMEN CHINA PAINTERS: ARTISTS AND AMATEURS

Rachel Gotlieb

The New York Times, covering the launch of the state china pattern designed by Michelle Obama, quipped, ‘Michelle Obama may be the first first lady whose nail polish matched her White House china service’.1 The article went on to report that she, like the American first ladies before her, enjoyed the privilege of ‘designing’ a state china pattern during her tenure. According to the article, Obama’s choice of ‘Kailua Blue turquoise’ for the banded border, did not reference her own personal history but rather that of her husband’s because the colour is meant to evoke the blue waters of President’s home state, Hawaii. The convention of the first lady being directly involved with the design and selection of the presidential service began with Mary Todd Lincoln in 1861.2 The custom of middle- and upper-class women, even those reaching the lofty heights of first lady, embedding their personal and family narratives in china decoration has a long history dating back several centuries and reinforces the well-entrenched bias that china and women have a symbiotic connection.3 Remarkably this thinking revealed in the New York Times still holds true today. Scholarship devoted to women designing ceramics and china painting – the latter ranks lower in status among collectors and academics – is a recent development.4 As English Professor Talia Schaffer points out, this neglect of women’s hobby-crafts in academia reaches back to the Victorian era, if not earlier, and reflects the overshadowing and ostracizing of the Arts and Crafts movement by modernist reformers who viewed women’s handicrafts with disdain, believing they demonstrated bad taste bordering on kitsch.5 Contempt for handicraft did not go unnoticed at the time by experts: HenriettaBarclay Paist asked in her 1916 foreword on the subject: ‘Why has China Painting been so long the “Cinderella of Art?”’6 While the significance of china painting executed by women in Britain and in the United States is now being situated within the larger context of social histories and cultural heritage, in Canada the subject of china painting is still under-researched and largely ignored by academics and museum curators. Pioneer settler artist Anne Langton, Nova Scotia teacher Alice Egan Hagen and the Canadian Historical Dinner Service are noted exceptions.7 The lack is unfortunate since I argue that china-decorating served as an effective tool of self-representation for Canadian women to assert identity, individuality and independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. China painting is largely women’s heritage.

Craft and Heritage

Marginalization of historical china painting may be attributed to the problem that the craft is often deemed domestic heritage rather than fine art heritage within curatorial practice. Museum studies scholar Susan Pearce identifies ‘domestic heritage’ as smallerscale production descended between individuals and family members. According to Pearce, ‘the smaller scales have tended to have less effort lavished on their capacity to create cultural heritage’.8 This is certainly the case regarding china painting in museums across Canada: few collect it and those that do rarely exhibit it or display it on their website, in contrast to fine art.9 I argue that in Canada the absence of cultural ‘work’ activities in institutional curatorship and collecting has contributed to these at once complex and simple reasons hindering the documentation and interpretation of the smaller-scale domestic heritage of china painting.10 Business professor Fiona Cheetham argues that such a network is critical for objects to be accepted as cultural heritage in museum practice. The ‘moment of problematization’ occurs in the lack of work by institutions. Put another way, trying to uncover the network of collecting china painting in Canada helps to understand why its legacy is neglected.11 This chapter discusses how and why Canadian women at the turn of the last century chose to express themselves through the art of porcelain painting by examining: a Dish with Dogwood Flowers, decorated by Mary Ella Dignam (1857–1930) in 1891 (Plate 21); and a small and stylized art nouveau jug painted by Florence Helena McGillivray (1864–1938) in 1909 (Plate 22). The Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada, acquired these objects in 2011 and 2014, respectively, via donation. Both these acts – the donation and acceptance – perhaps mark a turn through which museums like the Gardiner, which focuses on ceramic art (as opposed to social histories and material culture), are recognizing the importance of contributions to Canadian heritage by women artists who have been restricted to marginal status. I begin with a brief summary on the historical practice of china painting and then turn to the better-known examples in Canada to investigate why they have entered the canon of Canadian art history, while works by other makers have not. This overview provides context for the case studies of the Dignam and McGillivray pieces and the social networks in which they existed, where I contend they operate as signifiers of artistic selfexpression and family traditions (gifted from one family member to another) despite their perceived marginal status and, thereby, contribute to cultural heritage that should be more fully integrated in museum collecting and exhibiting practices.

China painting The act of china-decorating typically involves tracing a pencil outline often copied from a pattern onto a fired blank tile, dish, cup or pot of some kind, and then painting with overglaze enamels made of minerals that are combined with a powdered flux and blended with oils. Once the hand-painting is complete, the china is fired again in a kiln at low temperatures to fuse the pattern permanently on the surface. The number of firings is commonly three; however, this depends upon the complexity of the colour scheme and the use of accent gilding, which would be added last.12 190

Canadian Women China Painters

China painting by middle- and upper-class women (and sometimes men) originated in late-eighteenth-century Europe and continued to expand both as a profession and as a hobby, flourishing in Britain and America between 1880 and 1920 during ‘china mania’, the nickname describing the fashion to collect blue and white porcelain and art pottery.13 China painting, like watercolour painting, was considered respectable employment for British or North American genteel women (especially for unmarried women in need of income), since it was often executed in the home. At the same time, the practice of china painting outside the home and done in art studios of commercial potteries was also viewed as acceptable work. An 1888 article headlined, ‘Women at Work’, for Lady’s Pictorial (a magazine targeted to English domestic women) explained why: this is a ‘pretty industry’ and ‘the ladies and young girls who are hired are rarely drawn from the lower classes, so that personal refinement is the rule’.14 These decorators were, in the Coventry Patmore sense of the word, ‘angels’ who have left the house but who have still maintained their respectability.15 The Lady’s Pictorial author admitted that, ‘a girl should expect, an income of 1£ a week – not much, but earned in a peculiarly pleasant manner, and without the slightest suspicion of anything injurious to the physique of ever so delicate a woman’.16 Minton’s Art Pottery in Kensington Gore that opened in 1870 and Doulton’s Lambeth Art Pottery, which opened the following year, as well as Arts and Crafts potteries, advanced the practice by their adoption of ‘art manufacturing’, entailing setting up studios and teaching women, both professionals and amateurs, to paint and incise forms often designed by men. Within the art manufactories, the women’s work was also mainly supervised by men. The writer and potter George Rhead, who worked at Minton’s South Kensington Art Pottery, recollected that the studio provided employment for ‘lady students’, adding that ‘this was one of the numerous schemes which were mooted at the time for the employment of the middle and upper middle classes’.17 Rhead’s observation reveals the new status of British women attending art and design classes at the numerous regional schools opened by Henry Cole. Art historians Janice Helland and Bridget Elliot have noted ‘access to education in public institutions eroded the nineteenth-century category “amateur” artist and, along with increased opportunities for earning money, meant that women might obtain visibility as “professionals”’.18 Typically the distinction between dilettante and professional depended upon whether training was completed at a public institution or privately at home, and whether it was done as an unpaid hobby or for remuneration and often this was related to class. It is no coincidence, then, that both Minton and Lambeth were affiliated with nearby art schools, South Kensington National Art Training School and the Lambeth School of Art, respectively.19 Craft historian Stephen Knott adds that the commercial production of art tools and materials and increased how-to instruction manuals in magazines and books also popularized domestic handicraft as hobby for the leisure class.20 In addition to pottery manufacturers, ‘china agents’ and retailers in Britain and America played an active role promoting china-painting instruction classes and 191

Craft and Heritage

distributing the necessary materials and technologies to women amateurs. They believed it would increase the consumption and, therefore, the commercial sales of their art pottery and fine china.21 In sum, china painting, facilitated by the industry itself, served a double purpose – both promoting a leisure activity for amateurs that could develop into suitable professional pursuits and expanding the marketplace for fine china and art pottery. The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in the United States fuelled the popularity of art pottery and china clubs, which led to increased china instruction especially across the northeast and southern states. As documented by Wendy Kaplan and other scholars, china painting had profound consequences for women’s emancipation in these regions, creating opportunities for teaching at schools or running potteries. Two notable innovators in the field were Maria Longworth who founded Rookwood Art Pottery in Cincinnati in the 1880s and Syracuse-based Adelaide Alsop Robineau, who began as a china painter, then founded with her husband in 1899 Keramic Studio magazine, a leading journal on the handicraft. She became an esteemed art potter in her own right, known for delicate carving and incising on porcelain.22 However, the story of Canadian women china painters fared a different fate from those in Britain and the United States, possibly because Canada lacked (as it does today) a sustainable ceramic industry and, therefore, inhibited paintresses and china decorators from ‘rising’ to the level of designers or to set up their own studios and advance to become professional potters. Yet there is a danger in this type of scholarship of ‘skimming the topic of china painting in the ceramic histories, judging it an inconsequential “artistic field”, important solely for its eventual harvest of art potters’, as Cynthia Brandimante observes about American china painting.23 And therein lies the danger: the heroizing of some paintresses and the occluding of others. Such heroizing can be seen in the case of Alice Hagen, nee Egan, of Nova Scotia, Canada who made her public debut in 1897, painting twelve bird game plates copied from John James Audubon designs for the Canadian Historical Dinner Service. She receives considerable attention today due to the fact that she not only studied ceramics with Adelaide Alsop Robineau in New York but also and more importantly, she, like many of her American contemporaries, chose to abandon china painting to become a studio potter and throw her own pots on the wheel using local clays rather than utilizing imported blanks to decorate.24 Egan Hagen’s transformation in the 1930s from decorator to potter ensured that she was written into recent art and craft history and that her artistic heritage was preserved because her work is presented in museum exhibitions. For example, Artists, Architecture & Artisans: Canadian Art 1890–1918, organized by the National Gallery of Canada in 2013, included her china painting and no others, even though china painters Lily Osman Adams, Louise Couen and Juliet Howson are briefly discussed in the catalogue.25 Similarly, The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artists, co-presented by the Agnes Etherington Gallery and the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2015, featured only Alice Egan Hagen, perpetuating practices of selective occlusion. 192

Canadian Women China Painters

Mary Ella Dignam: China painting and Dish with Dogwood Flowers Mary Ella Dignam was a formidable presence in the promotion of Arts and Crafts in Canada, sometimes referred to as the ‘dean of Women’s Arts’ and won a Jubilee Medal in 1936 for her contribution26 (Figure 11.1). The Canadian Woman Artists History Initiative database ably documents her legacy as a women’s art activist – organizer, leader, patron, teacher and writer, and these achievements probably outweigh her contribution as an artist and craftsperson.27 Art critic Graham McInness, in his obituary on Dignam, commented that ‘Mrs. Dignam was not – nor did she pretend to be – an outstanding painter; she was a sincere amateur’.28 Damning with faint praise indeed, particularly since Dignam founded her career on the professionalizing of women’s art in Canada. And what is more, she turned to china painting as a strategy to elevate women in the arts and crafts.

Figure 11.1  Mary

Ella Dignam, City of Toronto Archive

193

Craft and Heritage

Born Mary Ella Williams in 1857 in Port Burwell, Southern Ontario, she attended the Western School of Art and Design in London, Ontario, where she likely received china painting instruction from British-born John Howard Griffiths. He was the first principal of the new school, an award-winning china painter and popular teacher of the craft, who trained at Minton in Stoke-on-Trent before immigrating to Canada in 1855.29 She was also privately instructed by prominent Canadian artist Paul Peel and studied at the Art Students League in New York City; she continued to attend art workshops in Europe throughout her life. Dignam taught art at ‘ladies’ art schools in Toronto and Hamilton, introducing nude modelling for life classes to the curriculum, a practice that had been until then reserved for men. In 1886, she founded and served as the first president of the Women’s Arts Association of Canada (WAAC) and remained president until 1913; she returned to this position in 1935.30 It is often remarked that Dignam’s oil paintings, which generally depict conventional landscapes, Dutch genre scenes, and still life did not reflect her progressive views about women and the arts, implying that it is difficult to ‘read’ her artwork as a form of selfrepresentation.31 At first glance, Dish with Dogwood Flowers (1891) (Plate 21) equally traditional, but I argue that it represents an important signifier of Dignam’s feminist leaning: as an early example of her china painting it operates as a turning point, transitioning from the amateur to the professional, and illustrates her growing awareness of design criticism. Thus, it denotes a significant feminist heritage that has contributed to the idea of Canadian culture and identity within the domestic space, designed through woman’s eyes and in need of critical evaluation. Dignam recognized that china painting could be a powerful tool for women to express their identity and earn an income, important ingredients to assert cultural and economic capital. Completed five years after she founded the Women’s Art Association of Canada (WAAC, originally known as the Women’s Art Club), the plate features a hand-painted bouquet of orange-red dogwood flowers painted in over-glaze enamels, which rests over a bed of gilded grass on white porcelain. On the back of the plate Dignam hand-printed in mat gold her initials, MED./’91 S. F. The Gardiner Museum acquired the plate in 2011 and, as indicated by the adhesive label, it came from the estate of Barbara and Peter Sutton-Smith, who were leading dealers and publishers of antiques in Canada; no doubt they would have been aware of Dignam’s stature in the arts community. The delicate pierced scallop gilt rim resembles a crocheted doily or embroidery pattern, also popular craft hobbies at this time and often featured in leading ladies’ magazines. As Barbara Williams points out, embroidery ‘accorded an enhanced value due to its decorative potential’, and this is also the case with china painting.32 While the florid perforated shape of the plate evokes the Neo-rococo style, Dignam’s floral decoration is more schematized, and thus represents some of the design reform thinking she would later promote in her lectures and articles of ceramic art. For example, some five years later Dignam dismisses rococo and cites a lecture by Professor Huntingford as her authority, asserting that the universality of the rococo is regrettably present in ceramic art and is to be avoided because it is unworthy.33 She also remarked: ‘The characteristics to be sought in good pottery decoration are, first appropriateness of 194

Canadian Women China Painters

subject, an agreeable flow of lines and disposition of masses, effective arrangement with fine quality of colour, and lastly, economy of labour’. Regarding home practice: […] ‘we do not find our Canadians decorating toilette sets with fruit, or making any blunders in proper use of decoration’.34 Dignam, therefore, advocated British design reform ideology that originated in the mid-nineteenth century and continued to hold strong, emphasizing conventionalized designs over pictorial, and fitness of purpose, or as she so plainly stated, ‘putting fish upon fish sets’.35 Dignam authored several articles and reports about china painting in Canada in which she asserted that painted china was a woman’s domain closely allied to interior design. She explained that it appeals ‘even before pictures to the house furnishers and entertainers, so there is a large field to be occupied which will belong exclusively to the women artists’.36 Dignam’s articles provided context for her greatest venture in china decorating, which she undertook around the same time, art directing the Cabot Commemorative State Dinner Service (celebrating the 400th anniversary of John Cabot’s arrival in Québec), also titled the Jubilee Service (in honour of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897), today known as the Canadian Historical Dinner Service.37 The 204-piece, eight-course dinner service for twenty-four was commissioned as a parting commemorative gift for Lady Aberdeen, patron of the WAAC and wife of the Governor General.38 Dignam formed the committee, organized the competition and sourced the imagery of Canadian flora and fauna and historical sites for content. She was also involved in the selection of sixteen female artists, half from Ontario and the balance from Québec and Nova Scotia. The total production cost was $1000 including payment for the Doulton and Limoges blanks. The Canadian government denied financial support but Dignam, the consummate networker, proceeded to successfully privately fundraise from members of the House of Commons and the Senate.39 Therefore, Dish with Dogwood Flowers of 1892, should be read as part of a deeper narrative signalling Dignam’s new positioning of china painting as culturally and economically important. It was not simply a singular work of home decor but had a function outside of the domestic sphere, contributing to the arts and crafts industry executed by wives and daughters. As such, it should be considered domestic heritage that has national consequences. For Dignam, striving to be professional in the art and craft field was a serious business because it stimulated self-reliance for women and ceramic decoration was a means to this end. In an unpublished report, Dignam addressed how china painting in Canada helped the overall economy of the nation. According to Dignam ‘a very low estimate’ of $20,000 is spent annually on imported china blanks, and after redecoration, is resold for $100,000.40 Another $100,000 was generated from china painting instruction; tax revenues collected on gold and china paints were large, making it another windfall for the government. Where Dignam found these numbers and statistics, and whether or not they were accurate, is unclear; however, what is significant is that she chose to cite them in her report, hence recognizing the need to assign a dollar value to the dainty industry of china painting to validate its economic impact. 195

Craft and Heritage

Florence Helen McGillivray: Small pitcher Dignam frequently exhibited her paintings with the Royal Academy of Artists and the Ontario Society of Artists, but these societies refused her membership despite her repeated applications. This rejection, which her peers and critics at the time attributed to her forceful personality, is possibly a reason why she has been overlooked by current scholars in their re-evaluation of her contribution to cultural heritage and feminism.41 It was a different story for her younger friend Florence Helena McGillivray who was a member of both, as well as WAAC, and whose landscape paintings were collected and exhibited in major galleries. A testament to McGillivray’s work, the National Gallery of Canada acquired two examples of her painting in 1914 when she was fifty, including Afterglow, one of her better-known paintings. Born in Whitby, Ontario, in 1864, McGillivray was a noted sketcher and landscape painter who studied under Scottishborn and trained Canadian landscape painter William Cruikshank at the Ontario School of Art, and privately with Lucius R. O’Brien, known for his oils and watercolours of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast and for founding the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.42 McGillivray’s landscapes reflect her artistic exchange with Tom Thomson, who was also a close family friend and a leading artist in Canada. Thomson’s depictions of Northern Ontario inspired the founding of the Group of Seven, a major national art movement in Canada in the early twentieth century.43 McGillivray lived with her mother and sister and worked at home in her studio in Whitby Ontario, where she displayed and sold her paintings and china painting. She also taught art instruction to boys and girls including at the new Ontario Lady’s College in Whitby, the second all-girls school in the province.44 Unlike Dignam, she never married and even though her family was prosperous, her single status placed her in the stereotypical role of women artists in the Victorian and Edwardian period: choosing to be professionals rather than amateurs to earn a modest income via teaching and painting that enabled some financial independence from relatives. While McGillivray’s position as a painter earned her a higher status than Dignam, her work as a china painter remains less known.45 Major institutions in Canada continue to collect and exhibit McGillivray paintings, but ignore her china decorating, designated as craft rather than art, affirming its status as the ‘Cinderella of Art’ and disregarding its cultural heritage.46 Barbara Mitchell, a past president of WAAC, and author of an insightful article on Anne Langton, an understudied Canadian woman artist and china painter also active in the Victorian era, donated the Small Pitcher to the Gardiner Museum in 2014. McGillivray completed the small, stylized jug in 1909, after studying china painting with Marshall Fry in New York City, a leading teacher and writer on china painting; he also ran The Fry Art Company selling minerals, gold, brushes and other china-painting supplies.47 As with Dignam, she began with an imported porcelain blank, preferring a simpler jug form than a dainty pierced plate, and which she signed on the underside. Painted some eighteen years later than Dignam’s dish, the mauve lustre crocuses with sinuous stems reference both the fashionable Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. She used a lithographic pencil to outline the design, while 196

Canadian Women China Painters

the handle and rim are trimmed in gold. The pitcher displays the stylized treatment known as the ‘conventionalized’ rather than the naturalistic approach, both methods promoted and published in Keramic Studio. McGillivray was versatile in both as was her teacher Fry. Her 1893 gilt scalloped jardinière and scalloped dishes featuring morning glories and strawberries are in the same floral naturalistic vein and Neo-rococo style as Dignam’s design. McGillivray also worked briefly in the genre of portraiture between 1895 and 1900, and she depicted an image of her mother on a porcelain tile and a china bracelet. The same likeness is used for both and comes from an 1890s photograph. The tile descended from the artist’s estate, while the bracelet’s provenance derives from her sister, and both remain with family descendants. They are testament to china painting being employed as a keepsake and memento rather than for commercial exchange and as such represent family heritage, which to date has been occluded in both fine art and craft museum collections. As Susan Pearce points out, women collect differently than men, with feeling and emotion and ‘as a way to organize the web of inter-personal relationships which bind together past, present and future in a tangible, visible network’.48 How then to read McGillivray’s china painting? To some the decoration and imagery may be perceived as ‘empty ciphers drained of any content’ to quote Llewellyn Negrin, while for others it reveals a feminine pastime ideal for wife and mother.49 For example, an 1898 Globe reviewer of a WAAC ceramic exhibition employed highly charged feminine terminology in the critical appraisal of the china, opting for words like ‘dainty’, ‘delicate’, ‘decorative’, ‘exquisite’, ‘harmonious’ and ‘pretty’. The gallery decor is observed and praised for being ‘most tastefully arranged’, with walls draped in cream and pale green, creating ‘beautiful soft effect’.50 Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock and Cheryl Buckley, among other contemporary feminist scholars, have observed that the critical vocabulary used to describe the women’s craft and artwork often reflects gender stereotypes of the maker themselves; this is also evident in china painting.51 Consequently, both the emphasis on the gender of the maker and the feminization of the decorative have contributed to the marginalization of decorative arts and craft, especially china painting. But as Buckley has rightfully argued, the terminology and the objects themselves are just one aspect of the story; it is the networks of exchange that are revealing of biography and other societal factors and that are so fundamental to domestic heritage.52

Networks of exchange Dignam correctly wrote that there was little ceramic production in Canada, ‘apart from the ordinary glazed jugs, teapots, pots and pans for common culinary purposes’ located in Québec and Ontario, and ‘useful for visiting’ to learn the industry.53 According to Dignam, this meant that the networks of exchange in china painting were ‘entirely in the hands of the individual artists who by banding together have shown that every kind of decoration may be accomplished’.54 The very act of learning, acquiring blanks from the United States, the UK or Europe, sourcing kilns either individually or as a group were demanding and expensive activities, particularly in comparison to other crafts of the 197

Craft and Heritage

period, but it proved easier as china painting flourished. A plethora of specialty journals like the China Decorator, as well as instruction books, and how-to articles on china decoration became available. For example, Ladies’ Home Journal offered decorators helpful and detailed hints: where to place the painting table so that ‘a north light will fall on your work over the left shoulder’, to limit the palette to twenty-five colours, and use large brushes for a broad style.55 Another article cautioned: do not make strong outlines with the pencil and suit your design to the shape.56 The objective of these guides was to simplify the steps for the amateur so she could emulate the professional. Art historian Catherine Zipf argues that advances in printing technology, improved woodcuts and engravings and new processes in chromolithography facilitated how-to publications allowing for increased and higher-quality reproductions.57 Adelaide Robineau’s Keramic Studio, for potters and decorators, operating from Syracuse between 1889 and 1924 was certainly read by Canadians despite its small circulation of 6000, if some of the advertisements and published designs are any indication.58 Notably, the supply house Ceramic Art Importing Company of Toronto advertised there (albeit only once),59 while Sarah Anne Mundy from Montreal and Mary Burnett from London, Ontario, regularly listed their china instruction services in the back pages between 1905 and 1909. Burnett frequently saw her naturalistic floral designs selected to be reproduced in the magazine, while J. W. Gowrie of Sarnia won fifth prize for firing and shared her kiln tips to Keramic readers.60 Robineau’s decision to invite amateur subscribers to submit designs, either conventionalized or naturalistic, for publication allowed them to mix with professional china painters like Marshall Fry and Frederick Rhead, whose work she also published, thus helping to advance the craft.61 By 1891, Canadian china decorators could purchase the necessary infrastructure for china painting, as well as finished products, from William Junor in Toronto. The store advertised its ‘complete assortment of white china for decorating’ in the Women’s Club (the predecessor of WAAC) exhibition catalogues.62 Eaton’s, Canada’s major department store, also advertised in WAAC exhibition catalogues at this time, capitalizing on the painted china market by promoting a ‘splendid’ assortment of blanks, enamels, colours, brushes and stencil patterns and offering as well kiln firing as part of the service.63 Firing at home or sourcing outside kilns was initially a major effort at the time. One magazine instructor advised that if a clean oven was not available an alcohol lamp would do but hold the china carefully, ‘turn it all the while over the flame and heating all parts equally, to ensure there is no danger of breakage’. And the same article advised that ‘if china is to be sent to a distance [to be fired], pack it carefully with plenty of soft paper in a wooden box’.64 By 1896, however, domestic kilns for china painting were available as evidenced in the advertisements published in the Canadian Home Journal; one such ad touted that the craft was ‘a genteel business for lady or gentleman’.65 With these changes, Dignam believed that ‘more than any other art industry, china painting promises to be generally taken up’.66 According to Dignam, ‘the art is now made so easy that ambitious students, living in more remote districts or in the smaller towns and villages, may not be deprived of the pleasure of painting on china’.67 China was sent from the larger centres by the importer safely, and painters had own their kilns and, what is more, students no longer needed to travel to the United States to learn the skill. 198

Canadian Women China Painters

Under the auspices of WAAC, china clubs formed in Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg and other cities. In the minutes book of the Toronto China Club dated between c. 1915 and 1940, members discussed issues related to education, pricing china for sale (high), revenues earned (low), bringing in teachers to discuss good and bad design, attending museum lectures, visiting utilitarian potteries, such as Sovereign Potters in Hamilton and sketching with the aid of a camera – all in pursuit of expanding knowledge on the application of painting on china.68 Toronto chapter members were concerned about where to exhibit, who should exhibit (members or non-members) and what to exhibit. In 1915, they initiated the Wild Rose Competition and set the rules of engagement for the competition: each participant could choose their own china piece (blank form) but each design would share the same rose motif and would begin with an outline only before offered for criticism.69 They invited a male instructor from Toronto’s major art school, Central Technical, to judge blind and critique. L. Steel Kellogg advised teachers in the monthly column on china painting in The Art Amateur that painting roses was no easy thing, admonishing: ‘Of all things, do not allow the novice to begin with a rose or the human figure!’70 Kellogg’s

Figure 11.2  Jardinière (D&C France), attributed to Florence McGillivray, 21.5 x 22 cm. Private Collection, Estate of Kathleen Dummy

199

Craft and Heritage

cautionary words are reiterated by Clarabel Childs Filkins who warns that: ‘Roses are dangerous ground for the beginner’, suggesting they buy or rent designs from Marshall Fry (McGillivray’s teacher) as well as others instructors.71 Interestingly, McGillivray’s undated Jardinière is a typical example of the naturalistic rose motif common in china painting at that time and does not depart much from an example in the instruction manual offered by Keramic Studio, published a few years earlier72 (Figure 11.2). Despite the ambitions of WAAC’s china club members, Robert Homes dismissed the art in his 1915 review of the Toronto Applied Arts Show at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) for the Evening Standard. He opined: Oft-repeated obtrusions of bunches of roses and designs more than reminiscent of various ceramic publications prompt one to side-step when confronted with a display of china painting. Generally speaking there seems to be less originality of design and more childlike faith in the illustrated journal of those who painting well on china than among good workers in any other of the applied arts.73

Conclusion How then might the Dignam and McGillivray china-painted pieces at the Gardiner Museum be read as portraits of ‘ideal femininity’, that is, as ‘stand-ins’ for the perfect daughter, sister, wife and mother, and how does this largely gendered art and craft practice intersect with heritage concerns? It is clear that these china-painted objects should not be read as simply feminine decorations in splendid isolation. If we explore their thingness, that is their aesthetic value as it relates to cultural, social and economic identities of their makers, we discover embedded within them a complex social system of conceptualizing, producing and circulating china painting.74 Drawing upon Talia Schaffer, I have argued that Canadian china painting is not just a neglected art deserving of new appreciation, but rather presents a lens into how ‘women intersected with the material world’ as ‘a way of doing things’, thus serving as a biographical tool of selfidentity and determination.75 That these two hand-painted china artefacts entered the collection of the Gardiner Museum, an institution devoted to elite ceramic art, with holdings of European eighteenth century Meissen, Sèvres and Chelsea porcelains, is a testament to the increasing awareness and importance of preserving and thinking about ceramics beyond the usual canon of connoisseurship. Their integration into this renowned collection recognizes the critical heritage value of women’s material culture to the social history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These two dishes speak not only to the changing taste from naturalistic to conventionalized design, to Canada’s burgeoning home decoration and ceramics industry, but more importantly to the ways women transformed a leisure pastime reproducing generic patterns of flora to expressions of independence through their networks of learning, exhibiting, meeting and consuming both within and beyond the domestic sphere. It is this kind of women’s domestic family 200

Canadian Women China Painters

heritage that needs to be further explored and integrated into museum practice and art histories as well as heritage and material cultural studies. Understanding china painting means understanding feminist domestic heritage.

Notes 1

Julia Hirshfeld Davis, ‘Inspiration from Hawaii in the Obamas’ White House China’, New York Times, 27 April 2015. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/us/ inspiration-from-hawaii-in-the-obamas-white-house-china.html (accessed 18 June 2019).

2

Mary Todd Lincoln chose a purple-red border with an American bald eagle for the Solferino set manufactured by Havilland and Company. In 1879, first lady Lucy Hayes continued the tradition deciding that American flora and fauna should serve as decorative motifs for her husband’s presidential service and invited American artist Theodore R. Davis as designer; while first lady Caroline Harrison, an artist in her own right, designed the goldenrod and corn motifs to reference her home state of Indiana for her husband’s presidential china in 1892. Margaret Brown Klapthor, Official White House China: 1789 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999).

3

For discussions on women’s close affiliations with porcelain, see: Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan, ‘Introduction’, in The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, eds. Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan (Ashgate: Burlington Vermont 2010), 1–17; and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘China’, in Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 52–69.

4

Anne Anderson, ‘The China Painter: Amateur Celebrities and Professional Stars at Howell and James’s Royal Academy of China Painting’, in Crafting the Women Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Abingtonon-Thames: Routledge, 2013), 123–44; Cheryl Buckley, ‘The Decorated Object: Gender, Modernism and the Design of Industrial Ceramics in Britain in the 1930s’, in Women Artists and Decorative Arts, 1880–1935: The Gender of Ornament, eds. Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 53–69; Catherine Zipf, Professional Pursuits: Women and the Arts and Crafts Movement (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), 2007.

5

Talia Schaffer, Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Cynthia Brandimarte, ‘Somebody’s Aunt and Nobody’s Mother: The American China Painter and Her Work, 1870–1920’, Winterthur Portfolio 23, no. 4 (Winter, 1988): 203–24; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘The Aesthetic Moment: China Decorators, Consumer Demand and Technological Change in the American Pottery Industry 1865–1900’, Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1994): 121–53.

6

Henrietta- Barclay Paist, Design and the Decoration of Porcelain (Syracuse: Keramic Studio Publishing Company, 1916), 5.

7

Barbara Williams, ‘Anne Langton’s China Painting’, Cahier Metiers D’Art/Craft Journal 4, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 94–109; Marie Elwood, ‘The State Dinner Service of Canada, 1898’, Material History Bulletin (Spring 1977): 48; ‘Alice Egan Hagen (1872–1972), Nova Scotian Women Ceramicist’. Available online: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/histoires_de_chez_ nous-community_stories/pm_v2.php?id=record_detail&fl=0&lg=English&ex=00000637&h s=0&rd=149208 (accessed: 20 June 2019).

8

Susan M. Pearce, ‘The Construction of Heritage: The Domestic Context and Its Implications’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 4 (1998): 2, 8.

201

Craft and Heritage 9

For instance, the McCord Museum in Montreal which is mandated to celebrate the city’s past and present life holds a collection of china painting but the names of the women artists are not searchable on their online website.

10 Fiona Cheetham, ‘An Actor-Network Perspective on Collecting and Collectables’, in Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories, eds. Sandra H. Dudley et al. (London: Routledge, 2012), 62. 11 Existing literature on china painting in Canada is scarce: ‘Hand Painted Porcelain in Canada, From a North American Perspective by a Canadian Collector’. Available online https:// sites.google.com/site/handpaintedporcelainincanada/home/hand-painted-china-in-canada (accessed 26 June 2019). 12 ‘Women at Work Art: Pottery and Painting on China’, Lady’s Pictorial (21 April 1888): 137. 13 Anne Anderson, ‘“China Mania”: Collecting Old Blue for the House Beautiful, c. 1860-1900’, in Material Cultures, Collecting 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, eds. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 109–28. 14 Lady’s Pictorial (21 April 1888): 137. 15 Coventry Patmore was a Victorian poet and essayist well known for his poem, ‘Angel in the House’ that described the ideal Victorian wife. Britannica, ‘Coventry Patmore’. https://www. britannica.com/biography/Coventry-Patmore. (accessed 1 May 2019). 16 Ibid. 17 George and Frederick Rhead, Staffordshire Pots and Potters (London: Hutchinson and co. 1906), 351. 18 Bridget Elliot and Janice Helland, ‘Introduction’, 6. 19 Joan Jones, Minton: The First Two Hundred Years of Production (Shrewsbury: Swan Hill Press), 1993; Richard Dennis, Doulton Pottery from the Lambeth and Burslem Studios 1873–1939 Part II (London: Fine Art Society), 1975. 20 Ibid.; See also Stephen Knott, Amateur Craft: History and Theory (London: Bloomsbury 2015), xiii. 21 Regina Blaszczyk, 1994, 121–2. 22 Nancy Elizabeth Owen, Rookwood and the Industry of Art: Women, Culture, and Commerce, 1880–1913 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001); Wendy Kaplan, ‘Women Designers and the Arts and Crafts Movement’, in Women Designers in the USA 1900–2000, ed. Pat Kirkham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 85–99. 23 Alice Boultier and Toby Bruce, The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artist (Kingston, ON: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2015). Brandimarte, ‘Somebody’s Aunt and Nobody’s Mother’, 203. 24 ‘Alice Egan Hagen (1872–1972), Nova Scotian Women Ceramicist’, Available online: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/histoires_de_chez_nous-community_stories/pm_ v2.php?id=record_detail&fl=0&lg=English&ex=00000637&hs=0&rd=149208 (accessed: 20 June 2019). 25 Charles Hill, Artists, Architecture & Artisans: Canadian Art 1890–1918 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2013), 104–5, 159–60. 26 Esther Hardistry, ‘Dean of Our Women Artists’, untitled and undated article, City of Toronto Archives, Women’s Art Association of Canada correspondence Fonds, 531; ‘Mary Ella Dignam Retrospective’, Women Art Association of Canada, May 26–13 June 2000. 27 ‘Dignam, Mary Ella,’ Canadian Women Art History Initiative. https://cwahi.colwncordia.ca/ sources/artists/nameSearch.php?artist=Dignam (accessed 9 May 2019).

202

Canadian Women China Painters 28 Cited in Archives of Ontario, https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/030001-1175-e. html (accessed 8 April 2019). 29 John Griffiths and his older brother James, who also learned china painting at Minton, are better documented than Canadian women china painters due to the scholarship of ceramic historian Elizabeth Collard. In 1886, John Griffiths captured several medals for his china painting at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, UK, and in 1889 at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition (Canadian National Exhibition). In 1887, John Griffiths was commissioned to paint a china tea service for Queen Victoria on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. The National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of History hold examples of his work. See Elizabeth Collard, Nineteenth Century Pottery and Porcelain in Canada (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), 315–19; John Griffiths Biographical Sketch. Available online (https://www.gallery.ca/library/ngc151.html; ‘China Painting’, Canadian Museum of History. Available online https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/ exhibitions/hist/cadeau/cachi01e.html (accessed 25 June 2019). 30 Janet Bonellie, ‘Mrs. Dignam’s Pursuit: Art and Liberation in Victorian Canada’, The Beaver 80, no. 3 (June/July 2000): 35–8. 31 Ibid.; E. A. Heaman, ‘Taking the World by Show: Canadian Women as Exhibitors to 1900’, Canadian Historical Review 78, no. 4 (December 1997): 599–631; McLeod, In Good Hands, 36–41. 32 Williams, ‘Anne Langton’s China Painting’, 97. 33 ‘Ceramic Art in Canada’, Our Monthly 1 (June 1896): 154, 157. 34 Ibid., 154. 35 Mary Dignam attended the International Congress of Women in London in 1899, where such Arts and Crafts leaders as William Lethaby and May Morris gave presentations. She also knew Walter Crane. Charles Hill, Artists, Architecture & Artisans, 160. 36 Mary Dignam, ‘Art Conference, A Short Account of the Report Made by the W.A.A. of Canada to Promote Ceramic Decoration in Canada’, undated, City of Toronto Archives, Women’s Art Association of Canada correspondence Fonds, 531, Series 2446, File 2B; Mary Dignam, ‘Ceramic Art and the W.A.A. of Canada’, Saturday Globe (Toronto) 4 December 1897: 14. 37 Hill, Artists, Architecture & Artisans,159. 38 Marie Elwood, ‘The Cabot Commemorative State Service for Canada, 1897- A History’. Available online: https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/hist/cadeau/cahis02e. html (accessed 1 May 2019). 39 Ibid. 40 Mary Dignam, ‘Art Conference, A Short Account of the Report Made by the W.A.A. of Canada to Promote Ceramic Decoration in Canada’, 2. 41 Bonellie, The Beaver, 35. 42 W. C. Allen, A Collection of Works by Florence Helena McGillivray (Winnipeg: Friesen Press, 2016), XI; ‘Biographical Sketch William Cruishank’. Available online https://www. beaux-arts.ca/sites/default/files/documents/ngc132.htm (accessed 20 June 2019); Dennis Reid, ‘Richard Lucius O’Brien’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography vol xii. Available Online: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/o_brien_lucius_richard_12E.html (accessed 20 June 2019). 43 Dennis Reid, Thom Thomson, Painter (Toronto/Ottawa: Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada), 2002.

203

Craft and Heritage 44 Founded in 1874 and today known as Trafalgar Castle School, it still remains a school exclusively for girls. 45 The McMichael Canadian Art Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, is planning a retrospective exhibition of Florence McGillivray, co-curated by Katharine Lochnan and Sarah Stanners. 46 The Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Agnes Etherington Centre in Kingston have examples of her paintings. A recent article on McGillivray by Lochnan and Stanners does not discuss her china painting. Katherine Lochnan and Sarah Stanners, ‘The Group of Eight’, Canadian Art (October 2017). Available online: https://canadianart.ca/ features/the-group-of-eight/(accessed 15 June 2019). 47 W. C. Allen, A Collection of Works, xii. Marshall T. Fry painter and ceramist, taught china painting with Mrs. Vance L. Phillips on West 24th Street, known as the Fry-Phillips Keramic Studio which taught ‘all branches of Keramic Art’. In 1907, he founded the Southampton Summer Art School in Southampton, New York. As well Fry taught at Alfred University. Fry studied under William Merritt Chase and Arthur Dow in New York and then James Whistler and Frank Brangwyn in London. He often contributed articles and designs in Keramic Studio where his company advertised. See Keramic Studio magazines between 1900 to 1915. 48 Susan M. Pearce, ‘Objects in the Contemporary Construction of Personal Culture: Perspectives Relating to Gender and Socio-Economic Class, Museum’, Management and Curatorship 17, no. 3 (1998): 238–9. 49 Llewellyn Negrin, ‘Ornament and the Feminine’, Feminist Theory 2 (2006): 219–35. 50 Globe (28 September 1898). 51 Rozskiza Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: L. B. Tauris & Co., 2013); Cheryl Buckley, Potters and Paintresses: Women Designers in the Pottery Industry 1870–1955 (London: The Women’s Press, 1990). 52 Buckley, Potters and Paintresses, 8. 53 Dignam, ‘Ceramic Art in Canada’, 149–50. To learn more about these utilitarian potteries such as St. Johns Stone Chinaware company, see Collard. 54 Mary Dignam, ‘Art Conference’, 1. 55 Anna T. Roberts, ‘Artistic China Painting,’ Ladies Home Journal, (April 1894): 21. 56 Amelia C. Austin, ‘Correct China Painting,’ Ladies Home Journal (November 1899): 20. 57 Zipf, Professional Pursuits, 111. 58 Ibid., 115. 59 Keramic Studio, (April 1909): 262. 60 W. J. Gowrie, ‘Firing’, Keramic Studio (May 1906): 4–5. Mary Burnett published floral designs in the natural style between 1906 and 1911: cherries (Jan. 1906, 208); pears (Jan. 1908, 217); wild cucumber (Nov. 1908, 158); petunias (April, 1909, 269). 61 Zipf, Professional Pursuits, 130. 62 Women’s Art Club Catalogue Spring Exhibition, 1891. 63 WAAC Exhibition catalogue, c. 1900. 64 L. Steele Kellogg, ‘Ceramic Painting Hints to Teachers’, The Art Amateur 19, no. 1 (June 1888): 14. 65 Canadian Home Journal (March 1896). 66 Dignam, Our Monthly, 157.

204

Canadian Women China Painters 67 Ibid. 68 ‘Records, The Ceramic Club of the Lyceum Club and Women’s Art Association of Canada’, c. 1915–1940, City of Toronto Archives, Women’s Art Association of Canada Fonds 531, Series 2380, File 1. 69 WAAC Minutes (2 June 1915). 70 Steele Kellogg, The Art Amateur, 14. 71 Clarabel Childs Filkins, The China Painters’ A-B-C: A Primer for Beginners (Buffalo: The Courier Co. of Buffalo, 1915), 109. 72 The Book of Roses, Studies for the China Painters and the Student of Watercolours (Syracuse: Keramic Studio Publishing, 1903). 73 R Holmes, ‘Vivid Display of Colours’, Evening Standard # (3 Sept 1915): 14. 74 Laura Peers, ‘“Almost True”: Peter Rindisbacher’s Early Images of Rupert’s Landing’, Art History 32, no. 3 (2009): 537. Peers, ‘Material Culture, Identity, and Colonial Society in the Canadian Fur Trade’, in Women & Things 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, eds. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 55, 64. 75 Schaffer, Novel Craft.

205

206

CHAPTER 12 CRAFTING CIVIC ENGAGEMENT? HOW HERITAGE LOTTERY FUNDING REFRAMED WATTS GALLERY: ARTISTS’ VILLAGE

Elaine Cheasley Paterson

This chapter is focussed on a series of listed buildings now referred to as Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village in Compton, Surrey, UK (Figure 12.1).1 At this site, I argue that the practice and scholarship of heritage and craft may be seen to converge in meaningful ways by exploring how a series of Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) applications between 2002 and 2016 shifted its interpretive narrative in practice. In other words, what might the targeting of heritage (rather than arts) organizations for funding reveal about the cultural process of interpreting these sites over time? I suggest the decorative art and craft history of this site is used as a means of engagement with the local community and is the key to claiming this site as one of heritage.

Figure 12.1  Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village, Compton, Surrey, UK (map drawing)

Craft and Heritage

This discussion is structured around a series of HLF grant applications in order to examine what each reveals about its own ‘present’ moment, including the current moment – with the art world’s intense interest in craft, socially engaged practice, community and the local, as well as wider, more pressing discussions of ethical labour, migration and environmental concerns. Following heritage scholars Ashworth and Graham’s lead, I sketch out ways ‘the present invokes the past in the service of diverse contemporary needs and how such heritage functions within political, cultural and economic arenas’.2 The aim of this chapter is to reveal how this site has begun making explicit links between the past and present for civic engagement purposes and to suggest where these might lead both in craft and heritage practice and scholarship.3 By way of explanation for how these ideas emerged, I offer some preliminary context. I am an art historian by disciplinary training whose doctoral work explored the history of women-run craft guilds of the nineteenth-century home arts and industries movement. This was a rural, philanthropic and women-led craft movement with ethical concerns that overlapped considerably with those of the better known arts and crafts movement, both begun in England but international in scope.4 My research has since focussed on Britain, Ireland and Canada. At the time I began this research, there was a shift away from traditional art historical ideas of the transcendence of art, the disembodied discerning eye, connoisseurship, exceptionalism and elitism.5 As such, I drew on material culture, women’s studies, feminist and postcolonial theory, as well as the scarce scholarship on craft history available, to complement the art historical basis of my dissertation. This research took me to Compton, Surrey, in search of Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938) – the craftswoman who founded the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild (CPAG, 1904). The Guild’s work included large unglazed terracotta garden pots, memorials, sundials and some figurines but, most importantly, the craft guild was formed after local Compton residents had completed the decorative terracotta and gesso work on the Compton Mortuary Chapel (Plate 23), which belongs to the Compton Parish Council. The local community of craftspeople was trained by Mary Seton Watts in gesso and clay modelling at evening classes in her home, Limnerslease: a class organized in 1895 into a branch of the Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA). This class was patterned after those she had taught earlier when living in London as part of her voluntary social work in Whitechapel with the HAIA.6 The terracotta exterior frieze and interior gesso panels of the Mortuary Chapel were designed by Mary Seton Watts, and she supervised their creation by the local craftspeople she had trained. The architect who reviewed her design for the Chapel to ensure it was structurally sound was George Redmayne and the builders were Heal & Jackson, Compton, confirming the prevalence of community engagement and the philosophy of patronizing the local community by Watts. While always noted, the builders and the architect are rarely discussed in literature on the Chapel. When I was researching Mary Seton Watts in the late 1990s, her papers and archive were housed in the Watts Picture Gallery just down the road from the Chapel. The

208

Crafting Civic Engagement?

Figure 12.2  G. F. Watts, Portrait of Mary Watts

(back view), 1887, oil on canvas, Watts Gallery Trust. At the 1892 Whitechapel exhibition, the note for this painting read: ‘A picture to show how much there is to be found even by those with only a back view.’

Gallery was built in 1904 to house the work of her husband (Figure 12.2), the wellestablished Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), but the original building’s primary purpose was as a hostel for the apprentice potters at her craftguild. By the time I arrived, the hostel had become the curator’s home, as it was conveniently attached to the art gallery. The whole place was in desperate need of restoration but rich in original nineteenth-century charm (dampness and draftiness included). By the time I was completing my research in the archive, the curator and his lone assistant were preparing to apply for a multi-million pound Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) Grant – 2002. The last chapter of my dissertation refers to the fact that the Gallery had just won their bid for the 4.5 million pound grant and was to close for five years while work took place.7 Heritage entered into my work as a newly minted art historian in this final note in my thesis about the HLF grant and remained there until recently. In 2014, I returned to the Watts Gallery for the first time since its closing with a view to broadening my earlier research to include the craftspeople at work in the Compton

209

Craft and Heritage

pottery and developing a working class history of the Guild whose founder I had written about already.8 While this research has proved fruitful, I was also impressed with the refurbishment and reinterpretation of the site I knew so well pre-HLF grant. I was struck by the way in which applying for Heritage funding had altered the representation of these histories – of the artistic couple, the pottery, the Chapel, the home arts movement itself – in this new heritage site. In what follows I trace the grant application narratives submitted to the HLF by the Watts Gallery from 2002 until the most recent grant in 2016. Social welfare, sustainability, local identity and community activism or involvement have been brought into these narratives to support a shift from the fine arts focus of the site to one of critical heritage with links to craft practices. Scholars Waterton and Winters advise that heritage scholarship ‘is most effective when it engages critiques and responds to practice’.9 Given the fluidity and interdisciplinarity of craft scholarship (my scholarly home so to speak), I am most interested in heritage as a cultural process and how it works as such in this site.10 ‘The 2002 Watts Gallery Extension and Restoration’ application drafts confirm the original HLF grant was supposed to extend the Gallery space (architectural plans were completed and paid for) to allow for a fuller presentation of the work of GF Watts, known in Victorian times as ‘England’s Michelangelo’.11 The initial approach for refurbishment focussed entirely on GF Watts as a ‘great artist’ following a traditional art historical trajectory. This proposal was not successful and at the suggestion of the HLF the Watts Gallery ‘took a step back’ from this new build idea to focus instead on undertaking ‘a conservation management plan, audience development plan and access plan’.12 By the ‘2004 HLF Project Planning Grant (PPG)’, the Gallery instead targeted education, broader audience through better interpretation of works and compliance with accessibility requirements. A staffing change was also underway by then and the structure was seen by the HLF as being ‘more professional, and formalis[ing] the place of education at the Gallery’.13 The HLF’s strategic plan from 2002 to 2007 reveals learning and education as key elements in its funding decisions.14 Restoration and conservation of the building and broadening the audience to the Gallery – especially school aged and university students – were the twin concerns at this point in the application narrative. Following the project planning grant, in 2006 the Watts Gallery Trust successfully applied for a 4.5-million-pound Heritage Grant, the ‘Hope Project’ (after GF Watts’s painting by the same name), and was awarded 5.3 million pounds. Both applications were submitted by the new Director of the Watts Gallery Trust, Perdita Hunt. The ‘Hope Project’ spanned the six years from 2004 to 2010. The six aims of the ‘Hope Project’, as detailed in a letter of support by Sue Doughty Liberal MP for Guildford (the city nearest Compton and Surrey County town), are as follows: to restore, refurbish and enhance the Gallery’s buildings and environment, conserve collection and make more accessible, strengthen the role of the Gallery in the local community, improve and extend the education programme, develop audience and income; and secure the future of the Watts Gallery Trust.15 There is a remarkable shift in tone and focus in this grant application to include the craftswoman Mary Seton Watts more prominently, as well as the history of her pottery 210

Crafting Civic Engagement?

and the Chapel. Yet these continued to remain less central than the work of the ‘great artist’, with the Chapel still presented as a ‘quaint and curious’ adjunct to the Gallery. Still, the use of ‘founders’ in the plural is notable in the Director’s claim that ‘above all we [the Gallery Trust] would like to achieve our founders’ vision of art for all’ in the ‘Hope Project’. Prior to this, there was little mention of the notion of ‘art for all’, but it comes directly from Mary Seton Watts’s own writing about her work with the potters of Compton and the decorative work on the Chapel as a home art industry. These early heritage grant application narratives suggest a change in thinking about the Watts Gallery – from the initial attempt to extend the Gallery in order to showcase the work of a single, male artist, towards creating a space where this work is set in the context of an artistic couple’s creative practice, and importantly how Mary Seton Watts’s cultural philanthropy (summed up in the catchy ‘art for all’) extended their artistic world view into the local community through skill training, creative collaboration on the Chapel and the establishment of a lasting pottery industry. The process of applying for Heritage funding reframed this collection of buildings as a cohesive heritage site now designated the ‘Artists’ Village’ where the Gallery was one among several key elements of the whole. Included as part of this heritage is the natural setting of the site itself, the junction of the Pilgrim’s Way (the historic route from Winchester to Canterbury, which attracts upwards of 80k walkers annually) and the North Downs Way in which the Chapel, Gallery and artists’ home are nestled (Figure 12.3).

Figure 12.3  Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village is situated at the junction of the North Downs Way and the Pilgrim’s Way, designated an ‘Area of Natural Outstanding Beauty’

211

Craft and Heritage

In the 2008–2013 HLF strategic plan, sustainability of heritage buildings and natural heritage were added to the key elements of learning and education considered in funding packages. Not surprisingly, the successful Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village HLF application (2010) centred around foregrounding the links between the art gallery, the Chapel and the pottery set within an ‘Area of Natural Outstanding Beauty’, also worthy of heritage conservation. These links are central to a funding package in heritage (as opposed to say with the Arts Council) and rely upon establishing clear ties to the craftwork of the local community, encouraged and developed by Mary Seton Watts in her Compton Potters’ Arts Guild – suggesting these are the ‘heritage assets’ needing to be secured. Heritage is here accessed via the craft legacy and decorative work of an architectural space, the Chapel, whose Grade I listing also relies on this decorative history.16 The move away from the person-specific art historical framework in heritage discourse has broadened the site’s meaning by placing it within an interdisciplinary context drawing together the fine arts, craft history, women’s activism, the decorative, architecture and the social and natural history of Compton and beyond. The most recent HLF grant awarded the Watts Gallery Trust in 2016 for the Watts’s home, titled ‘Limnerslease – Saving the Studios’ (note plural), comes closest to situating the value of the Artists’ Village squarely on the craft history of the site and of Compton itself. This grant was to acquire part of the Grade II listed home of the Wattses, Limnerslease across the lane from the Gallery, to restore and reinterpret as the original studios of GF Watts and Mary Seton Watts.17 ‘Limnerslease – Saving the Studios’ reveals a near complete shift away from a focus on GF Watts to his wife Mary Seton Watts and, even more significantly, a clear emphasis on reviving the history and ethos of the home arts movement though this craftswoman’s engagement with the community and through interpretive material for the Chapel.18 That Mary Seton Watts’s design and craftwork as well as community engagement is now positioned as an anchor for, rather than side note in, this cultural heritage site is clear: The Mary Watts studio stood for the values of the Home Arts and Industries Association. Mary Watts worked to create employment for impoverished people through the preservation of rural handicrafts. She trained the local community in clay modelling in her weekly evening class in her studio, engaged 70 local people in creating the Watts Cemetery Chapel and subsequently established the social enterprise of the Compton Potters’ Art Guild, a business which thrived for the next fifty years. She was a firm believer in the idea that anyone given the opportunity could produce things of beauty and that everyone should have a craft within which they could express themselves creatively and transform their lives.19 The application presents this heritage project as being ‘about bringing back to life two key cultural heritage factors: the revival of the 19th-century Home Arts and Industries Movement – transforming passive involvement into active engagement, offering training opportunities in art and heritage and offering the power of art and craft to transform lives; and a unique example of the society, ideas, working and cultural life and artists’ 212

Crafting Civic Engagement?

practice of the late 19th century’.20 The goals of the grant are to restore and recreate ‘the working studios of two artists’ and to interpret the Watts Chapel and the history of Mary Seton Watts’s ‘engagement with the community’.21 Yet there remain aspects of this grant that are underdeveloped in terms of institutional and interpretive goals set and those accomplished in this newly developed heritage site. I will focus on two to conclude: first, the decorative work within the architecture of the Chapel (Plate 24) and the artists’ home, Limnerslease; and second, community engagement, historically and at present, in Gallery programming. In both cases, these decorative and collaborative histories could be used to explore social marginality in Compton and engage more broadly as well with other contemporary social issues, by reflecting on historical concerns at play in the site. For instance, these might include gender equality, labour, creativity and artistic hierarchies, sustainability, rural infrastructure, professionalism, heritage skill transfer, migration and inclusion, and so on. Instead, the interpretive content for the Chapel is largely about technique in gesso and terracotta (albeit with instructive videos of gesso work, along with the opportunity to work clay and gesso at the interactive, community based onsite Studios and Learning Centre). Or, alternatively, the content is a list of cultural references for the pantheistic decoration of both the Chapel and Mary Seton Watts’s earlier gesso work on the spectacular white ceiling panels in Limnerslease (Figure 12.4).22 At the time of writing, these panels were not yet part of an official display, despite the fact that the decorative ceiling by Mary Seton Watts was a central focus of funding drafts to expand the site.

Figure 12.4  Restored Ceiling panels, Limnerslease, Compton, Surrey, UK 213

Craft and Heritage

The processes of making these decorative gesso panels for the Compton Chapel and artists’ home have largely been deciphered through Mary Seton Watts’s own somewhat cryptic diary notations23 and through the relocation of another set of gesso panels. The restored and relocated set of decorative gesso panels, originally part of another Chapel project carried out by the CPAG under Mary Seton Watts, the Cambridge Military Chapel in Aldershot (1916–1920), are the main features of display in the new Mary Watts Gallery. The decorative work of the CPAG is privileged in this Gallery both within and beyond its original architectural home (Figure 12.5). ‘Limnerslease – Saving the Studios’ explains that the new Watts Studios provide the social history context to the Watts Gallery. It has been designed as a centre for ‘bringing alive’ the ethos of the home arts movement. In practical terms, this will be done through the teaching of heritage skills and creating training opportunities, for example, work placement and internships to young people through heritage apprenticeships, workforce placements and transferable skills in horticulture, customer service, marketing and tourism.24 The Watts Studios and its focus on Mary Seton Watts hinges on ‘four key principles that add a unique element and perspective to the current Gallery experience’.25 In this grant four concepts were prioritized and described as follows: Making – to offer something new by focussing on 3D, rather than just 2D, in other words ‘making’ with terracotta, plaster, clay, bookbinding, conservation,

Figure 12.5  Detail, Restored Ceiling panels, Limnerslease, Compton, Surrey, UK 214

Crafting Civic Engagement?

jewellery, textiles and ceramics; Heritage Skills – those listed are viewed as transferable, offering transformation and healthy living possibilities and the continued relevance of ideas is linked with Mary Seton Watts’s involvement in the HAIA and activism through this philanthropy, as well as support for anti-tight lacing, suffrage and prison reform; Time, place and space – the site offers a historical capsule of life in the late nineteenth century as well as the natural surroundings; Community – citing the original terracotta modelling classes held in the dining room at Limnerslease until a purpose-built studio was created for the students, suffrage teas hosted by Mary Seton Watts in both her home and the art gallery, how she advocated against cutting down trees locally. It concludes that the site will become a ‘unique hub in Compton’ as a stop for those walking, hiking, cycling on the North Downs Way and the Pilgrim’s Way which intersect nearby.26 The latest HLF strategic framework 2013–2018 – no longer a plan with rigid boundaries but a framework open to interpretation and flexibility – pays additional attention to community use, skills training, in particular heritage skills, as well as oral history – in addition to those already mentioned in earlier strategic plans which include learning and education from the HLF Strategic Plan of 2002–2007; and sustainability and natural heritage from that of 2008–2013. What would benefit from further development is a critical perspective on both the notion of creative community collaboration and the reverence for the decorative work itself as heritage – that asks whose heritage? How might these be made meaningful for a much broader constituency? How might they be interpreted at this site in ways that address the ongoing legacy of social exclusion or privilege they represent historically? Heritage scholars Waterton and Smith call for a rethinking of this notion of community found within the field of heritage and point instead to one that ‘engages with social relationships in all their messiness.’27 They explain that a series of concepts (particularly in the UK but in the West more generally they say) have emerged that round on the idea of community: among them are regeneration, social inclusion, civic engagement, civil renewal and sustainable communities.28 They caution that these can lead to the notion that ‘community’ might somehow be a cure for all manner of social problems (such as drug abuse, poverty and exclusion) and often lead to things that are done for communities rather than with them in a heritage context. They contend ‘communities are run through with divergent interests, [anger, boredom, fear, happiness, loneliness, frustration, envy, wonder] and a range of either motivating or disruptive energies. Added to this are thick seams of power that structure any given collection of people, as well as mediate professionals’ desires to speak on behalf of those whose lives have been marginalised by traditional heritage narratives.’29 In, for example, the HLF applications, ‘community identity risks becoming the object of regulation through the heritage management process, reinforcing the power differentials in community-expert relations and ensuring essentialist notions of community.’30 In the Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village this is certainly a risk in the funding and interpretive discourses at work in this heritage site. Waterton and Smith propose instead thinking of community as ‘an incomplete process through which people construct and create identities, and bond themselves to others, whether geographically, virtually or imaginatively.’31 Certainly this can be said for the Wattses, and 215

Craft and Heritage

Mary Seton Watts in particular, who sought to bind themselves to the Compton community through initiatives including the art gallery, the Chapel build and its decorative work, as well as founding the CPAG, hosting concerts, garden parties for children and suffrage teas and funding local war memorials, among others.32 Questioning which of these initiatives may be interpreted as being for the community rather than with it might be a productive framing of these historical activities in this heritage site. We need to ask what the consequences of these have been for the community as well as how historical initiatives may hold continued relevance for the current demographic of Compton and Surrey, and even beyond it. The global-anthropological nature of the crafted interiors and decorative schemes in both the Chapel and Limnerslease conceived of by a nineteenth-century woman of means, born in India, raised in Scotland and working in England at the height of British imperialism, offers a way into the rich, multifaceted engagement with the past already at play within these spaces, while also underlining the continued privilege of some artists to loosely incorporate a myriad of cultural references into their work. The inspiration and authority of the decorative symbols in the Chapel, drawn from a dizzying array of vernacular styles initially documented in Mary Seton Watts’s own The Word in the Pattern and again in recent catalogues put out by the Gallery, could be set within a broader history of cultural appropriation emerging from global contact with cultures throughout the British Empire. And, while difficult, recognition of these histories may offer a way in for visitors and scholars more familiar with these histories and whose recognition might provide real means for social inclusion. A dialogue between the global networks of the past, which led to the decorative Compton Chapel, and current visitors whose own histories intersect with those of the cultures referenced in the Chapel design (Judaic or Muslim, Syrian or Egyptian for instance) might offer meaningful avenues for social cohesion or engagement less available in the current interpretive model. This would require sharing what is at stake in the site of Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village with a wider constituency. Yet curating the collection through a process of collaboration and consultation with the diverse communities living in or near Compton might offer the potential of making it relevant to the lives of all constituencies, past, present and future. Community, in this way, might become something that is reconstructed through ongoing experiences, respectful engagements, dialogue and relationship building.33 As Waterton and Smith argue, ‘in Britain, the cultural symbols of white middle/ elite classes have come to stand for, and define, the national heritage experience.’ This heritage, associated with the ‘great’ and the ‘good’ of white British history, is prioritized over histories ‘that deal with the more repugnant characteristics of empire’; histories they contend in many ways could be coded as ‘black’, ‘ethnic’ or ‘feminine’.’34 The Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village as a site offers the opportunity to address many of these concerns – where the art gallery is placed within a wider creative context, where the pantheistic decorative terracotta and gesso work in both the Chapel and Limnerslease might be understood as expressions of an imperial centre and point of cultural contact, and where the working life of craftspeople from Compton is a heritage story worth telling. Indeed, the craft workshop model favoured by Mary Seton Watts is already here presented as a site of integration in many respects: a place of social solidarity and unity 216

Crafting Civic Engagement?

and the production of objects necessary for life, where craftspeople could learn from one another and where idea was transformed into material reality binding together pedagogy, humanity and creativity.35 By turning to Heritage rather than the funding landscape of the arts, this fine art gallery that initially only paid homage to another great male painter has become one part of a much larger heritage site within the built environment, providing a support structure to the more valued craft in situ and decorative legacy of Compton as interpreted through the aesthetic and ethical lens of the HAIA of the late nineteenth century. Harnessing the history and ethics of the home arts movement of which the CPAG was a part offers a way for Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village to keep its cultural heritage meaningful as both a historical antecedent to current and widespread Do-It-Yourself initiatives and craftivist actions, fair trade and buy local movements, ethical consumption and other cultural currents. I suggest that there is also a rich, complex and mostly undeveloped resource in this site which could be used for tapping into larger, global concerns for social welfare, sustainability, ethical consumption and production, and exploring cultural intersections through migration. The diffuse, interdisciplinary field of heritage studies has begun to open up these possibilities at this rural cultural heritage site nestled in the hills of Compton, Surrey. As a critical craft scholar I do not presume to have a full handle on the rich complexity of critical heritage scholarship. What I would say is that in this case study I have found where heritage, architecture, craft and the decorative meet. Within the funding landscape of this Compton site, there is a seam of research worth examining in more depth for what it may offer these discourses – in practice and scholarship.

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was funded by grants from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) with additional funding provided through a grant in support of research from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Provost Office at Concordia University.

Notes 1

These include the Grade I listed Watts Mortuary Chapel (see note 16) and the Grade II listed Watts’s Artists Home and Art Gallery (see note 17). ‘Listing’ is the term given to the practice of listing buildings, scheduling monuments, registering parks, gardens and battlefields, and protecting wreck sites on the National Heritage List for England. A Listed Building is one that is recognized as being of national importance. Buildings with listed status are recorded on an official register called the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) [https:// historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/]. Buildings listed on the register are legally protected from being demolished, extended or significantly altered without special permission from the local planning authority. [Historic England: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/whatis-designation/].

217

Craft and Heritage 2

J. E. Tunbridge, G. J. Ashworth, and B. J. Graham, ‘Decennial Reflections on A Geography of Heritage (2000)’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, no. 4 (2013): 365. DOI:10.1080/ 13527258.2012.695038.

3

Kim Christensen, ‘Ideas versus Things: The Balancing Act of Interpreting Historic House Museums’, International Journal of Heritage Studies (2011): 154.

4

For more on the home arts movement, see Janice Helland, British and Irish Home Arts and Industries 1880–1914: Marketing Craft, Making Fashion (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007).

5

As listed by Russell Staiff in ‘Heritage and the Visual Arts’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research, eds. Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (Palgrave, 2015).

6

For this earlier work, see E. C. Paterson, ‘Decoration and Desire in the Watts Chapel, Compton: Narratives of Gender, Class and Colonialism’, Gender & History 17, no. 3 (November 2005): 714–36. And for a more recent analysis, see E. C. Paterson, ‘Gifted Design: Imperial Benevolence in the Needlework of Mary Seton Watts’, in Agency and Design, eds. J. Potvin and M. E. Marchand (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

7

The 2004 re-hang of the Watts Gallery’s permanent collection to mark the centenary of G. F. Watts’s death was the last show before this closure.

8

See, E. C. Paterson, ‘Tracing Craft: Labour, Creativity, and Sustainability in the Home Arts Movement’ in a special issue on Identity, Craft and Marketing for Journal of Canadian Art History, XXXIX (Fall 2019) and E. C. Paterson, ‘Crafting Empire: Intersections of Irish and Canadian Women’s History’ in Journal of Canadian Art History, eds. K. Huneault and J. Anderson, XXXIV:2 (2013), 243–68.

9

Tim Winter & Emma Waterton, ‘Critical Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, no. 6 (2013): 530. DOI:10.1080/13527258.2013.818572.

10 Emma Waterton and Steve Watson, eds. ‘Heritage as a Focus of Research: Past, Present and New Directions’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research (Palgrave, 2015). 11 A view supported in the lengthy biography by his wife, M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts. Annals of an Artist’s Life (London: Macmillan, 1912). The 2002 Draft of the HLF Watts Gallery Extension and Restoration Grant application is held at the Watts Archive, Compton, Surrey, UK. 12 The HLF advisor thought this would lead to ‘improved visitor experience’. There is evidence of considerable mentoring by the HLF (or perhaps direction) suggesting their claim to be a ‘responsive and collaborative funder’ may be accurate. [Heritage Lottery Fund: https://www. heritagefund.org.uk]. 13 Project Planning Grant (PPG), HLF Grant Application, 2004, Heritage Lottery Fund Archive. Also held at the Watts Archive, Compton, Surrey. 14 Heritage Lottery Fund, Strategic Plan from 2002–2007 [https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/ sites/default/files/media/corporate/hlfstrategicplan_2002to2007.pdf]. 15 Letter of support for the Hope Project from Sue Doughty Liberal MP for Guildford, Hope Project, HLF Grant application, 2006, Heritage Lottery Fund Archive. 16 See note 1. The Grade I listed Chapel means it meets the criteria for a site ‘of exceptional interest, of the highest significance’ [Historic England: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/ what-is-designation/]. See also, The List [https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/]. 17 The Grade II listed artists’ home and art gallery means these meet the criteria for sites of ‘particular interest, warranting every effort to preserve it’ [Historic England: https:// historicengland.org.uk/listing/what-is-designation/].

218

Crafting Civic Engagement? 18 The Chapel has also been brought into the fold, so to speak, through a long-term lease of the building, which belongs to and has been maintained by the Compton Parish Council, to the Watts Gallery Trust as of 2014 [Watts Archives]. 19 Limnerslease – Saving the Studios, HLF Grant application, 2011–2012, Heritage Lottery Fund Archive. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Her own Word in the Pattern (London: William H. Ward & Co., 1904) has stood alone as the only interpretation of the complex symbols depicted in the Chapel until recently – however these more recent texts list references without much critical enquiry into their use in this context. 23 M. S. Watts Diary (Watts Archive). This diary has been transcribed recently by Desna Greenhow as The Diary of Mary Watts, 1887–1904: Victorian Progressive and Artistic Visionary (Lund Humphries, 2016). 24 Limnerslease – Saving the Studios, 2011–12. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Laurajane Smith and Emma Waterton, ‘The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage,’ International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, no. 1-2(2010): 5. DOI:10.1080/13527250903441671. 28 Smith and Waterton, ‘The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage,’ 6. 29 Ibid., 8. 30 Ibid., 11. 31 Ibid., 8. 32 References to these are found in the Minutes of the Compton Parish Council, the Watts Archive letters and M. S. Watts’s own Diary, Journal, Commonplace Book and Newspaper Clipping Book. 33 My suggestions here have benefitted from the case study presented by Karen Excell in ‘Community Consultation and the Redevelopment of Manchester Museum’s Ancient Egypt Galleries’ which offers ways to creatively engage the theme of equality of representation in cultural ownership, in Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration, eds. Viv Golding and Wayne Modest (London, Bloomsbury, 2013), 133. 34 Smith and Waterton, ‘The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage,’ 12. 35 As elaborated on by Tom Crook in ‘Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England’, The Journal of Modern Craft 2, no. 1 (March 2009): 26. DOI:10.2752/174967809X416242.

219

220

CHAPTER 13 CRAFT AS PERFORMANCE IN CHINA’S PORCELAIN HERITAGE CAPITAL

Maris Gillette

The potter, a 75-year-old man, was seated by his wheel, a large flat circle of stone sunk into a small pit. He grabbed a long stick beside him, inserted it into a depression on the wheel and set it spinning. It was a chill winter day, readily perceptible because the wooden workshop, a single-storey structure with drying racks stacked under the rafters, had walls on only three sides. A large mound of clay, stiff from the cold, was centred on the wheel. The potter dipped his hands into a basin of hot water on the floor next to him and began to throw. A bowl quickly took form as he compressed the clay between his fingers while the wheel spun. He finished the bowl with a rubber rib, pinched it off the hump of clay, and set it on a plank in front of him. He threw another bowl. Then another. And another. The wheel kept spinning, requiring no further propulsion. After five bowls, the potter threw a vase in the shape of a double gourd, a form that required even more skill and dexterity. Pinching it off the hump, he then turned to the small group of visitors watching him, one of whom wielded a video camera. He asked: ‘Is that enough?’ This short interaction, lasting no more than ten minutes, took place in late December 2008 at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, one of the best known and most visited heritage sites in Jingdezhen, a city often called China’s porcelain capital. I was the person with the camera. I had paid the potter 200 yuan for permission to video; a clip of him at work opens my documentary Broken Pots Broken Dreams.1 After I concurred that he had thrown ‘enough’, the potter took the double gourd vase form and discarded it on a pile of clay that would be reprocessed and reused. In other words, the potter’s craftsmanship was a performance, not a way to make pots (Plate 25). How ‘the traditional porcelain making craftsmanship of Jingdezhen’, to quote from the Intangible Cultural Heritage nomination that China submitted to UNESCO in 2010, came to take on value as a virtuoso performance distinct from production is the subject of this chapter.2 The Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum was the location in Jingdezhen where such performances of craftsmanship took place most frequently during my field research from 2003 to 2010, but it was by no means the only place where they happened. Outside the museum, I attended performances of ‘traditional porcelain making’ at gala openings for private housing estates and new municipal buildings, activities organized for visiting international artists, and the city’s annual Ceramics Fair. Sometimes these craft demonstrations were accompanied by music, drum or dance performances. To be sure, ceramists used craft (and non-craft) techniques to make porcelain wares all

Craft and Heritage

Figure 13.1  A trimmer at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2004 over the city. Yet the craft of porcelain-making had also become a spectacle, valued in its own right. In a city that had been a large-scale manufacturing centre for at least six centuries, this was a striking development (Figure 13.1).

Performance, heritage and craft ‘Performance’ in the social science literature typically refers to an activity that is culturally marked or ‘staged’.3 Neither skill nor sincerity need be at stake, although scholars have analysed social and cultural performances in these terms.4 More central is that ‘performance’ indicates a distinctive, non-everyday meaning-making domain, set apart in time and space, with an audience.5 Because performances have an audience, all are spectacles to some degree, collective experiences that offer ‘performers’ and viewers the opportunity to engage with cultural symbols. In our era, heritage and craft are culturally marked and set off from the mundane, giving them a performative dimension. That which is designated as heritage and/or craft is differentiated from the ordinary objects, places and practices that are part of the conduct of our daily affairs. Under modernity (if not also in earlier eras), heritage is predicated on rupture and loss, the sense that something – a place, a building, a relic, a machine, a cultural activity – requires ‘saving’.6 A similar narrative of disappearance 222

Craft as Performance in China

and rescue characterizes discussions of craft.7 One could argue that the social, cultural and technological changes of industrialization created both heritage and craft, at least as those terms are used today. Craft skills that have been officially identified as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) are endowed with an additional layer of differentiation from the ordinary. In ICH discourse, ‘traditional craft skills’ are valuable as an activity and kind of knowledge, in the same way that rituals, festive events and the performing arts are valuable.8 Craft skills as ICH are an end in themselves, a performance rather than a means of production. UNESCO adds that aspects of this value relate to how ICH in all its forms manifests collective and national identities and shows ‘human creativity’.9 While the social processes that have created heritage, craft and ICH may have been motivated by a sense of cultural value and historical loss, their performative quality enables their deployment to generate economic value. The vignette with which I opened this chapter is a case in point. Economic value for the city was generated through the potter’s performance of craft, by attracting tourists; the museum, by generating revenues from ticket sales; and the potter, who took home his salary plus the occasional extra cash from ‘private clients’ like me. At other performances I witnessed in Jingdezhen, craft skills created economic value: for real estate developers, who invited artists to demonstrate their skills at gala openings for housing estates for sale; private owners of porcelain factories, who used skilled performances of craft to gain revenue from tourism in addition to ceramics sales; and entrepreneurs in the hospitality sector, who offered craft performances as a benefit to paying guests in their establishments. Writing about heritage activities in rural Zhejiang, Marina Svensson has observed that China’s central government has been joined by a number of other actors in defining and managing heritage.10 We could add that other actors have also joined the government in profiting from heritage performances of craft skills. The creation of economic value is, in fact, an important reason why the Chinese government became involved in defining and managing heritage, including ICH and ‘traditional craft skills’, in the first place.

Jingdezhen as industrial centre Jingdezhen is famous for the size, scope and quality of its porcelain production. Located in Jiangxi Province, the city became known as the ‘porcelain capital’ during the fourteenth century.11 At that time, and for five centuries thereafter, local ceramists used craft technologies organized in a highly specialized division of labour to manufacture porcelain. This production method allowed them to supply large quantities of highquality porcelain to the imperial court and consumers around the world. In China, the name ‘Jingdezhen’ is synonymous with porcelain. Although many Europeans and North Americans have not heard of Jingdezhen, they know its famous wares, particularly its blue-and-white porcelain which travelled all over the world. The city was a craft manufacturing giant through to the early-nineteenth century, when its dominance over the ceramics trade was challenged by the mechanical production methods, size 223

Craft and Heritage

and innovation of European ceramics industries. Mechanically produced ceramics manufactured in Europe and Japan, and later in foreign-owned factories in China itself, outsold Jingdezhen porcelain in domestic and international markets, leading to a serious economic decline during the first half of the twentieth century.12 After the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, officials prioritized restoring, expanding and mechanizing Jingdezhen’s porcelain production. A massive investment of state resources built up a huge industry that used sophisticated technologies to mass-produce decorative, daily use, architectural, industrial and sanitary porcelain.13 By 1982, Jingdezhen’s porcelain industry included twenty-three state-run and twentynine collective enterprises that produced everything needed to make porcelain, from china stone to decals, and massive quantities of finished wares. Among the nation’s ceramic manufacturing sites, Jingdezhen was the top earner of foreign currency.14 A decade later, the central government’s Light Industry Ministry designated Jingdezhen as the most important ceramics industry in the nation.15 During this long history of porcelain manufacturing, the final product – the finished ware – was the focus. Craft and mechanical technologies were both a means to an end, a way to make pots. Craft and machine technologies were adopted and abandoned in service of producing greater quantities and better quality of porcelain. As an activity in its own right, potting was low status. During the imperial period, on those rare occasions when Chinese elites bothered to notice the potter’s craft, they described it as dirty work.16 After Jingdezhen mechanized, potting by machine was still considered dirty. In particular, the tasks of operating the machines at the front of the production line, through which pots were formed, were called ‘bitter, dirty, tiring’ (苦脏累) (Plate 26).

The political conditions of craft as performance China’s Reform and Opening policies of the late twentieth century established the conditions of possibility for potting and other craft skills to become performances in their own right, rather than simply means of production. Four key national decisions enabled this change. Two occurred during the 1980s: the policy to encourage private enterprise as an economic activity and the decision to join international governing institutions, including UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention in 1985. The third was an outcome of the first two: the mid-1990s decision to privatize the state sector. The fourth responded to the economic developments catalysed by privatizing the state sector: the 2000s policy to ‘emphasize the function of tourism as an economic industry … providing employment, promoting Chinese culture and building the socialist spiritual civilization’.17 As is well known, China’s national leadership decided to permit private economic activity in addition to the state-managed economy during the 1980s. The People’s Republic had developed rapidly during the first three decades of Communist rule, with dramatic improvements in standards of living, health, levels of education and infrastructure. Nevertheless, by the late 1970s, China’s economy was stagnant and the country had relatively few trading partners. Carefully managed private market activity, 224

Craft as Performance in China

coupled with a new openness to Western capitalist nations, were seen as ways to kickstart the national economy and facilitate further development. For the first fifteen years of Reform and Opening, China continued to support a large state and collective sector, but allowed, and then encouraged, private economic activity. When Reform and Opening began, people in Jingdezhen who had ‘bad class backgrounds’ (such as ‘capitalist’) and were accused of political crimes such as having ‘overseas connections’, or who had illegally migrated to the city (Chinese citizens were not allowed to migrate at will from countryside to city, or from city to city), were refused jobs in the state and collective porcelain industry. Prior to the 1980s, these people had very few options for legal work and many supported themselves through odd jobs and barter. After private enterprise became legal, however, some went into private porcelain manufacturing. They used craft technologies to make small batches of art porcelain. This happened for two reasons. First, the capital costs to set up a small workshop for craft production were low. Second, art porcelain, and specifically porcelain made in a traditional aesthetic, was the main area where Jingdezhen’s state and collective sector was underproducing. In short, individuals who had been denied access to what at that time were considered good jobs in the (mechanized) porcelain industry turned to craft methods to make porcelain art objects to sell privately. This began a revival of these skills in Jingdezhen18 (Figure 13.2).

Figure 13.2  A craft ‘performer’ at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2016 225

Craft and Heritage

The second key policy that laid the groundwork for the emergence of craft as performance was China’s decision to extend its foreign political engagement beyond socialist bloc partners to Western capitalist countries and institutions. Although the People’s Republic had taken initial steps to reposition itself in international politics during the 1970s, when the president of the United States was invited to visit China, the country deepened and broadened its participation in global governance and trade during the 1980s. A new preservation-oriented position on traditional Chinese culture, which Communist leaders had previously tried to eradicate, was among the many measures that national leaders took which made China more appealing to the international community.19 Rather than castigating China’s past, and its material traces as ‘feudal’ and ‘backward’, Chinese leaders deployed a new discourse of ‘protecting’ what was now termed ‘the splendid historical and cultural legacy of the Chinese nation’, to quote the 1982 law on the protection of cultural relics.20 When China signed the World Heritage Convention in 1985, UNESCO’s notion of heritage focused on the historic and the monumental.21 In keeping with this understanding, China nominated sites associated with its imperial past to the World Heritage list: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, the Buddhist caves at Dunhuang and the sacred mountain Mount Tai (all added 1987). These nominations, like China’s 1982 cultural relics law and official pronouncements from the highest level of leadership, established China’s (official) heritage as imperial and traditional. Municipal officials in Jingdezhen followed this direction from the central government, designating historic kiln sites as preservation areas and rebuilding structures from the imperial period, including a pagoda associated with the former imperial manufactory and the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum.22 These measures were responses to the national policy to identify and protect cultural relics; they were not linked to tourism or efforts to secure overseas investment, as was the case in other parts of China.23 Jingdezhen had no tourism to speak of prior to the late 1990s. Also significant is that only sites and structures linked to non-mechanized, craft porcelain production were identified as heritage. Those linked to Jingdezhen’s mechanized industrialization were ignored. In 1994, China’s national leadership adopted the third policy that contributed to the development of craft performances: they decided that the central government would no longer invest in, or give loans to, the vast majority of China’s state and collective industries. Along the country’s south-eastern coast, in particular, private enterprise was flourishing; this was undoubtedly a factor influencing the central government’s decision. In Jingdezhen, where the state and collective sector dominated, private economic activity had grown more slowly. According to official records, 254,900 people were employed in the state and collective sector in 1993, as opposed to 18,400 who worked in the private sector.24 The 1994 decision to privatize the state and collective sector caused thousands of factories across the nation to go bankrupt and close and 28.5 million people who worked in manufacturing to lose their jobs.25 Manufacturing sites all over the country were affected, with places like Jingdezhen, where the entire city was dominated by a single 226

Craft as Performance in China

state-managed industry, hit especially hard. The output, quality and sales earnings from Jingdezhen porcelain fell so sharply that in 2004 the central government withdrew the city’s title of ‘porcelain capital’ and awarded it to the much younger Chaozhou ceramics industry.26 One of the officials responsible for the decision told the media, ‘it would be irresponsible if we gave the title to Jingdezhen, ignoring the changes and development within the industry. Jingdezhen is not what it was and is on the decline’.27 Jingdezhen’s deindustrialization caused labour power to flood into craft manufacturing, with its low capital costs. Large numbers of locals turned to making art porcelain, both replicas of antique wares and more contemporary styles.28 The sheer volume of people who had similar skills and made similar wares created an extremely competitive ceramics market. Some entrepreneurs responded by producing larger quantities of wares using cheaper methods like slip-casting. Others tried to sell to a niche market, consumers who were attracted by the promise of ‘hand-crafted’ art. As I describe below, some entrepreneurs went so far as to throw wares on stick-spun potter’s wheels, fire pots in wood-burning kilns and paint surface decoration with brushes of rabbit hair instead of synthetic fibres.29 The final policy contributing to the possibility of potting as performance was the central government’s decision to promote tourism. Beginning in the mid-1990s, officials implemented policies to encourage Chinese citizens to take leisure trips. In 1995, they mandated the two-day weekend and built twelve resorts for holiday travellers.30 In 1999 officials established three week-long holidays. During the 2000s, Chinese leaders began stressing the importance of tourism to the national economy.31 The central government paid for infrastructure improvements and sponsored tourist trips for factories and government offices.32 Tourism, national leaders stated, was ‘a key industry in the national economy’, an important tool for poverty reduction and a path toward (re)development.33 Jingdezhen was one of many locations that received central government money to develop tourism in the 2000s. Local ceramists and officials told me that the central government provided 300 million yuan to repair roads, reconstruct the city and ‘preserve the porcelain capital’. Some of this cash went to enhancing the heritage sites that had been designated in the 1980s. For example, the Hutian Ancient Kiln Site, a tenth-century kiln that went defunct in the Ming dynasty, was labelled as national heritage in 1982. When I first visited in 2003, visitor facilities were rudimentary. The exhibition area had the atmosphere of an archaeological excavation pit, with few labels and no didactics. By 2010, officials had redeveloped the Hutian Ancient Kiln Site with new buildings constructed in a quasi-traditional style, attractive landscaping and restaged exhibits. The Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum was another heritage site that received an infusion of money, including to restore its wood-burning kilns. From 2002 onwards, tourists at the Ancient Kiln could pay a fee to try their hand at potting with traditional tools. Enthusiastic tourists watching potters at the museum, and giving potting a go themselves, were featured on state media to promote tourism during China’s ‘golden week’.34 During special events, such as the annual ceramics fair, officials arranged for musical performances on porcelain instruments to take place at the museum too. 227

Craft and Heritage

Tourism grew exponentially. By 2012, Jingdezhen’s tourism generated 12.52 billion yuan in revenue, while the ceramics industry generated 2.88 billion yuan, less than a quarter as much.35 The number of visitors increased from 100,000 tourists in 2000 to 25.8 million in 201436 (Figure 13.3). Each of these national policy decisions contributed to the development of craft skills as spectacle rather than simply production method. The decision to allow, and then require, locals to engage in private economic activity caused the return of craft methods to an industrial centre dominated by mechanized manufacture. Locals used craft skills to make pots because this was a mode of production suited to small-scale, household-based economic activity and required minimal investment to start up. When Jingdezhen’s large factories went bankrupt between 1995 and 1998, the amount of mechanized porcelain production dropped sharply, and many residents got involved in low-technology ceramics manufacturing. The national policy of preserving and protecting China’s cultural relics, which focused on the imperial past, led Jingdezhen officials to identify as heritage historical sites of porcelain production, where manufacturing was done with hand methods. The re-evaluation of what could be called ‘traditional’ Chinese culture at the top levels of government enabled a similar process on local levels, which in Jingdezhen included what China’s 2010 ICH nomination called ‘traditional porcelain making craftsmanship’. Finally, the central government’s decision to push tourism as China’s economic path forward set the course for Jingdezhen’s economic restructuring after deindustrialization. A city famous

Figure 13.3  Tourists at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2016 228

Craft as Performance in China

for porcelain production retooled to become a city known for porcelain heritage. In order for tourism to become a significant part of the municipal economy, Jingdezhen had to have attractive heritage sites and experiences to offer visitors.

The contributions of pioneering entrepreneurs On the local level, two innovators played key roles in pushing forward craft’s transformation from ‘mere’ production technology to staged virtuoso performance. Recognizing that traditional craft methods added value to pots was an important first step. Here, the scholar and artist Luo Xuezheng was an early pioneer. A second key development was realizing that heritage performances enhanced Jingdezhen’s attractiveness to visitors, including those who came to the porcelain city to make pots. Here the artist and entrepreneur Li Jianshen was a significant innovator. These two entrepreneurs undertook what at the time were daring experiments with craft that subsequently inspired many others, enabling the rise of potting as performance. Luo Xuezheng was a professor at the Jingdezhen Vocational University when I first met him in 2005. He was both an artist (a ceramics painter and sculptor) and a researcher (Chinese ceramics history) and, as he explained to me during a long interview, had been a porcelain entrepreneur during the 1980s. In 1984, Luo was researching Chinese ceramics history in Beijing when he met an exporter who persuaded him that there was a market for replicas of antique Chinese porcelain. At the time, Luo was a state-sector employee, working at a Jingdezhen research centre that also produced wares. He tried to persuade his employer that the research centre should produce historic replicas, but the higher-ups were not interested. Thus, Luo and four or five others opened their own private workshop. Luo and his partners’ concern differed from the (few) other workshops that were privately producing porcelain in some key respects. First, Luo and his compatriots had stable day-jobs in the state sector. The workshop that they opened to make antique replicas was an afterwork activity. While they got into business because they thought they could make money from historic replicas, they did not need to sell porcelain to support themselves. This meant that they could take risks where others would not. Second, Luo had a specialized education and an interest in high-quality replicas, that was both entrepreneurial and scholarly. He and his partners studied archaeological evidence and historical records to determine what a workshop that mimicked traditional craft production should be like. They decided to use obsolete technologies, such as the stick-spun potter’s wheel, old-fashioned trimming knives and a wood-burning kiln, to make porcelain replicas (Figure 13.4). This was a major departure from what other entrepreneurs were doing, who used electric wheels, coal-fired kilns and other modern tools to fabricate pots. Finally, Luo and his partners only hired ceramists who had learned to pot and paint before the 1950s to work in their workshop. These men had embodied knowledge of the craft methods that they were now being asked to use again, in service of creating porcelain copies of historic vessels that Luo and his partners wanted to be as ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ as possible.37 229

Craft and Heritage

Figure 13.4  A craft ‘performer’ prepares to fire the wood-burning kiln Luo only ran the historic replicas workshop for a short time. When the national government decreed that state-sector employees could not open after-hours private enterprises and keep their jobs, Luo and his partners sold the workshop to one of their private employees. As should be clear from my account, Luo never staged craft performances for audiences. Nevertheless, his daring decision to produce replicas of antique Chinese porcelain using obsolete technologies and craftsmen experienced in their deployment was a key move towards craft as performance in Jingdezhen. Unlike other early private porcelain entrepreneurs, Luo was convinced that traditional craftsmanship added value to the object he produced. Luo believed that how one manufactured a pot affected the final product, and that craft technologies and skilled craftsmen produced a ware that customers of distinction would pay more for. By behaving as if craft skills and technologies made a difference, Luo marked or ‘set off ’ these activities, giving them a performative quality. In his workshop, however, the audience did not see the activity itself, only its end result – a high-quality, handcrafted replica of an antique porcelain. In the late 1990s, the ceramic artist and founder of the Sanbao International Ceramic Art Institute, Li Jianshen, pioneered the provision of heritage experiences, including performances of craft skills, to audiences of visitors. Li studied ceramic art at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute during the 1980s, and then attended Alfred University in New York in the early 1990s. While living in New York, Li encountered the concept of an artistic residency, a phenomenon he found ‘eye-opening’, as he later told a reporter.38 230

Craft as Performance in China

Li decided he would offer artistic residencies in Jingdezhen. He purchased three of four houses in a small village near the city in 1993 and redesigned them into the Sanbao International Ceramic Art Institute, an artist’s colony that he opened in 1998 (Plate 27). Sanbao was a set of beautiful wooden structures nestled among forested hills and rice fields, where visitors could hear the sounds of stream-powered water hammers crushing porcelain stone in the distance. As Li explained to me in 2003, his goal was to preserve local heritage as a ‘living tradition’ rather than a ‘museum piece’. Li wanted Sanbao to give visitors a ‘nostalgic’ experience of a ‘way of life that people have had for 1,000 years’, while simultaneously providing modern studio and residential spaces for guests who wanted to make art. In addition, he hoped to help local officials envision ‘an alternative way of developing Jingdezhen’.39 Rather than tearing down old structures and replacing them with high rises, private developers and government officials could preserve Jingdezhen’s special features to make the city an attractive destination. As a hospitality entrepreneur, Li put his own political influence and money towards this goal. He had been able to stop construction on a development adjacent to Sanbao when I first met him. Several years later, in 2013, he paid $27,300 USD to purchase four waterpowered hammers for pulverizing porcelain stone in the vicinity of Sanbao which were going to be demolished.40 The stream-powered crushers were essential components of the Sanbao ‘experience’. Offering space and facilities for artistic creation was crucial to Li’s idea of offering artistic residencies, as was putting visiting artists in touch with local ceramists who would assist them to make works. However, providing encounters with heritage and craft skills was also key to Sanbao’s identity. Li exerted himself to ensure that the experience of living and working at the colony included heritage performances. For example, during my short visits in 2003 and 2004, Li took the guests at Sanbao (and me as the accompanying anthropologist) to see the excavation site of the imperial kiln, the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, the Hutian Ancient Kiln Site, the former Gaoling porcelain clay mine and a historic commercial kiln in the nearby village of Raonan. He also included a visit to a porcelain workshop near the colony, where his guests were allowed to wander in and watch the ceramists at work. Since this workshop specialized in making giant wares, the purpose of this trip was not buying pots. Li did connect his resident artists with the workshop if the visitors wanted to work on monumental pieces. The purpose of the factory tour, however, was performative, a spectacle for his guests. Back at Sanbo, Li organized other performances, including a musical concert by members of Jingdezhen’s porcelain orchestra, and a demonstration of craft methods by local ceramists (Figure 13.5). Li was a frontrunner in offering tourism and heritage experiences to visitors. His Sanbao concept was well under way when municipal officials received central government funds to ‘preserve the porcelain capital’ and develop tourism. Providing Sanbao residents with opportunities to watch the spectacle of craftsmen at work was part of how Li created the colony’s image and sold residencies. To be clear, craft was not entirely detached from production at Sanbao. Most if not all of the guests were studio ceramists or artists and some would later employ the potters they watched to help them 231

Craft and Heritage

Figure 13.5  A potter performing his craft at Sanbao, 2004

make works. Still, craft performances at Sanbao also had a value distinct, and were sometimes completely detached, from the production of craft objects.

Craft performances in Jingdezhen In 2006, ‘the traditional porcelain making craftsmanship of Jingdezhen’ was designated ICH of Jiangxi Province.41 In 2009, these heritage craft skills were added to China’s national list. The following year, China submitted the nomination to UNESCO. There it has languished in a backlog file, according to UNESCO’s website, along with at least 141 other ICH nominations from countries around the world. 2010 was also the year I completed my field research in Jingdezhen. Virtuoso craft performances were an established part of the city’s ceramic heritage. Porcelain enterprise owners established relationships with tour companies, who would then bring buses of tourists to watch employees using craft production methods to make pots. 232

Craft as Performance in China

Many small-scale ceramics producers tried to make the craft aspects of their production visible, for example by painting overglaze enamels on the shop floor. In addition to being incentives to attract visitors, who then might buy a pot, craft heritage performances were valuable activities in their own right and could be completely detached from ceramics production. Municipal officials included craft performances at gala openings for new buildings and real estate developers staged craft demonstrations during open houses in the hopes of attracting more visitors. Craft as performance was part of Jingdezhen’s economic lifeblood, a value-producing activity that could be harnessed to the economic and social needs of a range of actors in the city. As I noted near the opening of this chapter, a sense of loss and the imperative to ‘rescue’ are part of what makes heritage and craft culturally marked categories, staged ‘performances’ distinct from everyday realities and the ways we usually do things. Narratives of loss and disappearance frequently characterize heritage and craft discourses, suggesting that both are remnants of an earlier moment, in some sense destroyed by what are taken to be ‘later’ technological and social changes. Craft technologies certainly predated mechanized production in Jingdezhen’s porcelain industry. They are also, however, the ‘after’ of industrialization, ‘later’ than mechanized production. Craft manufacturing and craft skills as virtuoso performances need no rescuing in twenty-first-century Jingdezhen. They are central to the city’s brand and tourism sector. Much more in need of rescue in 2010 was, in fact, Jingdezhen’s mechanized industrial heritage.

Notes 1

Maris Boyd Gillette, Broken Pots Broken Dreams: Working in Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Industry, (Haverford, PA: n.p., 2009).

2

UNESCO. N.d. Intangible Cultural Heritage Backlog Files. UNESCO Intangible cultural heritage website. https://ich.unesco.org/en/backlog-files-00554?select_country=00045&select_ type=all&select_cycle=all#table_cand.

3

Bethan Coupland and Nikolas Coupland, ‘The Authenticating Discourses of Mining Heritage Tourism in Cornwall and Wales’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 18, no. 4 (2014): 495–517; Laurel Kendell, ‘Intangible Traces and Material Things: The Performance of Heritage Craft’, Acta Koreana 17, no. 2 (2014): 537–55; Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Post-Industrial City (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

4

Eeva Kesküla, ‘Reproducing Labor in the Estonian Industrial Heritage Museum’, Journal of Baltic Studies 44, no. 2 (2013): 229–48; Phillip Xie, Industrial Heritage Tourism (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2015), 121–44.

5 Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 21–3. 6

Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches, (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 26–8; Marina Svensson, ‘In the Ancestors Shadow: Cultural Heritage Contestations in Chinese Villages’, in Working Papers in Contemporary Asian Studies 17 (Lund, Sweden: Center for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University 2006), 1.

233

Craft and Heritage 7

Kendell, ‘Intangible Traces and Material Things’, 544; Tik-sang Liu, ‘“Intangible Cultural Heritage”: New Concept, New Expectations’, in Intangible Cultural Heritage and Local Communities in East Asia (Hong Kong: South China Research Center, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, 2011), 15–29.

8

Liu, ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’, 23–4.

9

See Kendell, ‘Intangible Traces and Material Things’; Liu, ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’.

10 Marina Svensson, ‘In the Ancestors Shadow’, 3. 11 Zilin Ying, ed. 日用瓷工藝 [The Art of Daily Use Porcelain] (Nanchang, Jiangxi: Nanchang Linyun Publishers, 1988), 4. 12 Maris Boyd Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 29–41. 13 Ibid., 43–64. 14 Ibid., 80–3. 15 Chen Changgeng, Feng Shiyang, and Wu Rensheng, eds. 1993. 景德鎮年鉴 1991–1992 (Jingdezhen Yearbook 1991–1992). Beijing: Chinese Communist Party Central Party School Press. 16 Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 14. 17 David Airey and King Chong, ‘National Policy-Makers for Tourism in China’, Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 2 (2010): 303. 18 Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 77–85. 19 Svensson, ‘In the Ancestors Shadow’, 1–60. 20 National People’s Congress. n.d. Law of the People’s Republic of China on Protection of Cultural Relics. Database of laws and regulations. http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/ Law/2007-12/13/content_1384015.htm. 21 Harrison, Heritage, 42–67. 22 Jingdezhen City Records Compilation Committee, ed. 1989. 景德鎮市志略 [Brief Records of Jingdezhen City]. Shanghai: Chinese Dictionary Publishers, 329; Wang Zongda, Yin Chengguo, eds. 1994. 現代景德鎮陶瓷經濟史 1949-1993 [Modern Economic History of Jingdezhen 1949-1993]. Beijing: Zhongguo Shuji Publications, 456; Jianshu Zhou, 景德鎮史 話 [Speaking of Jingdezhen’s History] (Shanghai: People’s Publisher, 1989), 193. 23 Svensson, ‘In the Ancestors Shadow’, 1–60. 24 Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 82. 25 Mark Frazier, ‘State-sector Shrinkage and Workforce Reduction in China’, European Journal of Political Economy, 22 (2006): 435–51. 26 Fa Jian, ‘The Glory of China: The Nation’s Staggering Porcelain Capital Epitomizes the Transition from a State Planned Economy. But It Seeks Salvation’, Beijing Weekly 47, no. 38 (2004): 40–3; Lan Na, ‘Jingdezhen: Still China’s Porcelain Capital?’ CRI Online, 7 August 2004, http://english.cri.cn/1174/2004–8-7/[email protected]. 27 Jian, ‘The Glory of China’, 2004. 28 Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 98–111. 29 Ibid., 104–8. 30 Travis Klingberg and Tim Oakes, ‘Producing Exemplary Consumers: Tourism and Leisure Culture in China’s Nation-building Project’, in China in and beyond the Headlines, eds. Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 195–213; Airey and Chong, ‘National Policy-Makers for Tourism in China’, 295–314. 234

Craft as Performance in China 31 Ibid. 32 Matthias Schultz, ‘Mao’s Disneyland: “Red Tourism” Is Golden for Chinese Economy’. Spiegal Online 28 March 2013. http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-growth-ofred-tourism-in-communist-china-a-891353.html. 33 An Baijie, ‘Premier Says Tourism Push to Help Relieve Poverty’, China Daily 20 May 2016. http://english.gov.cn/premier/news/2016/05/20/content_281475353364215.htm. 34 China Global Television Network. 2013. ‘Tourists Flock to Jingdezhen, China’s Porcelain Capital’, CGTN China 24 7 October 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WqS95FbGwlE. 35 Hong Kong Trade Development Research. 2014. ‘Jingdezhen (Jiangxi) City Information’, HKTDC China Trade Research. http://china-trade-research.hktdc.com/business-news/article/ Fast-Facts/Jingdezhen-Jiangxi-City-Information/ff/en/1/1X000000/1X09VZCR.htm. 2 36 Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital, 116. 37 Author interview with Luo Xuezheng, 2005. 38 Peng Yining, ‘Preserving the Ancient Traditions’, China Watch 21 July 2014. http:// chinawatch.washingtonpost.com/2014/07/preserving_the_ancient_traditions/. 39 Author interview with Li Jianshen, 2003. 40 Peng Yining, ‘Preserving the Ancient Traditions’. 41 Baidu, 2019, 景德镇手工制瓷技艺 [Traditional porcelain making craftsmanship of Jingdezhen]. Baidu encyclopedia. https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%99%AF%E5%BE%B7% E9%95%87%E6%89%8B%E5%B7%A5%E5%88%B6%E7%93%B7%E6%8A%80%E8%89%BA.

235

236

CHAPTER 14 CRAFT NARRATIVES FROM HERITAGE SITES IN BUGANDA

Maureen Muwanga Senoga

Introduction Heritage sites are repositories of practices, beliefs and traditions that are part of the history of an ethnic or cultural group. Material culture housed in these sites demands an inquiry into the materiality, functionality, economic and cultural dimensions of the varied objects including crafts. As research objects, crafts embody rich but rarely documented stories told by the makers and those who have lived in the shadows of the respective heritage sites. Thus, the relationship between craft objects and heritage is fundamental to our understanding of the significance of material culture within a given society. Researchers have variously defined material culture to denote the physical objects (artefacts), resources (means of production, goods and products) and spaces (architectural structures and natural environs), that people use to distinguish their culture,1 but as part of their culture, individuals also appreciate and cultivate language, social habits and religion. While an artefact might begin simply as a physical item of necessity, over time it comes to represent nonmaterial and symbolic aspects of a culture. Available research on different objects such as rugs, tapestry and pottery indicates that nonmaterial (language, song, poetry) and symbolic (patterns, plant and animal images, nature) aspects of culture are in many instances embedded within all phases of the making of such objects from the outset.2 Building on previous research published as ‘Social Media Expressions of Ugandan Heritage Sites’, this chapter examines possible intersections of craft and heritage from the Kasubi Royal Tombs (KRT),3 inscribed on the UNESCO World heritage list in 20014 (Figure 14.1). It presents information from the Baganda about the creation, specific utilization and meanings of craft objects (such as baskets, mats, pots) valued by makers and users, and attempts to establish how craft work supports ethnic groups in constructing their own heritage. Through photographic representation of basketry, matweaving and pottery and from conversations with site custodians, there is an indication of craft as a field of contemporary and culturally relevant knowledge. Important to note is the centrality of the maker as cited in the Maker Movement Manifesto. ‘Making is fundamental to what it means to be human. We must make, create, and express ourselves to feel whole. There is something unique about making physical things. Things we make are like little pieces of us and seem to embody portions of our soul’.5 Therefore the relationship between craft and heritage, processes of making and usage, preservation, disposal and sustainability of materials, tools and technologies inform

Craft and Heritage

Figure 14.1  Kasubi Royal Tombs main building, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2001

ways in which craft objects become a basis for Indigenous identity, cultural expression and continuity of the cultural heritage of an ethnic group, in this case the Baganda. The Baganda, an ethnic group also referred to as Ganda,6 belong to the Bantu tribe, who are known for their cultural richness.7 They occupy Buganda, a central region where Uganda’s capital city Kampala is located and where the people speak Luganda8 (Figure 14.2). The Baganda ancestral structure comprises fifty-two clans, each with a particular duty to perform for the Kabaka (king) in the Buganda kingdom. The Baganda institutions are based on clan ancestry and Kabaka-dominated social systems, where Indigenous material culture takes centrestage. Earlier studies on Ganda art, Baganda material culture and bark-cloth making in Buganda support the argument that the Baganda express their culture through the use of objects abounding with meaning.9 Throughout this chapter, the selected crafts are treated as cultural artefacts created for specific purposes within the confines of a heritage site and amongst the community. A brief exploration of craft and heritage as complex terms, therefore, is paramount at this stage.

Craft and heritage convey culturally relevant knowledge Craft has been variously defined by different schools of thought, showing the complexity of meanings and interpretations attached to this term. The breadth of craft definition

238

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda

Figure 14.2  Geographical location of Buganda and the counties. The Kasubi Royal Tombs Heritage Site is located in Kyadondo county.

is not exhaustive but should be considered for deeper understanding of the term in its respective contexts. Hilary Jennings’s compendium of craft definitions within the UK includes that of The Crafts Council from 2001, which considers craft as ‘ … the designing and making of individual artefacts, encouraging the development of intellectual, creative and practical skills, visual sensitivity and a working knowledge of tools and materials’. Additionally, the Craft Occupational Standards Board (COSB) defines craft making as ‘an accepted body of skilled techniques learned over time, with materials worked by hand (albeit often using sophisticated hand tools and hand-controlled machinery and equipment)’.10 Further to craft bodies’ definitions, Jennings highlights that craft is ‘a calling requiring a special skill and knowledge, especially a manual art’, which goes some way in condensing the breadth of its potential meaning.11 Summing up craft production, she specifies that

239

Craft and Heritage

craft practice defies easy categorisation because it ranges from innovative work that is experimental both in terms of its vision and its use of material, to traditional craft that supports and preserves our cultural heritage. Craft covers a range of products from small portable items (jewelry, ceramics, and textiles) to architectural structures of considerable scale; exemplified by an engagement with material, form and function.12 Important to note is that craft objects are skill-based and require specialized knowledge of materials and their properties. Craft can thus be seen as a way of making things by hand as well as of thinking through the material being manipulated. In other words, crafts are ‘a dynamic process of learning and understanding through material experience’.13 In this chapter, I navigate the Indigenous materials of craft relating to hand skills and their manipulation to create serviceable items. The Scottish Arts Council definition is of relevance to the conversation about the Indigenous crafts in Buganda. Indigenous crafts are those crafts which have emerged from the culture of an area. They are part of a continuing tradition, with a style distinctive to that area. Indigenous crafts represent skills and trades originally acquired and practiced out of necessity – they are a product of functional life. Historically they reflect locally available materials and resources and are part of Scottish regional and national cultural identity. Contemporary practice of these crafts is based on received traditions, making them distinct from the innovative and expressive crafts developed through the art colleges.14 Additionally, the elements of craft practices, which are common with makers have been identified by Jennings as: ‘Understanding of and engagement with materials; The application of haptic skills and hand-controlled tools; The honing of skills learnt over time; One-off or relatively small batch rather than mass production; Maker impact on conception, design and aesthetics of finished product; Cultural embedding of finished product’.15 These aspects reflect both the practice and the product but are more rooted in the practice and are linked to Indigenous peoples globally. In Buganda, for instance, artefacts are material evidence that the Baganda have survived as an ethnic group and cultural entity.16 Heritage is sustained by craft and the preservation of the skills that produce it, and makers who understand and practice various historical skills play a significant role in preserving and maintaining craft practices that are valued by generations. Baskets, mats and pots are Indigenous crafts that are part of continuing historical practices with a style distinctive to Buganda. At the intersection of craft making are forms of knowledge and skills that fortify heritage. Heritage, Jennings observes, is a comprehensive concept that consists of many diverse values, including cultural, natural, historical, architectural, archaeological, geological values. As a multifaceted concept, heritage reflects different ways of living and habits that are manifest in different eras and the society they produce. A well-preserved heritage enables communities to learn about their cultural history accurately and chronologically. 240

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda

Conservation of various craft objects within heritage sites is one way of salvaging cultures and ensuring the continuity of tradition, identity and skills of a given society.17 The 1972 World Heritage Convention categorized heritage into ‘cultural heritage’ (human activities and creations) and ‘natural heritage’ (based upon the legacy of natural evolution of the earth). Under cultural heritage, sites are described as ‘works of man or the combined works of nature and man, and areas including archaeological sites, which are of outstanding universal value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view’.18 This category is justified from an ‘aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view’ besides the ‘historic’ point of view,19 significant for the KRT and other heritage sites in Buganda. Subsequent sections in this chapter detail each craft and its importance within the Kasubi Royal Tombs, in existence from 1882 to 16 March 2010, when fire gutted the main tomb Muzibu Azaala Mpanga.20 Thereafter, master craftspeople were charged with replacing the thatched roof, mats, baskets and other objects that were burnt to ashes. The KRT site, owned by the Buganda Kingdom, is supervised by two key funders: the Uganda Government and UNESCO.21 By May 2011, the Uganda Government and UNESCO had completed the verification process for the contractors and signed an agreement for the tomb reconstruction. However, the Buganda Lukiiko (parliament) meetings to discuss the renovation progress reveal a delayed release of the fire report, which affected the reconstruction plans of the cultural site.22 According to Gabriel Opio, Minister of Gender, Labour and Social Development at the time, the reconstruction was expected to be completed by 2012 and the site would be inaugurated on 16 March 2012, the anniversary of the date of the arson.23 Nine years later, work is still ongoing. One of the concerns of the KRT traditional custodians was that the improvement of the visitor’s experience to the site could not be done without harming the intangible values of the KRT. In 2013, before reconstruction work started, intangible heritage practices that involved cultural norms and rituals were carried out. On 1 September 2019, Prince Junju, the Kabaka’s son, launched the final stage of restoration works at the KRT. This final phase involves roofing, furnishing both the inside and outside and the restoration of royal regalia. As described in a recent report, the thatching technique is incomparable with any other African or European thatching technique. Work on the ‘grass thatched roof resting on structural rings of palm tree fronds’ was subcontracted to the Engo (Leopard) and Engeye (Colobus monkey) clans, who are culturally charged with thatching and decorating all royal palaces and tombs.24 The royal tombs are a heritage site representative of other cultural and natural sites throughout the eighteen counties of Buganda that include shrines allied to Buganda history, politics and religion intrinsically linked to the Kabaka.25

Kasubi tombs: Repository for material culture The KRT renowned heritage site embodies material culture that reflects Indigenous identity, cultural expression and continuity of the culture and heritage of a particular ethnic group of Uganda, the Baganda.26 Located on Kasubi hill in Kampala, it is the burial 241

Craft and Heritage

ground for the four most recently departed kings (Ssekabaka) of Buganda kingdom: Mutesa I (1835–1884), Mwanga II (1867–1903), Daudi Chwa II (1896–1939) and Mutesa II (1924–1969). While the Kasubi tombs site was inscribed on the UNESCO World heritage list in 2001 as ‘a major example of an architectural achievement in organic materials, principally wood, thatch, reed, wattle and daub’,27 the submission also asserts that the physical features at the Kasubi tombs represent a fraction of the traditional life there.28 The rich intangible heritage of the whole site environment, including the function of the craft objects within the tombs and the practices required to make them, is also crucially important to the strong spiritual and social significance of the tombs’ continuity and hence their heritage value. The KRT site complex carries meanings invested with spiritual values related to the Ganda culture, which reflect the interaction between nature and culture and the interaction between the spirits and the living people.29 As part of the heritage of Indigenous groups, the transfer of craft technologies from generation to generation traces the history of the Baganda and is currently embedded within official heritage sites that are considered sacred, such as the Kasubi tombs. The crafts practised within and as part of the KRT represent skills and trades originally acquired and practised out of necessity, a product of functional life, involving locally available materials and resources that are familiar to the users and which form their cultural identity. The Indigenous knowledge of craft making, once believed to be a creative instinct among the Baganda, could also be traced to the settlement of these early migrants in the area comprised of present-day Uganda. Historically, skills of basketry, mat-weaving and pottery have been passed on from generation to generation. An early-twentieth-century Christian missionary provided historical information about the origin of mat-weaving. While the Baganda initially made mats from reeds, ‘[w]hen the Arabs and the Swahili traders appeared they began to make mats for themselves from plaited fronds of wild palm-leaves. The Baganda soon learnt the art of neat mat making’.30 The Arabs referred to in this account arrived in Uganda in the mid-nineteenth century as traders.31 Mats for the KRT are typically woven by women,32 who live in the houses surrounding the KRT courtyard and whose role is to preserve the living cultural practices and ensure continuity.33 To authenticate such data, I turn to two residents of the KRT: a grandchild referred to as Muzukulu and a builder, Wabula akayole, who have both lived in the shadows of the KRT and who furnish stories about the three crafts regarded as culturally significant in Buganda.34

Mat-weaving supports ethnic groups in constructing heritage Custodian One, a Muzukulu (grandchild), has lived in the confines of KRT site with his grandmother (heir to one of the Kabaka’s widows) since he was nine years old. Having learned mat-weaving from his grandmother, he narrates that it is a skill required of both men and women who reside in the royal tombs. Any woman who is chosen as heir should have the knowledge and skill of weaving a mat (omukeeka). The women who 242

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda

reside in the royal tombs comprise the Kabaka’s widows and heirs to the widows, headed by Kadulubale the Kabaka’s head widow who oversees the tangible and intangible items. The women work in shifts for a period of one month each, continuing to care for the deceased king. During the shift, the widow engages in making mats that are used as floor carpets inside the tomb house. This mat-weaving also keeps the widow busy, thus reducing the boredom of sitting idle all day. The Muzukulu talks about the time spent with his grandmother: The skill of mat-weaving was a requirement for every widow because other mats woven outside the tomb were not allowed inside lest they contaminate the sacredness of the royals who are not supposed to mix with their in-laws according to the Ganda culture. As an activity mat-weaving kept away boredom. Colour choice and pattern depended on one’s creativity. Thus no strict instructions were followed in this regard. Inside the burial grounds, ordinary mats of the check weave, (also known as ‘kyaaki’) made with wider palm weaves were unacceptable! The Kabaka should get the finest designed and finished mats.35 Mat-weaving is an activity for children in Buganda to learn about the materials (palm leaves and dyes) and techniques of weaving. Through interacting with his grandmother during her weaving sessions, the curious Muzukulu asked questions about his ancestry, health and gender roles, and this conversation would keep the grandmother alert and active from late afternoon till bedtime. Mat-weaving therefore displays continued allegiance to the Kabaka, and the skilfulness involved in their fine quality testify to the honour befitting him even after his death. This craft transmission is by proximity and involves tacit knowledge, while the accompanying conversations rely on intergenerational oral transmission. In this case the grandmother transmits cultural knowledge to a grandson, signifying gender cross-over as well as generational connections, which are sustainably integrated in the Ganda culture. In Buganda, mat-making is an activity for income generation and has become a lucrative business. Mats are purchased as gifts for women during cultural introduction ceremonies (Okwanjula) or weddings and for use in their homes.36 As an economic venture, mat-selling offers one of the remedies for eradicating poverty in Uganda. The appearance of new patterns of words and symbols as innovative techniques have popularized contemporary mat-making, thus boosting the living standards of lowincome families.37 Currently, women at KRT sell their mats to visitors and tourists who take them to their homes or ultimately to global markets. The procedure for weaving a mat has remained the same even among other ethnic groups in Uganda. The process involves cutting and plucking fronds from ‘the wild date palm tree (phoenix reclinata) … similar to that used in the Sudan and the Indian Ocean coast, and probably brought to Uganda by the Arabs’.38 Conversely, Peter Mulindwa, a curator of history and archaeology at the Uganda National Museum from 1970 to 1972 was of the view that plaited mat-making is an Indigenous craft in Uganda.39 Initially the leaves are dried under the sun (some are dyed and others are left in natural colour), slit 243

Craft and Heritage

to the required size and plaited into strips of about 5–7 centimetres wide and 50 metres long. The weaver determines the length and width then stitches together the strips with raffia strings to form the desired pattern. The successive sewn strips form a tube to create the desired length with the circumference of the tube as the width of the mat. Patterns are made by introducing coloured strands and by alterations in the weave.40 Recent research from Kyambogo University describes three broad categories of plaited mats in Uganda. The rough and tough kyaki (meaning ‘what is it for?’) is usually plain, and made from strands of about 5 millimetres wide, which are double in thickness. The mat is strong and cheap, used in everyday activities, but not in social situations where a visitor is shown respect. For that reason, kyaki is not used inside the KRT which houses the departed Buganda kings and where the living king visits. The kalanamye (meaning ‘general’) has single strands of about 3 millimetres wide with some colour introduced. The third kind of mat, fine, 3 millimetres wide, and multicoloured is of a higher quality compared to the previously mentioned types. The plaiting is complex, resulting in beautiful patterns ‘arising from the combination of colours, the mathematical pattern used, or by a combination of colours and mathematical patterns’.41 The mats in KRT used as seats are of the second and third categories and are highly patterned with intricate geometric designs. There are over thirty names of plaited mats and their patterns are mostly geometrical due to the raw material and the construction technique, which is either a mathematical combination and or an interplay of varied coloured fronds of repeated motifs.42 The floor of the burial chamber or great hut (Muzibu Azaala Mpanga) is adorned with these patterned and finely made mats from the entrance to the back. The women (Kabakas’ wives) constantly look after the tombs and are responsible for mat-making and replacing old mats with new ones (Plate 28). Alongside the mats, metal work in the form of spears together with woven shields that display the skill of basketry form part of the display. The spear and shield are symbols of power, which were used during land wars and to protect the king and his subjects from the enemies of the Buganda kingdom. Such material culture signifies human endeavours, methods and practices for survival, political, economic and social institutions, and values, beliefs and the arts. The display of the artefacts in KRT demonstrates their importance in the continuity of cultural heritage and in establishing Baganda craftsmanship.43

Basketry: A multifaceted industry In Buganda basketry is possibly the oldest Indigenous industry.44 Although there is sparse research about the craft, it is argued that basketry was understood by the people before the working of clay, iron or wood, and that the technique of coiled pottery was derived from that of basketry. In this regard, some early moulded pots show signs of having been pressed into shape inside a woven basket giving rise to the suggestion that the whole discovery of the action of heat on clay came about by the accidental firing of the clay lining of a food basket (ekibbo) that left a bowlike container.45 In the past, baskets came in varying sizes: the largest were woven by men for carrying food for the Kabaka, 244

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda

while the smaller baskets were made by women. Materials consist of cane and fronds of a banana leaf, which are shredded and dried under the sun. Basket making begins at the centre, forming the base, and successive fronds are coiled around and around until the desired size is attained; each coil is stitched to the neighbouring coil by cane or banana fibre. An iron awl is used to make the holes in the cane through which the end of the coil is tapered and stitched down firmly to the coil below it so that it should not be undone or untidy.46 While consumer demand affects production processes and the value of ethnic material culture, the basketry found in heritage sites, such as the KRT, has maintained the original materials (grass and banana leaf straw), tools and technique of the craft. Nevertheless, baskets embody inscriptions from makers and consumers, which speak to ongoing cultural interactions over many centuries, making these valuable Indigenous objects. Anthropologists have historically recognized that basketry is a highly developed art in Uganda, through which various cultures have reached a high standard of workmanship.47 Contemporary scholarship explains that the Ganda basket has been used for many purposes, most notably as a holding vessel in many homes, churches, shrines and at introduction functions (okwajula).48 Heritage conservator at the KRT, Remigius Kigongo, adds that baskets were used as water carriers and in preparing banana juice,49 while, the Muzukulu and Wabula akayole explain that the baskets in the Kasubi tombs and those found in the community are made with natural materials such as shredded banana leaf straws (obukeedo) and cane fibre (enjulu), giving the baskets a natural earth colour without added pigmentation (Figure 14.3).

Figure 14.3  Baskets are made in different sizes 245

Craft and Heritage

Baskets brought to the KRT are woven in different locations mostly with natural materials and colours. As the Muzukulu narrates, all items (food, coffee, chicken) entering the site must come in covered baskets. No gift (amakula) enters the site in a container that is not a natural basket. Both men and women had to master the skill of basketry; the former would later transfer the skill to construct architectural structures at the site, while the latter would weave baskets for day-to-day use like carrying food, coffee beans for visitors to create bonds between the Kabaka and his subjects.50 The Muzukulu explains about the smaller baskets kept in one of the houses surrounding the KRT courtyard: In our house, small baskets were used as banks where cash was kept as savings or upkeep. If a child took out any amount (in form of a loan), he or she had to buy a valuable item such as a goat that would be used for food or sacrifice to cleanse the bad spirits around the family. The child would then work hard to put back that amount and even save more. Thus a basket was kept as a sign of prosperity since the basket acted as a “bank” or “safe”.51 Baskets are also used when celebrating the birth of twins in Buganda. Small baskets become receptacles of the babies’ break away parts of the umbilical cords. If the Kabaka has twins, the wife (who lives in her own home – one of the huts in the KRT courtyard, and away from the king) is responsible for keeping the basket containing the cords (even after the king dies). She does not get a shift inside the tomb but remains responsible for safeguarding the umbilical cords kept in one of the huts within the KRT courtyard. Inside the KRT, baskets of varied sizes are placed on a mat-covered floor, under each king’s portrait (Plate 29). A visitor places a cash gift in each basket to appease the spirit of the departed king and may make a wish before the respective king, with a belief it will be granted.52 The gifts in form of coffee berries accompany the cash in the same basket as offerings to the departed. Another basket holds coffee beans offered by the caretaker and eaten during the visitation as a sign of comradeship (katamukago) but these also can serve as a snack for the caretakers on shift.53 The basket was and continues to be valuable as a symbol of prestige and respect for the Kabaka. The materials, technique, shape and uses of baskets signify respect, comradeship, beliefs and a sense of belonging and within the KRT they are found under a thatched roof that itself is derived from basketry skills. The Kabaka adopted basketry as an architectural design for most of the built structures in his kingdom; for instance, the roof of the architectural structures in Kasubi estate is inspired by the shape of a basket.54The grass is prepared in conical bundles which are laid onto the roof without being tied, except for the first layers at the bottom.55 The Muzukulu talks about the king’s role during the construction. 246

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda

In relation to architecture, the basket design was and continues to function as the section of the roof peak. At the beginning of the construction work, the living Kabaka was obliged to place the woven part at the rooftop, then his subjects responsible for construction would complete the subsequent cycles of reeds and straws. The meaning behind the Kabaka’s act was to initiate the genesis of his kingdom; with him at the center and the highest point of his jurisdiction. Successive rings are constructed in the same fashion and the final structure is like a basket turned upside down.56 (Plate 30) The 2018 Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board (BHTB) publication on Buganda confirms the Muzukulu’s narration citing that Buganda palaces were made using a special ceiling technique known as eddali (considered as a masterpiece given the intricate formation and the time that goes into making it).57 The interiors of these basketlike shaped ceilings were made from palm fronds, raffia, reeds, tree bark and banana fibres, while the exterior had clusters of spear grass (lusenke). The Ngeye clan (Colobus Monkey) oversaw creating these great structures and the gentleman who supervised the work was given the title, ‘wabula akayole’ since he was such a perfectionist. This work is hereditary and today the Ngeye Clan is responsible for the reconstruction of the Kasubi Tombs as well as the construction of the Kabaka’s palace and other Buganda houses. The present Wabula akayole has constructed the king’s huts since 1968. As an apprentice working with his father from childhood, he acquired the skill of artful construction. He provides an explanation for the KRT architectural structures thus: The eccentric design that runs in structures found in king’s palaces represent the king’s subjects at the bottom and in the presence of the king who is at the topmost center point. Men who build the king’s house abstain from sex. I was in charge of construction work for most burial houses (amasiro) belonging to kings, which have similar interiors; notably Kabalega in Hoima, Kaboyo in Toro and in Rwanda.58 Basketry and mat-making remain the most highly produced crafts in Buganda because the materials are affordable, the artisans can work from home in confined spaces and the skills are mostly informally acquired and passed on from generation to generation. Ultimately, baskets represent an amalgamation of the environment (materials), technology (processes of making) and culture (different uses).

Pottery: A repository of Indigenous knowledge In Uganda, like elsewhere in the world, pottery is one of the oldest crafts. Clay as the basic material for pottery is in abundance, making the pot (ensuwa) a required item in most homes in Buganda. Research on pottery indicates that the processes of clay preparation and pot-building are very similar in every cultural group, with variations 247

Craft and Heritage

in the time taken over drying and the firing.59 Clay preparation involves pounding and mixing natural clay with temper (broken pot-shard), while surface treatment of pots involves burnishing with pebbles, pieces of calabashes and other natural objects when the pot is leather hard, a stage that allows decoration by incising patterns and/or rolling a roulette made of knotted papyrus, string or carved wood. While numerous types of pots are made and used for different purposes like carrying water, holding beer or for drinking water and cooking, the pots found in heritage sites are usually magico-religious in function. The Muzukulu states that inside Muzibu Azaala Mpanga pots are kept next to the graves of the four kings (Basekabaka), and it is believed that the spirits quench their thirst since after some days the pots are found empty. Wabula akayole adds that drinking water is boiled and poured in the pot (ensumbi) and that the pot is smoked with banana peelings to flavour the non-communal drinking water. Recent discussions situate the royal pottery of Buganda as not only a technical and functional product but one also socially and symbolically constructed, reflecting the moral values of society.60 This position is coherent with the observations proffered by both custodians of the KRT. Current scholarship asserts that pottery in Buganda is a symbolic source of health, which has resulted in the establishment of royal potters who make ritually clean royal ceramic vessels by following strict taboos in order to protect the health of the Kabaka and the kingdom.61 When a pot breaks it is not thrown away. The pot shard is used in the preparation of herbal medicine, usually a concoction of different herbs mixed

Figure 14.4  Bowl (ekibya) where medicinal herbs for the king were prepared 248

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda

with clay and modelled into an elongated burrow-shaped tablet commonly known as emumbwa. To prepare the medicinal dosage, the dried tablet is pressed in a shard or clay bowl (ekibya) containing a little amount of drinking water (Figure 14.4). Before the medicine is administered, more water is added depending on the required concentration. According to Wabula akayole, the king’s bowl is made by Sedagala of the Ngeye clan. The bowl has three stands to ease the drinking of medicine.62 A bigger pot (entamu) is used to cook banana, the staple food for the Baganda. Beef is wrapped in banana leaves (luwombo) and cooked in a pot (ensaka), giving food and sauce unique flavour and taste. The Baganda have maintained this historic method of food preparation, which also supports healthy eating and environmental preservation. Drinking water is kept in a special pot with a long neck (ensumbi) and is not communal. The pot (ensuwa) for the family is medium-sized and usually smoked to make the safe drinking water tasty. Today local potters engage in selling pots (water pots, planters and beer pots among others) for economic gains.63

Conclusion In Buganda, crafts such as basketry, weaving and pottery are still commonly practised.64 Although the use of new manufactured materials or those discarded as waste facilitates different interpretations of cultural representation, the custodians of the Royal Kasubi Tombs maintain the usage of Indigenous materials. Even when repairs are needed, Indigenous materials are used with the highest standard of workmanship reflecting the signature of the respective makers. This observation brings home the importance of Jennings’s use of the phrase ‘heritage craft’ that broadly incorporates: ‘Practices which employ manual dexterity and skill, and an understanding of traditional materials, designs and techniques to make or repair useful things’. Here, attention is drawn to craft and heritage as inseparable entities of a tradition that weaves and shapes the fabric of the ethnic cultural continuity in concrete ways.65 Discourses regarding conservation of materials and technologies of production reveal a sense of belonging and ‘resistance’ to change, which allow the sustainable imprinting of an Indigenous identity. Perhaps this resistance to change might be in some way related to the economic profitability of the KRT as a heritage site. Nevertheless, meanings embedded in the tangible objects discussed in this chapter, which include the ephemeral products or non-material aspects of culture, notably language, stories, forms of knowledge and craft skills, are all concerns of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The Indigenous crafts of basketry, mat-making and pottery are interconnected in terms of techniques that aid the forming and shaping of the end product while informing Indigenous knowledge transference. When it comes to cultural identity and continuity, the Baganda, through the manipulation of materials and production of Indigenous designs of basketry, mat-weaving and pottery, are sustainably creating and recreating themselves as an ethnic group. The current reconstruction of the KRT after the 2010 fire that destroyed the site offers an important opportunity for educating a new generation into the craft practices required in the reconstruction site.66 249

Craft and Heritage

The materiality, functionality, economic and cultural dimensions of the crafts are finding an increasingly important place within the scholarly landscape that strives to document the rich heritage of Buganda and eventually the whole of Uganda. However, external influences like new religions and changes of materials threaten the continuity of Indigenous craft practices within a heritage framework. This discussion of the Uganda’s Royal Kasubi Tombs clarifies the importance of connections between Indigenous knowledge and crafts skills. The recent establishment of the BHTB,67 whose mission is to ‘preserve, protect and promote Buganda Kingdom’s unique historical and cultural heritage’, including the KRT, is one way of ensuring sustainability of a culture and its people, the Baganda.68

Notes 1

Taga Nuwagaba and Nathan Kiwere, Totems of Uganda/: Culture Embracing Nature – Buganda Edition (Kampala: Taga Nuwagaba and Nathan Kiwere, 2014).

2

E. S. Ssemakula, ‘The Clans of Buganda: A Study of Centralized Systems in Pre- and PostColonial Uganda’, MA Thesis, Makerere University-Kampala Uganda, 2016.

3

M. L. Morbey, M. Senoga, M. P. O’Meara, and M. Sengara, ‘Ugandan Heritage Sites: Social Media Engages Oral Cultures at Ugandan Heritage Sites’ (Toronto: York University, 2017), http://irdl.info.yorku.ca/uganda/.

4

UNESCO, ‘Tombs of Bugonda Kings at Kasubi: Nomination File 1022’, 2001, https://whc. unesco.org/en/list/1022/documents/.

5

M. Hatch, The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers (Columbus Ohio: McGraw-Hill Books, 2013), 11.

6

‘Ganda’ is a generic term by scholars to refer to the Baganda people, their language, and any other aspects relating to Buganda. The author is Baganda.

7

Buganda Tourism and Heritage Board, ‘Buganda, Gateway to the Pearl’, CEDP: Competitive and Development Enterprise Project, 2018, http://www.cedp.go.ug/grant-enables-bugandakingdom-publish-tourism-book/; R. Nzita and M. Niwampa, Peoples and Cultures of Uganda (Fourth Edition Fountain Publishers, 2011), 85; A. M. Lugira, Ganda Art (Kampala, Uganda: Osasa Publications, 1970), 7.

8

Luganda is the language spoken by the Baganda and is widely used in Uganda after English, the official language. Throughout this chapter, Luganda words are written in italics.

9

For Ganda art, see Lugira, Ganda Art, 7. For material culture, see T. Kivubiro, ‘Baganda Material Culture since 1900, an Indigenous Interpretation’, (PhD Diss. Flinders University of South Australia, 1999). For bark-cloth, see V. Nakazibwe, ‘Bark –Cloth of the Baganda People of Southern Uganda: A Record of Continuity and Change’, (PhD Diss., Middlesex University, London UK., 2005).

10 Hilary Jennings, ‘Towards a Definition of Heritage Craft: Prepared for Creative & Cultural Skills’, (The National Skills Academy, 2012), 16. http://blueprintfiles.s3.amazonaws. com/1344600067-Towards-a-Definition-of-Heritage-Craft-final-draft.pdf. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 N. Nimkulrat, ‘Hands-on Intellect: Integrating Craft Practice into Design Research’, International Journal of Design; Taipai 6, no. 3 (December 2012): 2. 250

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda 14 Scottish Arts Council, ‘Glorious Obsessions – Scottish Indigenous Crafts Today’, 2000, quoted in Jennings, ‘Towards a Definition of Heritage Craft’, 17. 15 Ibid. 16 Kivubiro, ‘Baganda Material Culture since 1900’. 17 Jennings, ‘Towards a Definition of Heritage Craft’. 18 Sun Hua, ‘World Heritage Classification and Related Issues – A Case Study of the “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage,”’ Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 2, no. 5 (2010): 6954–61. 19 Ibid., 6955. 20 While a tomb building has been on the site since the thirteenth century, in 1882 it became the site of a palace, which was converted to a burial ground in 1884. UNESCO, ‘Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi’, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1022/; UNESCO, ‘Safeguarding Living Cultural Traditions at the World Heritage Site of Muzibu-Azaala-Mpanga’, https:// whc.unesco.org/en/news/1132/. 21 UNESCO, ‘Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi’. 22 Jeff Andrew Lule, ‘Mayiga Inaugurates New Buganda Tourism Board’, 4 July 2017, New Vision, Kampala https://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1456949/katikiiroinaugurates-buganda-tourism-board. 23 P. Kwesiga, ‘Kasubi Tombs Construction to Be Completed by 2012’, New Vision, 20 September 2010, https://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1282409/kasubi-tombsreconstruction-completed-2012. 24 UNESCO, ‘Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi’. 25 In a compendium of the Baganda by the Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board (BHTB), Shrines include the The Goggwe shrine (Olubiri lwe Goggwe) in Buddu, Holy Walusi Hill in Bulemezi, and the Nakayima shrine and the Nakayima Tree in Buwekula. These sites, among others, have similar artefacts to those also found in the KRT. 26 J. Akumu, ‘Visual Expressions of Selected Artifacts from Kasubi Royal Tombs for Fabric Decoration’, MA Thesis Kyambogo University, Kampala-Uganda, 2017. 27 United Nations Educational. Scientific and Cultural Organization and World Heritage Convention, ‘Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi’, 84, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1022/. 28 Ibid., 80. 29 According to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, the site of the Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi covers ‘almost 30 hectares of hillside within Kampala district. Most of the site is agricultural, farmed by traditional methods. At its core on the hilltop is the former palace of the Kabakas of Buganda, built in 1882 and converted into the royal burial ground in 1884. Four royal tombs now lie within the Muzibu Azaala Mpanga, the main building, which is circular and surmounted by a dome’. UNESCO, World Heritage List, ‘Tomb of Buganda Kings at Kasubi’, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1022. 30 E. Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (London: Macmillan, 1911), 413. See as well Margaret Trowell and Klaus P. Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda (London: Oxford University Press, 1953); Lugira, Ganda Art, 1970. 31 A. B. K. Kasozi, ‘The Impact of Islam on Ganda Culture’, Journal of Religion in Africa 12, no. 1 (1981): note 7, 134. 32 C. Gombe, J. Kekimuri, and E. Barlow, ‘Plaited Mat-Making in Uganda’, Unpublished research report, Kyambogo University, Kampala-Uganda, 2009. 33 Ibid. 251

Craft and Heritage 34 Interviews with the Muzukulu and Wabula akayole were conducted by the author and translated into English, 31 January 2019. 35 Ibid. 36 Gombe, Kekimuri, and Barlow, ‘Plaited Mat-Making in Uganda’. 37 Ibid., 35. 38 Trowell and Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda, 145. 39 Mulindwa was interviewed by Catherine Gombe in 2005. His argument is based on the abundance of wild palm trees in Uganda, similarities between patterns on plaited mats, house decorations, baskets, pots and striking similarities between the technique of plaiting mats to that used in the making of baskets and building fences. Gombe, Kekimuri, and Barlow, ‘Plaited Mat-Making in Uganda’, 6. 40 Gombe, Kekimuri, and Barlow, ‘Plaited Mat-Making in Uganda’; Trowell and Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda, 143–5. 41 Gombe, Kekimuri and Barlow, ‘Plaited Mat-Making in Uganda’, 28. 42 Ibid., 31. 43 In addition to basketry, mat-making and pottery, craftsmanship is seen in bark cloth making, drum making, metal smiting and shield making. See: J. D. Giblin and R. Kigongo, ‘The Social and Symbolic Context of the Royal Potters of Buganda, Azania’, Archaeological Research in Africa 47, no. 1 (2012): 64–80; Lugira, Ganda Art, 1970; Trowell and Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda; Roscoe, The Baganda. 44 Ibid., 410. 45 Trowell and Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda, 134. 46 Akumu, ‘Visual Expressions of Selected Artifacts from Kasubi Royal Tombs for Fabric Decoration’. 47 Trowell and Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda, 134. 48 Akumu, ‘Visual Expressions of Selected Artifacts from Kasubi Royal Tombs for Fabric Decoration’. 49 Interview by author with Kigongo Remigious, Heritage Conservator at Kasubi Royal Tombs on 23 August 2019. 50 Interview with Wabula akayole by the author and translated into English, 31 January 2019. 51 Ibid. 52 Lugira, Ganda Art, 1970. The spirits of the departed (be it the king or a family member) are possibly the most revered of religious objects in Buganda. 53 Interview with Muzulu by the author and translated into English, 31 January 2019. 54 UNESCO, ‘Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi’. 55 A. Ssenyonga, ‘Kasubi Tombs Restoration Enters Final Stage’, New Vision, 2 September 2019, https://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1506527/kasubi-tombs-restoration-entersfinal-stage. 56 Interview with Wabula akayole. 57 Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board, Gateway to the Pearl of Africa, 12. 58 Interview with Wabula akayole. 59 This is discussed in several sources in terms of African pottery: Trowell and Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda; N. Barley, Smashing Pots: Feats of Clay from Africa (London, England: British Museum Press, 1994); M. Berns, Ceramic Gestures: New Vessels by Magdalene 252

Craft Narratives from Heritage Sites in Buganda Odundo, (Santa Barbara, CA: University Art Museum, University of California, 1995); Moira Vincentelli, Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (Manchester, England: University Press, 2003). 60 Giblin and Kigongo, ‘The Social and Symbolic Context of the Royal Potters of Buganda, Azania’, 77. 61 Ibid., 76. 62 Interview with Wabula akayole. 63 Gombe et al., ‘Traditional Pottery and Its Technology as a Source of Employment. A case of Gishu Traditional Pottery, Mbale District, Uganda’, 1999. 64 Basket weaving and pottery in Buganda have been less researched than mat-weaving. 65 Jennings, ‘Towards a Definition of Heritage Craft’, 4. 66 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; World Heritage Convention, ‘Ugandan Youth Are at the Centre of the Reconstruction Process at Kasubi Tombs World Heritage Site in Danger’, 11 September 2017. https://whc.unesco.org/en/ news/1752/. 67 Lule, ‘Mayiga Inaugurates New Buganda Tourism Board’. 68 Welcome to Buganda Kingdom Official Site, ‘Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board Launched’, http://www.buganda.or.ug/index.php/news/141-buganda-heritage-and-tourismboard-launched.

253

254

CHAPTER 15

HUNTING FOR LOST CRAFTS: THE VALUE OF INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN CONTEMPORARY SCOTTISH CRAFT

Juliette MacDonald

The past is not dead, it is living in us and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. – William Morris, 18931

Introduction William Morris’s comment in his preface to Robert Steele’s Medieval Lore is echoed in the UNESCO statement a century later that: ‘Cultural heritage does not end at monuments and collections of objects. It also includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants … ’.2 Morris is reminding the reader that the past belongs to us all and therefore, by implication, we need to be fully aware of the past’s implications for our present and indeed, our future cultural growth and development. Both Morris’s idea of the past ‘living in us’ and the UNESCO term ‘living expressions’ shifts the focus from the tangible cultural manifestation to the intangible and ‘the wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted through it from one generation to the next’.3 Focusing on two recent exhibitions, Hunting for Lost Crafts and Naked Craft, this chapter will explore how contemporary craft makers continue to respond to and express this ‘past’ and heritage in their work. It will also consider the physical and immaterial sense of place and the value of intangible cultural heritage for contemporary craft. Scotland will provide the main geographical focus for this essay, which will reflect on Scottish makers’ interaction with nature, their environment and their personal histories. The essay will also consider how this interaction provides a sense of identity and continuity for themselves, and the broader communities in which they live and work. In 2014, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland, UK, curated an exhibition of crafts and objects called Hunting for Lost Crafts (August–October 2014). This was a collaborative project between Inverness Museum and Art Gallery and Emergents, a community interest company which supports makers in and around the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, providing workshops and opportunities to encourage ongoing creativity and entrepreneurship. The exhibition focused on crafts prevalent in the Scottish Highlands associated with pursuits such as hunting, shooting and fishing, which

Craft and Heritage

were once essential life skills but are now recreational sports. The exhibition highlighted contemporary responses to these traditions through the inclusion of work reflecting these historic techniques or materials. Objects for Hunting for Lost Crafts were chosen by a team of community volunteers from the collections at Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, the Highland Folk Museum in Newtonmore as well as from photographs from the Highland Photographic Archive, which is based in the Inverness Museum & Art Gallery. Set alongside the older objects were newly commissioned artworks from makers based in Scotland who were asked to illustrate how their particular craft discipline, which has a strong association with the skills once needed to survive, has developed to align with their contemporary practice and interests. Six short documentary films were also commissioned to give an insight into the lives and work of a falconer, an estate owner, a fly-tyer, a jeweller, a ceramist and a small group of weavers. A series of workshops, masterclasses and taster sessions ran alongside the exhibition, giving the public an opportunity to meet with skilled makers and interact with the historical objects and contemporary processes. The Naked Craft touring exhibition (2016–2017) featured work produced by craftspeople from Scotland and Canada. One of the overall aims of the exhibition was to question the intangible sense of belonging and sense of place from a materials and making perspective. This aim grew from the many social, historical and geographical threads that Scotland and Canada share: Both Canada and Scotland share a sense of northern resilience, each being situated above a southern political powerhouse … There is also a shared collective connection to each country’s raw resources which, in turn, informs the identity of Canadian and Scottish contemporary craft. It is what most people think of when you mention these two countries – the rugged openness of the landscape, and the natural environment. Furthermore, traditions and heritage, from complicated colonial legacies to celebrated founding principles, are placeholders that contribute to the definition of identity in much craft production.4 The show featured work produced by craftspeople from Scotland and Canada and was designed around four themes: ‘New Positions’ which explored some of the new methods of craft production and the dichotomy between the traditional and the emerging; ‘Do-ityourself ’ which related to the long and rich history of small craft and home improvement projects; ‘Tooling up’ which addressed the fact that the simplest forms of craft practice always involve tools, and ‘Down and Dirty’ which focused on issues questioning cultural and national identity. Each theme was designed to present a cross-section of contemporary craft as well as craft’s relationship to heritage and popular culture.5 For ‘Down and Dirty’ the curators wanted to reflect on how and why we engage with a particular place, and what means we might use to communicate and articulate the internal, personal and subjective view of somewhere we have always called ‘home’, or have chosen to call ‘home’. Makers whose work reflects on a deep sense of place from a variety of perspectives were chosen. This included the long-term experience in a particular 256

Hunting for Lost Crafts

landscape, the gathering of local knowledge, encountering the people who inhabit the place now and in times past, and discovering stories and folklore associated with the area. The materials used, the objects created by the makers and the way materials and objects might address craft’s potential to highlight a personal or communal attachment with a place or a sense of a place were presented by the curators in the hope that the immaterial sense of connection might be communicated to the audience.6 Both Hunting for Lost Crafts and Naked Craft encouraged professional, amateur and public engagement with the themes of heritage and innovation and stimulated questions around how contemporary practice and innovative work might relate to skills and objects often thought of as ‘traditional’. The 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage highlighted the importance of the passing of knowledge from one generation to another, and that the knowledge has room to evolve to reflect the contemporary context.7 Together both exhibitions provided an arena for questioning the current role of a sense of place within craft practice.

The physical and immaterial sense of place Visual images and narrative texts based on or around the myths, customs and people of a place are often used to shape our understanding of a place. Shetlander Jen Deschenes uses her embroidery skills to tell stories about the beliefs and customs of the Shetland Isles and particularly of the island of Whalsay where she grew up: I like to imagine myself as a storyteller but in a different medium. The entire body of my work is in the recreation of intimate and nostalgic objects or imagery to tell stories of or from the past … I like to explore ideas about how materials are traded and move around the Earth. The things of everyday life with their own unspoken stories – objects and remnants like the pottery washed ashore smoothed by the sea – set apart from their everyday use, become echoes of the past.8 Her work for Naked Craft told of the relationship between Whalsay’s men out at sea and the women at home, and their superstitions and belief in love tokens (Figure 15.1). Deschenes’s practice was enriched by her experience at a Naked Craft Make/Workshop at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden where she worked in the foundry. She made bronze figures to represent superstitions which used objects for protection, based on the traditional charms often left by fishermen and women in the nooks of walls to ward off ailments and evil spirits. The figures are also reminiscent of tokens for a board game or chess pieces and for Deschenes they also represent the notion of passing time, waiting for the storm to abate or the tide to turn. Placed in ceramic boats the pieces recall the fishermen facing the dangers of wild seas and storms and the hope of every Shetland woman: ‘keep him safe’. There is further symbolism in this work in that the three boats with their embroidered sails reflect the movement of people between places and their shifting sense of belonging. In particular, they recall the journeys of many Scottish 257

Craft and Heritage

Figure 15.1  Sixareen: Laying on an aamos, Jen Deschenes

migrants to the shores of Canada. Her work, whilst speaking of the separation of islands and the isolation often felt by fishermen and their families, is nonetheless eloquent in its description of the rich heritage of the area: ‘Her delicate and thoughtful pieces recast the notion of islands as peripheral and isolated places into richly-connected communities, where all sorts of things come ashore’.9 Beth Legg’s jewellery stems from her strong connection with her home in the northeast of Scotland. The remote landscape of this region is reflected in the work she creates: ‘ … each piece an exploration of composing elements encompassing themes of landscape and memory, ultimately reflecting the often bleak and fragile nature of the environment I come from’.10 The silver and bark bracelets which were included in the Naked Craft exhibition demonstrate Legg’s approach to her materials where hand tool methods are used to reveal the potential of the material whether it be precious metal or stone or wood. Found natural objects such as bark from fallen trees, lichen-covered stones or tangled seaweed underpin her pieces, and she uses these finds in two distinct ways: as metaphors for recovered memory and as the medium providing the conversation between the found object’s original environment and the new context within which it sits. Weaving from the Isle of Skye provides a good example of how a tradition can survive being moved from one location to another and how a process can evolve whilst still communicating a strong sense of cultural heritage. Harris Tweed is the material that comes to mind when thinking of weaving from the western isles of Scotland. However, there is a tradition of weaving from Skye too. Extreme hardship endured by islanders on 258

Hunting for Lost Crafts

Harris and Lewis at the end of the First World War prompted the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to buy land on the Isle of Skye and create the three townships of Port-na-long, Fiskavaig and Fearnilea. The land was then offered to sixty families so that they could make a new life crofting there. The families who took up the offer brought their skills and their looms with them. The spinning, weaving and knitting they produced became an important source of income for these families who sold their ‘Port-na-Skye’ tweed, as it became known, largely to tourists. Today the labour-intensive work is continued by a small group, the Skye Weavers, who featured in one of the films commissioned for Hunting for Lost Crafts. The company’s aim is to maintain the knowledge and skills associated with Scottish tweed but also to incorporate contemporary concerns around the ethical sourcing of materials and sustainability. The company encourages a strong sense of connection with the local environment, sourcing their wool from local sheep farmers and crofters on Skye and, whilst the loom is not a replica of those used by the crofters for the Port-na-Skye tweed, it is still powered manually, though in this case by bicycle pedals. For Hunting for Lost Crafts, they were commissioned to design a herringbone fabric. Natural indigo was used to dye the cloth and this resulted in bright and dark blue herringbone pattern which resembled, for the Skye Weavers, a densely packed shoal of herring: the white overcheck on the cloth, representing the nets in which the fish were caught. The tweed was intended as a reflection on the herring fishing industry which provided a major source of living for many areas along the Scottish coast up from the 1800s until its decline in the twentieth century (Plate 31). The Skye Weavers represent a thriving form of cultural heritage. They have not attempted to keep the processes static but rather have adapted and evolved their business whilst maintaining a strong connection to the history and traditions of weaving in that location. For the ceramicist Kevin Andrew Morris, the intangible relationship between objects, material and place is at the heart of his approach. The objects he incorporates into his thinking and making are taken from both the natural environment and the manmade, and he is frequently involved with community craft projects which aim to engage participants with the excitement of the technology and tradition associated with the materials and processes of clay and ceramics. For his work, which appeared in Hunting for Lost Crafts and Naked Craft, Morris drew upon his own family heritage and material culture. His grandfather had been a fishing ghillie in Aberdeenshire. Through exploring some of the objects and letters which once belonged to his grandfather, as well as visiting the places his grandfather would have worked and gathering stories about the work of ghillies in the early twentieth century, Morris established a strong connection with a man he had never met while developing a deeper understanding about his own familial links to the past.11 His research for the ceramic pieces led to him layering short extracts of letters, maps and photographs, woven tam and spools of wire into the slip cast ceramic vessels as well as placing some of his grandfather’s possessions, such as a hip-flask, in the containers in order to provide an impression of his grandfather’s day-to-day life and the everyday things he might have used and to highlight his own connection to his family’s heritage (Figure 15.2). The research also provided Morris with an opportunity to explore the craft skills of fishing communities 259

Craft and Heritage

Figure 15.2  Hunting for the Lost, Kevin Andrew Morris, 2013, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

and reflect on how this knowledge was integral to the identity of the communities as well as challenging him to find ways to translate these new insights into his own practice. Morris observed that for him ‘craft, material and place facilitates a conversation between found objects detached from their original environment and fabricated ceramic pieces, focusing on attitudes to survival through craft and the fragility of both the natural world and human condition’.12 Mark Edmonds’s research on long-term temporalities in the Lake District in the north west of England provides an interesting perspective, as it brings together the mountains and hills, the rivers, forests, roads, paths, people and activities under a phenomenological umbrella of ‘taskscapes’. Following on from Tim Ingold, who coined the term, he argues that it is necessary to think of landscapes as taskscapes, which are ‘intimately bound up with the lives and values of those who work in and off the land in which identities are constituted through particular forms of activity’.13Edmonds argued that it is easier to explore the identity of a prehistoric community through its daily rhythms. This idea is taken further by Rajala and Mills who note: ‘Taskscapes link tangibly different temporalities and precise locations, making landscapes temporal through past practices and conceptualizations – both conscious and unconscious. This unison of time and space is what makes the concept of taskscape and temporalities so suitable for archaeological use’.14 I believe there is an opportunity for critiquing craft in this context too when thinking about how the intangible value of contemporary craft and the past might inform the present. 260

Hunting for Lost Crafts

The Crochetdermy® Wild Boar Trophy by Shauna Richardson in Hunting for Lost Craft offers a playful yet provocative reflection on craft that was once central to a community’s livelihood, but which is now associated with recreation. The realistic life-size boar’s head set on a wall plaque, complete with glass eyes and teeth, was sculpted from a wool and mohair mix using a freestyle hand-crochet technique (Richardson refers to the technique as ‘crochetdermy’) which she uses ‘to respond to, and highlight, the anatomy of each piece as [she goes] along’15 (Figure 15.3). The work prompts the viewer to consider, or better still reconsider, their thinking about the boundaries which encompass societal rules and traditions. Richardson’s wild boar has a story to tell of historical and cultural shifts, reflecting Scotland’s geography and history as an ideal place for hunting, shooting and fishing, at first as a necessity but later as a playground for those who could afford to enjoy the hunt as a sporting activity, with the head being set on a plaque as a memento of the occasion. This ‘crochetdermy’ relies on the traditional domestic craft of crochet, which was associated with domesticity and femininity, to mimic the anatomical and aesthetic skills of the nineteenth-century taxidermist (who was usually male). This is the spirit of playful rebellion and subversion at the core of the work. The subversive element is also evident when the symbolic narrative, which tells of a stuffed animal and its human viewer, is considered. The object was once a proud and strong sentient creature, which had been skilfully hunted, caught and put on display to demonstrate a man’s power and prowess.

Figure 15.3  Crochetdermy® Wild Boar Trophy, Shauna Richardson, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

261

Craft and Heritage

This boar’s head of wool and mohair offer an eloquent replacement where skill and imagination are still displayed on a plinth but without causing harm to an animal for the viewer’s pleasure. Kate MccGwire’s, Brawl also from Hunting for Lost Craft comprises a contorted feather sculpture contained within a round-topped vitrine (Plate 32). Displaying the ‘natural wonders’ of the world it would look equally at home in an eighteenth-century Wunderkammer as it does in a contemporary gallery space. The object within the vitrine suggests a scientific or medical specimen: the viewer is both compelled and repulsed by the luxurious colours of the feathers and the writhing twists of the intestine-like sculpture. Whilst the sculpture suggests taxidermy was used to create the work it has in fact been created from feathers from the natural process of moulting. Yet despite knowing this, one cannot help but wonder which of the ‘feathered creatures’ within the glass will win this frenzied battle. In Surrealist terms Brawl is an ‘inter-repulsive’ work in that it holds a transgressive space whereby it encourages the viewer to oscillate between attraction and repulsion. MccGwire’s intention is to set up a number of juxtapositions for the viewer in order to encourage reflection on the dichotomy between the stunning beauty of the animal and the brutality inherent in shooting and hunting as well as highlighting the often-conflicting emotions evoked by such sport or need – the horror of slaughter set against a necessity to feed a hungry family or the high emotions experienced in the thrill of the chase. The various threads of long-held traditions, stories and rituals associated with local activities, alongside the physical and geographic aspects of fishing and hunting have had a powerful impact on the work discussed in this section. As has been noted, the intangible sense of place functions as a driving force provoking the imagination of both maker and viewer and a questioning of the changing cultural heritage in Scotland.

The value of craft in intangible cultural heritage Successful hunting, whether for necessity or sport, requires much ingenuity and, in some cases, cooperative effort. A good example of the need for collaboration is the historic practice of poachers ‘burning the water’ in order to draw fish to a river surface by hanging a brazier of burning peats over the water whilst hunters spear the fish with tridents. A good poacher could spear a salmon from some metres’ distance. R. R. McIan’s description of salmon hunting from 1848 gives an insight into the excitement of the event: Spearing salmon affords a scene of the most novel and striking description, the wild excitement of which must be witnessed to be rightly appreciated. The picturesque effect of the blazing torches on the darksome waters, on which are thrown shifting and fantastic shadows, the lurid glare discovering the expected prey – the sound of the rushing stream in the gloomy night – the splashing of both men and salmon, with the shouts of laughter as some poor fellow, intent upon the sport, slips over a stone into a sullen pool – the occasional dash of a heavy fish as it springs from the 262

Hunting for Lost Crafts

water through the legs of the spearman, altogether form a picture of the strangest character to the eye of one unaccustomed to the sight.16 Until the mid-twentieth century the making of appropriate clothing and tools for fishing, shooting and hunting continued to provide employment among the many communities of Scotland. As Legg notes in a preparatory research document for the Hunting for Lost Crafts exhibition, there was an ‘almost overwhelming range of activities, processes, techniques, materials, objects and occupations’17 required to support the domestic needs of the community as well as the leisure pursuits of the wealthy. For example, metalwork for guns and knives, glassblowing for floats, working with wood to build boats and barrels and plants to make baskets, leather and hide work for clothing and saddles, textiles for ropes and clothes: … in some cases we can see a clear journey (such as the need to fish) leading to the process of boatbuilding which utilizes the technique of steam-bending wood which is still evidence in contemporary furniture. But more often many of the crafts related to hunting, shooting and fishing are linked in a web of multiple, shared threads, rather than in a straightforward linear fashion.18 Many of the communities and activities which were once associated with shooting, hunting and fishing have vanished. The economies which thrived on hunting and stalking, along with the ghillies, keepers and fishermen are much depleted and the associated craft skills have either been lost or have changed beyond recognition and beyond their original use. What is interesting is that even in 1848 McIan was aware that the skills of the hunter and fisherman and associated makers were in danger of extinction as he comments that: It is a scene the more interesting, as among other effects of refined civilization, spearing salmon may be among those things which once have been. This valuable fish has been decreasing for years, and if the breed continue to decline in the same proportion, experienced fishermen say it must, ere long, become extinct.19 Some 170 years later Pat Reynolds, co-coordinator at the Heritage Crafts Association (the UK advocacy body for heritage craft skills), echoed McIan’s views highlighting that centuries-old crafts are in danger of disappearing unless younger people made a concerted effort to learn them: ‘We have an incredible range of craft skills in the UK and some of the best craftspeople in the world … These skills will only survive if they live in each generation. They provide a link to our roots, and they are part of our shared heritage’.20 At the time of writing, the UK has not ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Scotland has indicated its interest in ratifying the Convention but is unable to do so due to its limited devolved political powers within the UK. There have, however, in recent years been some changes to Scottish domestic laws so that the requirements of the Convention are integrated and the importance of intangible cultural heritage in Scotland emphasized. 263

Craft and Heritage

The Heritage Crafts Association’s paper Crafts in the English Countryside (2014) continues to paint a bleak picture of the future of rural craft in the UK due in part to loss of skills, raw materials and affordable places to live and work. The HCA’s belief is that the decline is also due to the value of intangible heritage and its association with craft practice not being sufficiently recognized or rewarded: Crafts are under-recognised and under-resourced as a part of the heritage of the UK: research and advocacy is needed to help funders and policy makers understand and respond to the significance and value of crafts as intangible, living, heritage and the risks faced by particular crafts.21 Whilst keen to see the UK align with the UNESCO Convention, HCA states that it would be satisfied with a different route being taken such as an alliance with the Canadian province Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and an adoption of its mission for safeguarding and sustaining: … the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Newfoundland and Labrador for present and future generations, as a vital part of the identities of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, and as a valuable collection of unique knowledge and customs. This will be achieved through policies that support initiatives that celebrate, record, disseminate and promote our living heritage and help to build bridges between diverse cultural groups within and outside Newfoundland and Labrador.22 At the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, the following edict was agreed: Any efforts to safeguard traditional craftsmanship must focus not on preserving craft objects – no matter how beautiful, precious, rare or important they might be – but on creating conditions that will encourage artisans to continue to produce crafts of all kinds, and to transmit their skills and knowledge to others.23 This was a brave, perhaps even contentious decision, but important since it attempts to ensure that regional and local craft knowledge is not lost but continues to find expression even when the social and economic motivators have gone or have changed, as is the case in Scotland. There has been consistent support in Scotland from a number of quarters to promote and disseminate contemporary craft and articulate its values and importance. It may not be possible to always pinpoint a specific ‘Scottishness’ in the work shown in Hunting for Lost Crafts and Naked Craft, and many of the taskscapes associated with some of the skills highlighted in this chapter would be common practices to the everyday working of rural, and in some cases urban, communities in Europe and North America. However, the regional and local variations and associations with particular stories and events provide a reminder of the relationship between practices often thought of as 264

Hunting for Lost Crafts

traditional with innovative developments, such as the bicycle pedal looms on Skye, and can often unwittingly reinforce the unseen or intangible threads that bring communities together. As Design Historian Andrea Peach argues: ‘In a post-industrial context, modern craft should therefore be considered both mutable and malleable, and essentially a form of cultural construction’.24 The ceramicist Edmund de Waal provides a strong call for the need to understand and reflect on the role of craft within our cultures: Craft is the great otherness in our culture. It’s little understood. It’s extraordinarily relevant and powerful. It goes deep into people’s lives. It’s catalytic. It changes the world. It reaches deep into unknown histories that we are only beginning to understand. It crosses identities and genders and ethnicities in incredibly powerful ways. So it is in profound need of celebration and critical celebration.25 De Waal’s comment is particularly interesting in that he turns much thinking about craft on its head, highlighting its intangible and profound power, its resonance within our culture, our history and our identity. His observation of craft as an unstable set of possibilities or experiences is provocative and in direct opposition to the way craft is often used, particularly in marketing and branding, to imply or represent age-old traditions, related to nostalgia for the old ways of life. Its ability to connect one person to another, or one community with another, is precisely why craft, its practices and processes are valuable contributors to the heritage of communities in Scotland.

Conclusion The examples discussed throughout this chapter demonstrate how a sense of a place emanating from an affiliation with the landscape or its history can be deeply entwined with the processes of making. Clearly, as De Waal so eloquently points out, the need to find balanced ways of maintaining craft skills as a viable part of our culture is an ongoing one. Whilst craft is often associated with the final artefact, the context and processes invest the object with intangible qualities of heritage and identity. Here, Ingold’s comment is worth holding in mind: ‘A place owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there … And these in turn depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhabitants engage’.26 Valuing the environments and the activities that come together in craft is essential. All the work shown in the two exhibitions Hunting for Lost Crafts and Naked Craft highlight the place of contemporary craft within the context of an intangible cultural heritage in Scotland. The work invites us to consider how the land or a landscape functions as a powerful means for binding place to materials which are associated with an embodied space. The stories historical or recent, real or mythical told by many of the objects offer new insights into materials, processes and practices, and the works provide the viewer with an evocative and tangible expression of the intangible connections the makers have with the histories and materials, processes and practices. The continuation 265

Craft and Heritage

or creation of communities of practice is an essential ingredient for valuing cultural identity and diversity. Craft as a process is an essential part of articulating experiences and perceptions, through it we can relate to the past, examine the present and project who we might be in the future. Since commencing this contribution to Craft and Heritage, Dr. Sandra Alfoldy sadly passed away. She was a beloved member of the Naked Craft team; she brought wisdom, enthusiasm and fun to our projects and we miss her very much.

Notes 1

William Morris Preface in Robert Steele’s Medieval Lore from Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 1905. Reprint (Kessinger Publishing, 2009).

2

UNESCO, Intangible Cultural Heritage, ‘What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage’, https://ich. unesco.org/en/what-is-intangible-heritage-00003.

3 Ibid. 4

E. Quin, ‘Preface to Naked Craft’, in Naked Craft: Canada/Scotland, eds. Sandra Alfoldy, Denis Longchamps, Juliette MacDonald, Emma Quin, Arno Verhoeven (Halifax and Edinburgh: NSCAD University and the Edinburgh College of Art, 2015), 7.

5

See essays: Denis Longchamps, ‘Naked Craft: Beyond the Missionary Position’, 9–12; Sandra Alfoldy, ‘Do-It-Yourself!’, 13–16; Juliette MacDonald, ‘Down and Dirty: Politics of Material’, 17-20; Arno Verhoeven, ‘Tooling Up’, 21-21, in Naked Craft: Canada/Scotland.

6

MacDonald, ‘Down and Dirty: Politics of Material’, 17–20.

7

UNESCO, ‘What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage’.

8

J Deschenes quoted by S. Laurensen, ‘Storytelling in a Different Medium’, The Island Review, 8 July 2016, http://theislandreview.com/content/jen-deschenes (accessed 1 August 2018).

9

S. Laurensen, ‘Storytelling in a Different Medium’, 8 July 2016, http://theislandreview.com/ content/jen-deschenes (accessed 8 January 2018).

10 J. MacDonald, quoting Beth Legg, Naked Craft Catalogue (2015): 17. 11 Kevin Morris, Naked Craft Catalogue (2015): 78. 12 Glasgow Sculpture Studios, ‘Kevin Morris’, http://www.glasgowsculpturestudios. org/2015/04/22/kevin-morris/. 13 Christopher Tilley, ‘Introduction: Identity, Place, Landscape, Heritage’, Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 1–2 (2006): 26. See also: Mark Edmonds, ‘Who Said Romance Was Dead?’ Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 1–2 (2006): 167–88. 14 Ulla Rajala, Phil Mills, Forms of Dwelling: 20 Years of Taskscapes in Archaeology (Barnsley UK: Oxbow Books, 2017), 6. 15 Nina Azzarello, ‘Shauna Richardson’s Crochetdermy Animals Exhibit at Design Days Dubai’, Design Boom, https://www.designboom.com/art/shauna-richardson-crochetdermy-designdays-dubai-crafts-council-london-03-15-2015/. 16 R. R. McIan, McIan’s Highlanders at Home or Gaelic Gatherings (Glasgow: David Bryce, 1900, reprint of Strand: Ackerman & Co. 1848), 188–89. https://archive.org/details/ mcianshighlander00mciauoft/page/188 (accessed 24 March 2016).

266

Hunting for Lost Crafts 17 Beth Legg, ‘Hunting for Lost Crafts: A Report Detailing Research Undertaken into the Heritage Crafts of the Highlands Relating to Hunting, Shooting and Fishing’, 4, https://www. academia.edu/11301934/Hunting_for_Lost_Crafts. 18 Ibid. 19 R. R. McIan, McIan’s Highlanders at Home, 189. 20 Pat Reynolds quoted by Hannah Ellis-Petersen ‘Traditional Skills at Risk of Dying Out, Says Craft Group’, The Guardian, 30 December 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/ dec/30/traditional-skills-endangered-heritage-craft. 21 Pat Reynolds, ‘Crafts in the English Countryside: Dark Reflections from the Future’, (Appendix 9a), Heritage Crafts Association Research Reports, (2014), 4. http://heritagecrafts.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2017/05/Crafts_in_the_English_Countryside_Updated-2014.pdf. 22 Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Heritage Foundation Newfoundland and Labrador, http://heritagefoundation.ca/programs/ich/(accessed 8 August 2017). 23 UNESCO, Intangible Cultural Heritage: Traditional Craft, https://ich.unesco.org/en/ traditional-craftsmanship-00057. 24 Andrea Peach, ‘The Making of Modern Scottish Craft: Revival and Invention in 1970s Scotland’, Robert Gordon University, Scotland, Unpublished PhD, 2017, 11. 25 Edmund de Waal, ‘In Black and White’, Crafts (November/December 2015): 35. 26 Tim Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (October 1993): 155.

267

INDEX

Boldface locators indicate figures and tables; locators followed by ‘n.’ indicate endnotes Abdülaziz, Sultan 39, 41, 56 Abdülhamid II, Sultan 41, 56, 59 n.36 Abdülmecid 56 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo 98 academic community 2 academic disciplines 4, 12 Acosta, Laura 95, 100, 104–5, 107, 111 n.56 Perra Egoista (2011–2013) (Plate 11) 105 Rosa Bear 105 ‘Street Operas’ 105 Adams, Lily Osman 192 agency 1–2, 9, 97, 119 Agnes Etherington Gallery 192 Akçam, Taner 59–60 n.37 Albert Fine Art Album (Bezirdjian) 43, 48, 56–7 ‘exotic’ items 50–1 features 50 and Grammar of Ornament 51–5 ‘Oriental’ patterns 50 revival of heraldry 50 and Victorian market 48–51 Alfoldy, Sandra 7, 266 Allen, W. C. 204 n.47 Allende, Salvador 100 AmaXhosa communities, Intsikizi 88–9 American Craft Council 2, 15 n.18, 17 n.37 American Craftsmen’s Council 7, 15 n.18, 17 n.37 American Indian Religious Freedom Act 135 American National Endowment for the Arts 2 Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum 188, 221, 226–7, 231 craft performer 225, 225 performances of craftsmanship (Plate 25) 221, 222 potter performance (Plate 26) 224 tourists at 228, 228 Anderson, Benedict 70 Anderson, Robert A. 121–2 An Dương Vương, King 73 Anne of Brittany 93 n.22 Aparicion con Vida (slogan) 98 Ardagh cheese 121–2

Arevalo, J. M. 96 Armenian community 40–1, 57 massacres and intervention 44–5 Southern Cemetery 43 ‘symbolic framework’ 42 Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) 44 Armenian Ladies’ Association 44, 59 n.31 ‘the Armenian Nation’ 56 Armony, Victor 100 arpilleras (Chile) 97–9 The Art Amateur 199 art and design 2–3, 191 Art Deco motifs 66 Art Gallery of Hamilton 192 The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artists 192 Artists, Architecture & Artisans: Canadian Art 1890–1918 (exhibition) 192 artizanat producers 160–1, 166 ‘art manufacturing’ 191 Art Nouveau movements 66–7, 196 Arts and Crafts exhibitions 6, 25 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society 6 Arts and Crafts Movement 2, 6, 9, 11–12, 14 n.6, 21, 63, 145, 172, 189, 193, 196, 208 Arvin, Maile 133 Ashbee, Charles, Guild and School of Handicraft 12 Ashworth, G. J. 208 association 9, 44, 67–8, 113, 264. See also specific association Association for the Promotion of Authentic Heritage (Horezu) 162 Association of Folk Craftsmen ‘Rooster of Horezu’ 162 Audubon, John James, Canadian Historical Dinner Service 192 Australia Council for the Arts 14 n.12 crafts 3 ‘authentic’ art-making practices 82 authenticity 8–10, 21–2, 50–1, 56, 64, 74–5, 115, 128–32, 148, 164, 166–7, 178–9, 187 Ayvazovsky, Ivan 57

Index Baganda (craft objects) 237 basketry 244–7, 245 craft and heritage 238–41 Ganda 238, 250 n.6 geographical location 239 Kasubi tombs 188, 241–2 mat-weaving 242–4, 252 n.39 pottery 247–9, 248 Balick, Mariette 65 Balick, Robert 63, 65 Balyan Family 41, 58 n.12 Baronian, Sukias 43 Barranquilla carnival 105, 112 n.60 Barrow, George Lennox 36 n.45 Barton, Rose 36 n.37 basketry (Baganda) 242, 244–7, 245, 249 Bayeux Tapestry 84, 87 beadwork 104, 111 n.51 Belfast Morning News 38 n.71 Bellegarde, Perry 127 Beylerbeyi Palace 41 Bezirdjian, Sopon 39 Albert Fine Art Album (see Albert Fine Art Album (Bezirdjian)) Armenian identity 40, 44, 57 career 39–41 Constantinople to Manchester 40–5 correcting misconceptions 55 Oriental Art 40 ‘Oriental Designs’ 40 Royal Life Company Insurance, advertisement 46, 47 sketches of Ottoman motifs 54, 54 Tea Cozy, Arabian Style 49 Turkish style 53, 54 works in Manchester 45, 45–6, 46, 47, 48, 48 (see also designs (Bezirdjian)) Biên Hoà ceramics 63–6 beyond craft 75–8 and colonial art education 67–9 eclecticism 78 quandary of modernization 70–4 tradition and capitalist time lags 74–5 vase with Angkor motifs 66, 66 bigger pot (entamu) 249 Binkley, Lisa 5–6, 9–11, 113 Black Lives Matter movement 5 Blundell, Valda 135 Bodley, J. E. C. 50 Boito, Camillo, historical equivalence 145 Bokmakierie 90 Bolivar, Simon, ‘El Libertador’ 102 ‘bona fide British Colonists’ 51 Book of Kells 28

Bordando por la paz: Un panuelo una victima (project) 99 Bord Bía, The Craft of Cheesemaking 115 Bourdieu, Pierre 143 habitus 114 heritage conservation (analytical framework) 143–4 theory of structuration 153 Brandimante, Cynthia 192 Breton, André 105 Bretton Woods Agreement 132 Bruce-Joy, Albert 31 Buchczyk, Magdalena 2–3, 5–6, 9–11, 114. See also heritage smart ceramic productions 3 Buckley, Cheryl 197 Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board (BHTB) 247, 250, 251 n.25 The Builder 51 Bùi Xuân Phái 75 Bundgaard, Helle 179 Burnett, Mary, floral designs 198, 204 n.60 Cáceres, Berta 103, 111 n.47 Caerphilly cheese 118, 122, 124 n.36 Cahirmoyle, cheesemaking 115–18, 121–2, 123 n.5 Calcutta Exhibition 51 Cambodian empire 65–6 Canada 256. See also China painting (in Canada) Canadian Guild of Handicrafts 19 n.68 Council for the Arts 14 n.11 Gardiner Museum 13 heritage crafts 3 immigration policies 106 Latin American diaspora 95–6, 100 residential schools 138 n.2 ‘the sixties scoop’ 133 textile social activism 22 Canadian Home Journal 198 Canadian Indian Act 135, 141 n.36 Canadian Museum of History 14 n.11, 203 n.29 Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), Toronto Applied Arts Show 200, 203 n.29 Carnegie Trustees 124 n.14 Carpenter, Aimée 23 Cavallo, Adolfo Salvatore 86 Cây Mai pottery 65–6 Ceramic Art Importing Company (Toronto) 198 ceramics 65, 187, 189, 200, 223–4, 227–8, 233, 259 Biên Hoà (see Biên Hoà ceramics) Horezu 159–60 Ottoman 54 Ceramics Cooperative (Cooperativa Ceramica) 161

269

Index Ceramics Fair 221 Césaire, Aimé, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land 72 Chaminda (designs) 175, 176 Champa (Ciamba) 65, 78 n.5 Champ de Mars models 26 Chánh, Nguyễn Quốc 75–6 artist’s statement 76 Barefoot 77 Guerrilla Mode series (Plate 3) 77 Parallax series 77 ‘Saigon sidewalk’ literary movement 76 Chapel, Mortuary 210–11, 217 n.1 ceiling panels in Limnerslease 213, 213 decorative terracotta (Plate 23) 208 interior gesso work (Plate 24) 213 Chapel, Watts Cemetery 212–13 Cheddar cheese 118–22, 125 n.39 Cheese Control 122 cheesemaking 113, 116, 118–20 documentation for 116 skill of 116, 123 as wartime economy 121 Cheetham, Fiona 190 Chicago Herald 32 Chicago Tribune 31–2 Chicago World’s Fair (1893) 21, 23, 28, 34 n.2, 56 Donegal Industrial Fund 23–5, 29 child blanket (Plate 19) 174 China. See also China painting (in Canada) Jingdezhen (see Jingdezhen (‘porcelain capital’)) kitsch products 161 political and economic decisions 188 Reform and Opening policies 224–5 China Decorator 198 China painting (in Canada) 190–2, 200 and Dish with Dogwood Flowers 190, 193–5 domestic heritage of 190 marginalization 190 scholarship to women 189 significance of 189 ‘Women at Work’ (Lady’s Pictorial) 191 women’s heritage 189 Chinoiserie 67 Christian of Schleswig-Holstein 50 Civil War (1922–1923) 123 Çırağan Palace 41 Clarke, Purdon 51 clay bowl (ekibya) 248, 249 Cleeve, Messers 118 Cloisters Museum 81, 84–5, 89 Cochinchine 65 Cocks, Michelle 88 Cole, Henry 51, 191 Collard, Elizabeth 203 n.29

270

collections 187. See also specific collections and cultural institutions 12–13 Highland Folk Museum 188 Inverness Museum & Art Gallery 188 collective rituals and meeting spaces Constellation I and II (2016) 104 Fil de lin, fil du temps (2005) 101 Les Cercles de Fermieres 101 Meeting Point (2008–2016) 101–2, 102 Meli Wixan Mapu 103 Ruka (2016–2017) 103–4 Territoire Textile (2017) 101 Wajmapu 103 Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) 51, 203 n.29 colonialism 9, 12 Biên Hoà and colonial art education 67–9 colonial art education 63–4, 67–9, 73 Columbus, Christopher 65 commercial orientation of modernized patterns 167 Compton Parish Council 208 Compton Potters’ Arts Guild (CPAG) 208, 212, 214, 216–17 decorative work 214, 214 consumerism 46, 50, 56 Contemporary Applied Arts 15 n.18 conventionalized treatment 197 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 172–3, 180–1, 183 n.15 aḷuva 173 Mediaeval Sinhalese Art 178 traditional craft 181 Cottiaris (Kattigara/Cattigara) 65, 78 n.5 Couen, Louise 192 Cowichan sweater 133 craft(s) 1–3, 5, 8, 14 n.12, 25, 63, 97, 113, 238–41, 265–6. See also heritage as artistic process 95 challenges 10 defined and hierarchized 10 labour 133 as making 1, 239 modernity 3 shifting structures 3 as sphere 158 as things 1, 4 universal type of 7 vitality of 187 craftivism 99 Craft Occupational Standards Board (COSB) 239 craft practices 1–2, 6, 95–6, 100, 113, 157, 239–40. See also Sri Lanka (craft practices) authentic 21 in ceramic centre 114 First Nations 18 n.53 heritage 5, 8, 10–11

Index as immaterial heritage 159 institutional marginalization 2, 7 modern 21 textiles as 95 craftsmanship 68, 175, 252 n.43 Baganda 244 in Jingdezhen 221 medieval 145 traditional porcelain making 228, 232 craftsmen (sanaatkar) 39, 51, 65, 151–2, 174, 181, 230–1 craftspeople 1–2, 5, 11, 96, 113, 148–50, 166, 188, 208, 241, 256, 263 agency of 9 Compton pottery 209–10, 216 ‘Do-it-yourself ’ (theme) 256 ‘Down and Dirty’ (theme) 256 Global North 8 implications 11 ‘New Positions’ (theme) 256 symbolic potency 11 ‘Tooling up’ (theme) 256 Crawford, Alan 6 Creation Altarpiece (2007) 84, 86–7 crochetdermy 261 Cromwell, Oliver 33 Cruikshank, William 196 Cù Lao Phố 65 cultural appropriation 6, 66, 69, 95, 104, 107, 138, 216 cultural assimilation 97 cultural hybridity 22, 128–32 cultural metissage 102–3 cultural resilience 113 cultural transformation 137 Cunningham, John, ‘the stain of Drogheda’ 33 Dahl, Johan Christian 146 Danger, Dayna 104, 111 n.51 Daschle, Tom 137–8 Daskon, Chandima 181 Davis, Theodore R. 201 n.2 Dean, Teresa 23–4, 34 n.8 decolonizing practices 2, 4, 7, 9, 21, 113–14 de Grammont, Nuria Carton 8–9, 11, 22 Delacroix, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi 44 Delrenne, M. 118 DeNicola, Alicia Ory 181 Deschenes, Jen 257 Sixareen: Laying on an aamos 258 designs (Bezirdjian) for Beylerbeyi Palace (Plate 1) 41 for ceilings 45 for four chairs 46 Myra’s Journal 48, 48

‘Oriental’ 39, 48 promotional calendar (Spicer Bros paper suppliers) 46, 47 de Waal, Edmund 265 diasporic craft 22 Dickens, Charles, Jr., ‘Donegal Sketches’ 26 Dignam, Mary Ella 193, 200, 203 n.35 Canadian Historical Dinner Service 195 Canadian Woman Artists History Initiative 193 as ‘dean of Women’s Arts’ 193 Dish with Dogwood Flowers (Plate 21) 190, 193–5 floral decoration 194 networks of exchange 197–200 Plate with Dogwood Flowers 195 pottery decoration 194–5 as President of WAAC 194 Dinjyan, Setrak (Faraway the Spring) 56 Dirty War 97–8 diya kacci 173 Dodd, Tony 88 domestic heritage 187, 190, 195, 197, 201 Donegal Castle 28, 30, 33 Donegal Industrial Fund 23–5, 29 Donegal Village 23, 33–4 Chicago World’s Fair (1893) 21, 23–5, 28, 29, 34 n.2, 56 for London’s Irish Exhibition (1888) 26 Đỗ Quang Em 75 Doulton’s Lambeth Art Pottery 191 Drew, Thomas 28 drug trade 99, 109 n.24 drug trafficking 100 drug war 95, 99, 109 n.24 Dublin Exhibition (1853) 37 n.50 Dumbarra Textiles weaving (Sri Lanka) 171–3 community of practice 173–4 innovation-driven economic model 177 multiple construction, heritage 181 national craftsmanship awards/exhibitions 179–80 outsider’s evaluation of 180–1 production of authenticity 178–9 salvage paradigm 182 traditional motifs (Plate 20) 178, 178 weaver’s account 176–8 ‘Durban Hall’ 51 economic refugees 100 economic sustainability 2, 113 economy and politics, modernization 72 eddali 247 Edmonds, Mark, temporalities 260 Edward VII, coronation 50 Elliot, Bridget 191

271

Index El Oasis 97 ‘embroiderers cottage,’ Kells 25–6, 27 embroidering/embroidery 82–3, 86–7, 93 n.28, 96, 194 for the disappeared 97–100 against violence/authoritarianism/censorship 96–7 Embroidery for Peace project (Mexico) 97 emumbwa 249 Enlightenment progress 73 Eugenie, Empress 57 Eurocentric colonial and imperialistic agendas 4 craft objects, removal 4–5 linking of craft 22 European Union, initiatives 162 Evening Telegraph 26 Ezcurra, Maria 8–9, 11, 22, 95, 100, 107 Invisible (2005/2016) 105, 106 In Your Shoes (2010) 105–6 ‘fair trade’ network 25 Fair Trade programmes 12 Falke, Jacob, Die Kunst im Haus 146 Feminist Art Journal 134 Filkins, Clarabel Childs 200 Fine Art College of Indochina (FACI) 68 fine arts 2–3, 10, 144, 190, 210, 212 fine craft 2–3, 14 n.8 modern studio practices 8 Western 7 Finerty, John F. 31–2 Flegg, Eleanor 3, 6, 11 Blessed are the cheesemakers: A cultural history of cheese in early twentieth-century Ireland 113 folk, category of 2–3, 5, 16 n.25, 16 n.27 folk arts 4, 14 n.8, 97, 159–61, 166 folklore 159, 257 folklore protection (Bolivia) 18 n.59 Fordist mass production of goods 63 Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) 128 Foster, Roy 30, 33 ‘Ireland Abroad’ 31 France fine arts 144 repatriation of cultural objects 5 traditional workmanship 145 Frank, Gelya 97 Freeman, Margaret 85 The Unicorn Tapestries 93 n.22 Freeman’s Journal 25–6, 32, 35 n.20, 38 n.70 Free Trade Movement 19 n.70 Fry, Marshall 196–8, 200, 204 n.47 The Fry Art Company 196 Fry-Phillips Keramic Studio 204 n.47

272

Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains) 99 funding 3, 86–7, 92, 168, 187, 207, 210–13, 215–17 Gardiner Museum 187, 190, 194 ‘ideal femininity,’ portraits 200 Small Pitcher (Plate 22) 196 Gedze, Nokuphiwa 88 gender 11, 243, 265. See also women fair trade and 19 n.70 and personal connotation 97 politics of 187 stereotypes 104–7, 197 Geneva Accords (1954) 71 genocide 44, 57, 59 n.37 George Horse Capture (Gros Ventre) 129 German Michel 44 Ghent Altarpiece (1432) 84 Gijsbertsen, Joos 88 Gillette, Maris 2–3, 11, 188 Broken Pots Broken Dreams 221 ‘Giữ gin bản sắc dan tộc’ (slogan) 74 Gladstone, William 30–1, 40 global art market 63 Globe (1898) (exhibition) 197 Godfrey, Robert 83, 88 Goss, W. H. 50 Gotlieb, Rachel 3, 6, 10–11, 187 Gowrie, J. W. 198 Graham, B. J. 208 Great Sioux Reservation 128 Greenhalgh, Paul, enhancement of trade 26 Greenough, Paul 184 n.37 Greru, Chamithri 5–6, 9–12, 114, 182 Griffiths, John 203 n.29 Grunewald 84 Guild and School of Handicraft 12 Hagen, Alice Egan 189, 192 Hagopian, Richard, Faraway the Spring 56 Hallam, Elizabeth, Creativity and Cultural Improvisation 17 n.46 Hamidian Massacres 59 n.36 hand-crochet technique 261 handicraft practitioners 63 handkerchiefs, embroidering 97–9 Hanımefendi, Leyla 56 Hans, Birgit 131 Hanum, Melek 56 Harrison, Caroline 201 n.2 Harrison, Rodney 4, 7 Heritage 15 n.17 Harris Tweed 258 Harrod, Tanya, The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century 15 n.18

Index Hart, Alice Rowland 23, 34 n.3, 37 n.64 ‘boycotting and National League friends’ 35 n.21 characteristics, projects 26 and Donegal Industrial Fund 25 exhibition villages 25–6, 28 factory-made goods 36 n.39 recreated heritage 24–5 Hart, Ernest 23 Hartley, L. P. 145 Hayastan (Armenia) 44, 56 Hayes, Lucy 201 n.2 Helland, Janice 6, 11–12, 21, 191 heritage 1–3, 5, 9, 11, 14 n.12, 15 n.17, 21, 35 n.12, 113, 238–41. See also craft(s) adopting 128–32 authorized and unauthorized 3–4, 12 compartmentalized 10 disseminating 135–6 funding 187 performing in studio 162–5 politics of 136–7 shifting structures 3 sites 33, 188, 210–13, 215–17, 221, 227, 237, 241, 245, 248–9 (see also Kasubi Royal Tombs (KRT)) tourism and 166 vitality of 187 heritage conservation, field 143 Bourdieusian analytical framework 143–4 German influences (Norway) 146 Gothic revival and creation 144–5 industrial Swiss chalet style (Røros) 146–7 Heritage Crafts Association 3 Crafts in the English Countryside 264 Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) 207–9, 218 n.12 ‘Hope Project’ 210–11 Project Planning Grant (PPG) 210 strategic plan 210, 212, 215 Watts Gallery Extension and Restoration (2002) 210 heritage smart 114, 158, 167–8 Highland Folk Museum 188, 256 historical memory and political agency 187 Hồ Chí Minh 70 Hofer, Tamás 24 Hofmeyr, Carol 84–7. See also Keiskamma Art Project Holy Cross Armenian Church (Manchester) 42, 42 Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA) 11, 208, 212, 217 ‘home cheesemaking’ 120 Home Rule Movement 23, 25–6, 31, 33 Homes, Robert 200

Horezu plates/potters (Plate 18) 157, 159–60, 163–4, 168 craft transmission 166 heritage smart 114, 158 Howson, Juliet 192 Hunt, Perdita 210 Hunting for Lost Crafts (exhibition) 188, 255–7, 260, 264–5 Brawl (MccGwire) 262 Crochetdermy® Wild Boar Trophy (Richardson) 261, 261 preparatory research document 263 Skye Weavers 259 The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries 81, 82, 83, 85–7, 89 ground hornbill flies across stream (Plate 6) 90 hunting (Plate 4) 89 killed unicorn (Plate 8) 90 kneeling young huntsman (Plate 7) 90 lush foliage (Plate 5) 89–90 restoration (Plate 9) 91 Hutcheon, Linda 81 Hutian Ancient Kiln Site 227, 231 Huỳnh, Bội Trân 68 Huynh-Beattie, Boitran 72 Igloliorte, Heather 5 Ikea 64, 74 Illustrated London News 46 improvisation and innovation 1, 10, 17 n.46 Independence Palace 73 India Museum 57 ‘Indian Palace’ (Clarke) 51 Indian Residential School (IRS) System 133, 137, 138 n.1 Indian Sentinel 133 Indigenous crafts 240, 243, 249–50 Indigenous women of Turtle Island (North America) 13 industrialization and urbanization 4–5, 63, 146, 223 Ingold, Tim 260, 265 Creativity and Cultural Improvisation 17 n.46 innovative art 63 intangible craft/heritage practices 1–2, 6, 10, 32 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention (2003) 8 Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) 1, 3, 5, 8–10, 12, 18 n.59, 114, 187–8, 221, 223, 249, 257 ‘traditional porcelain making craftsmanship’ 228 value of craft 262–5 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 4 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) 7, 148 International Wood Committee 148 International Exhibitions 25–6, 72

273

Index Intsikizi Tapestries 81, 81, 83, 93 n.28, 94 n.31 in AmaXhosa communities 88–9 developing 86–8 drought (Plate 5) 89 Exhibition (National Arts Festival) 83 ground hornbill flies across river (Plate 6) 90 killed hornbill (Plate 8) 90 restoration (Plate 9) 91 sets of 82–3 ‘Setting Out’ (Plate 4) 89 surrounded hornbill (Plate 7) 90 Inverness Museum and Art Gallery 255–6 Irish Agricultural Organisational Society (IAOS) 117, 121 Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society (IAWS) 119 Irish Exhibition in London (1888) 25–6, 27 The Irish Homestead 117–20 Irish national identity 23 imagination and memory 32 Irish Times 26, 33, 34 n.10 Irish Village 23, 27. See also Donegal Village for Chicago (1893) 28, 30–2 Kells embroiderers’ cottage 25–6, 27 Isenheim Altarpiece (1512 to 1516) 84 Ishbel, Countess of Aberdeen 23–4, 34 n.7 isishweshwe fabric 89 Jain, Joytindra 180, 184 n.37 Japonisme 67 Jarulaitienė, Giedrė 2, 5–6, 9–10, 12, 114 Jelin, Elizabeth 107 Trabajos de la memoria 112 n.64 Jennings, Hilary 239–40, 249 Jingdezhen (‘porcelain capital’) 221 craft methods 231, 232 craft performances in 223–4 deindustrialization 227–8 economic lifeblood 233 as industrial centre 223–4 mechanized industrial heritage 233 municipal officials in 226 potters 188 state and collective sector 226 tourism and 227–9 ‘traditional porcelain making craftsmanship’ 228, 232 John Bull 44 Johnson, Margaret 133 Jones, Owen 40, 51, 56, 61 n.79 ‘Daisy’ wallpaper 45 Grammar of Ornament 41, 51–5 ‘higher ambition’ 52 Persian style 52 Jones, Robin 172 Junor, William 198

274

Kabaka 243 basketry 246 mats 243 social systems 238 kalanamye 244 Kalkreuter, Britta 5–6, 9–12, 114, 182 Kandyan Art Association 173 Kaplan, Wendy 192 Kasubi Royal Tombs (KRT) 188, 237, 238, 241, 249–50, 251 n.29 architectural structures 247 baskets (Plate 29) 246 repository for material culture 241–2 Katia (potter) 157, 165, 167–8 Keiskamma Altarpiece (2005) 84, 87 Keiskamma Art Project 81, 84–5, 94 n.31 Bayeux Tapestry 84 Christian and customary beliefs 94 n.52 developing Intsikizi Tapestries 81, 81, 86–8 (see also Intsikizi Tapestries) Exhibition (National Arts Festival) 83 form and content of tapestries 89–91 The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries 82, 85–6 Intsikizi in AmaXhosa communities 88–9 Keiskamma Tapestry 84, 93 n.28 kraal 91 Keiskamma Guernica (2010) 84, 87 Keiskamma Music Academy 85–6 Keiskamma Trust 85–6 Kellogg, L. Steel 199 Kelly, Fanny 128 Kemhadjian, Vortik 41 Keramic Studio 192, 197–8, 200, 204 n.47 Kevorkian, Raymond 59 n.37 Khan, Malcom 50 Khrimyan, Mıgırdiç 44 Kigongo, Remigius 245 kitsch products 161, 163 Knott, Stephen 191 Koyana, Mojalefe 87 Kuprecht, Karolina 5 Kuutmas, Kristin 1, 167 kyaki 244 Ladies’ Drawing Room Book 49 Ladies’ Home Journal 198 Lady’s Magazine 49 Lakota Sioux star blankets 113, 127, 129 authenticity and hybridity in 128–32 Bethlehem Star/Lone Star 130, 138 buffalo robes 129, 130, 132 elongated diamonds 131 expectations 136–7 heritage of resilience 132–5 intercultural exchange 132

Index patchwork quiltmaking 130–1, 134 powwows and pan-Indigeneity 135–6 quilting pattern (Plate 14) 129 second-wave feminism 134–5 significance of 128 ‘specific tribal and pan-Indian meanings’ 132 as tangible/intangible heritage 128 war bonnet 131, 132 Lambeth School of Art 191 La mineria canadiense mata (slogan) 103 Langton, Anne 189, 196 Latin America collective rituals and meeting spaces 101–4 diaspora in Canada 95–6 embroidering against violence/ authoritarianism/censorship 96–7 social violence in 107 women and motherhood 97–8 Latin-Canadian art 110 n.33 migration and cross-border identity 100 traditional art productions 107–8 Laycock, Jo 44 Legg, Beth 258, 263 Leighton, Frederic 55, 57 Les Cercles de Fermieres (Circle/Community of farmers’ wives) 101 Levy, Robert 56 Li Jianshen 229–31 Lincoln, Mary Todd 189, 201 n.2 Linehan, Hugh 38 n.78 Living Human Treasures project 18 n.59 local art, interpretations of 78 Lonely Planet 30 Longworth, Maria 192. See also Rookwood Art Pottery Lord Mayor’s Fund 44 Lords, Nguyễn 65 Lowenthal, David 24, 145 Luckman, Susan 8 Luo Xuezheng 229–30 Lý (1009–1225 AD) dynasty 66, 68 Lynch, Caitrin 172 MacDonald, Juliette 10–11, 188 MacDowell, Marsha 130 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Argentina) 97–9 Mainardi, Patricia, ‘Quilts: The Great American Art’ 134 Maker Movement Manifesto 237 Makhubalo, Sinovuyo 88 Mallon, Sean 9 Malumbezo, Nombuyiselo 88 Manchester Metropolitan University Library 40, 57 Mapuma, Ndileka 88 Marshall Plan 132, 139 n.18

material culture 64, 97, 200, 208, 237–8, 241–2, 244, 259 mat-weaving (Baganda) 242–4, 252 n.39 Mauss, Marcel 137 MccGwire, Kate, Brawl (Plate 32) 262 McCord Museum (Montreal) 202 n.9 McCormack, John 118, 122 McGillivray, Florence Helen 200 Afterglow 196 as ‘Cinderella of Art’ 196 exhibition of 204 n.45 jardinière 199, 200 Royal Canadian Academy of Arts 196 small pitcher (Plate 22) 190, 196–7 McIan, R. R., salmon hunting 262–3 McInness, Graham 193 McMichael Canadian Art Gallery 204 n.45 McNeill, T. E. 30 medieval rationalism 145 Meeting Point (2008–2016) 101–2, 102, 110 n.42 Meli Wixan Mapu 103 “memories of memories” 135 migration 64–5, 74, 96, 106, 217 and cross-border identity 100 Milloy, John S. 138 n.2 Mills, Phil 260 Minh Hương 65 Mining Injustice Solidarity Network 103 Ministry of Culture and Heritage 3 Minton’s Art Pottery 191 mission civilisatrice 67, 71 Mitchell, Barbara 196 ‘moment of problematization’ 190 Morall, Angie 133 Morris, Kevin Andrew 259–60 Morris, William 2, 6, 255 Mulindwa, Peter 243 Mundy, Sarah Anne 198 Murphy, Paula 30 Musée National des Beaux Arts du Québec 102 Museum of Art and Design (MAD) 15 n.18 Muzibu Azaala Mpanga 241, 251 n.29 Muzukulu (grandchild, KRT) 242 baskets 246 mat-weaving skill 243 pots 248 Mvubu, Cebo 87–8, 94 n.38 Myre, Nadia 104, 111 n.51 The Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn 86 Naked Craft (exhibition) 188, 255–9, 264–5 The Nation 25 National Art Council of South Africa 86 National Arts Festival 83, 83–4, 86–7, 89

275

Index National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) 111 n.47 National Craft Council of Sri Lanka 175, 179, 181 ‘national cultural heritage’ 21, 24 National Dairy Council, The History of Cheese 115 National Gallery of Canada 192, 196, 203 n.29 National Heritage Fellowships 2 National Heritage List for England (NHLE) 217 n.1 National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) 129 National Union of Craft Cooperatives (UCECOM) 160 craft cooperatives 161 potters’ development in 166 natural heritage 212, 241 needlework 49, 81, 84, 98–9, 130, 134 Negrin, Llewellyn 197 neoliberalism 12, 19 n.70 New York Times 23–4, 30, 32, 34 n.10, 72, 189 New Zealand, craft and heritage 3 Ngeye clan 247, 249 Ngô Đình Diệm 70–1 Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm 69 Nguyen-Long, Kerry 67 Nguyễn Trọng Lộc 75 human in uncanny forms 75, 76 Nguyễn-võ, Thu-hương 5, 8–9, 12, 22 Eurocentric linking of craft 22 socialist realism 79 n.19 Nicolaysen, Nicolay 146 Nidaros Cathedral (Trondheim) 146 Nkani, Nomfusi 88 Norwegian Society for Preservation of Norwegian Ancient Monuments 146 Nyongo, Avumile 88 Obama, Michelle, ‘Kailua Blue turquoise’ 189 objet d’art 63 O Brien, Dermod 115 The Morning Milk (Plate 12) 117 O Brien, Mabel 115, 116, 126 n.71 Caerphilly tradition 122 Cahirmoyle estate 117 cheesemaking 116, 118–21 co-operation 117 co-operative store 118 farmhouse cheese movement 123 The Irish Homestead 117–20 O’Brien, William Smith 35 n.20, 123 n.5 O’Connell, Daniel 33 Memorial Chapel model 30 Monument 30, 37 n.50 O’Day, Alan, ‘imagined Irish identities’ 32

276

Ødegaard, Sverre 150 Antiquarian Workshops 148 O’Donnell, Rory 30 O’Donoghue, D. J., Poets of Ireland 25, 35 n.19 Oger, Henri, The Technique of the Annamese People 67 O’Grady, Shirley 134 O’Hara, Helen 36 n.37 Opio, Gabriel 241 ‘Oriental Art’ (Bezirdjian) 40, 51–2, 54–5 O’Sullivan, Sean, Mabel O Brien 116 Paddy, Donegal 26 Paist, Henrietta-Barclay 189 pan-Indigeneity 127 powwows and 135–6 star blanket (see Lakota Sioux star blankets) Panofsky, Erwin, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism 143 Panslav Conference in Moscow (1867) 26 Paris Exposition (1900) 39 Parker, Rozsika 197 The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine 134 Parnell, Charles Stewart 32, 35 n.20, 35 n.21, 38 n.70, 38 n.71 Paterson, Elaine Cheasley 3, 6, 11–12 institutional transformation 187 Patmore, Coventry 202 n.15 Peace and Friendship Treaty (1726) 138 n.3 Peach, Andrea 265 Pearce, Susan 187, 190, 197 Peel, Paul 194 Peers, Laura 5, 15 n.22 Pendant qu’il fais mauvais (exhibition) 110 n.44 performance 222 contributions of pioneering entrepreneurs 229–32 heritage and craft 222–3 in Jingdezhen 230, 232–3 political conditions of craft 224–9 potter’s craftsmanship (Plate 25) 221 Petrie, George 37 n.50 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (1876) 192 “philanthropic arm” 11 philanthropic ideals 12 ‘philanthropic’ organizations 19 n.68 philanthropy 11–12 Phù Đổng Thiên Vương 73 Picasso, Guernica (1937) 84 Pinochet dictatorship 98, 110 n.43 place and belonging 12–13, 21–2 plagiarism 95, 107 Plotz, John 43

Index Plunkett, Horace 117–18 co-operative movement 120 Poland, Marguerite 86 ‘politico-ethnographic exhibition’ 26 Pollock, Griselda 197 potters/pottery authenticity 164, 167 in Baganda 247–9, 248 contemporary craft practice 157, 158 diplomas 165 facades of houses (Plate 17) 157 firing process 163–4, 166 Horezu pottery 157–9 household studio (atelier) 163, 167 knowledge transmission 165–6, 188 learning to make heritage pots 165–7 management of uncertainty 164 museum fair 160 Olari workshops 167 unemployment and marginalization 162 working group (echipă) 166 In Praise of Hands (WCC’s exhibition) 7 Prats, C. L. 96 Ptolemy, Claudius 65, 78 n.5 Pugin, A. W. 51 Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper 24 Irish Village 27, 37 n.50 Racette, Sherry Farrell 18 n.53, 104 Rajala, Ulla 260 Ramos Maza, Teresa 107 ‘Rare Craft Fellowship Award’ 2 rata (Dumbara patterns) 176–7, 179 Ray, Lana 104 reconciliation 114, 128, 136, 138 Red Cloud 128 blanket 129, 129 Redgrave, Richard 51 Redmayne, George 208 Reflections 106 Renaissance humanism 63 Reynolds, Pat 263 Rhead, Frederick 198 Rhead, George 191 Richardson, Shauna, Crochetdermy® Wild Boar Trophy 261, 261 Robineau, Adelaide Alsop 192, 198. See also Keramic Studio Robinson, Lennox 117–18, 121, 124 n.14 ‘The Lynx’ 117 Palette and Plough (1948) 117 The Whiteheaded Boy (1916) 117, 124 n.16

Rochefoucauld family 85 Rockefeller, John D. 85 Rodini, Elizabeth 62 n.105 Romanian Academy 160 Romantic Nationalism 146 Rookwood Art Pottery 192 ‘Rooster of Horezu’ (Cocoşul de Horezu) fair 160 Røros (Norway) Copper-work trade monopoly 147 ‘Halvor Vreim’s period’ 147 Swiss chalet style 146–7 townscape (Plate 15) 147 traditional workmanship (see traditional workmanship (Røros)) ‘rosemaling’ technique 146 Roy, Tirthankar 175 Royal Dublin Society Show 122 Royal Life Company Insurance, advertisement 46, 47 Royal Proclamation (1763) 138 n.3 Royle & Bennett 42 Ruskin, John 6 Russell, George 117–18 SAARC Museum of Textiles and Handicraft (New Delhi) 179 Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de 96 Saidye Bronfman Award for Fine Crafts 14 n.11 ‘Saigon sidewalk’ literary movement 76 Saint-Saëns, Camille, Carnival of the Animals 86 Samuel, Raphael 24, 33–4, 35 n.12 Sanbao International Ceramic Art Institute (Plate 27) 188, 230–1 Sansoni, Dominic 180 Sarraut, Albert 67 Schaffer, Talia 189, 200 Schmahmann, Brenda 4–6, 9, 11–12, 22 Scotland 255 craftspeople, themes 256 intangible cultural heritage in 262–5 physical and immaterial sense of place 257–61 Scott, Yvonne 23 Scottish Arts Council 240 Scrase, Timothy 12 Second Indochina War 70–1 Second World War 7, 132, 139 n.18, 147, 159 Senoga, Maureen 2–3, 5–6, 188 Sevadjian, Marie, L’Amira 41 Sharp, Edmund 28 Shilpi Exhibition of the National Craft Council 179 Sifuentes, Aram Han 9 Sioux, Oglala 128

277

Index skills and knowledge 3, 5–6, 8, 25, 223, 230, 265 development of 228 as virtuoso performances 233 Skye Weavers, indigo tweed (Plate 31) 259 Slătineanu, Barbu 159–60 slip-casting 227 Smith, Laurajane 7, 11, 215–16 Uses of Heritage 14 n.6 Smyly, Philip Crampton 115 socialist realism 70–1, 79 n.19 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) 2, 6, 145 Society of United Irishwomen (UI) 120–2 Solar, María Elena del 96 ‘Song to Romania’ (Cintarea Romaniei) festival 160–1 Southampton Summer Art School 204 n.47 South Dakota 129 Pine Ridge Indian Reservation 139 n.5 star quilts in 131, 137 ‘Southern Ground-Hornbill: Population and Habitat Viability Assessment Workshop’ 94 n.40 South Kensington National Art Training School 191 Sovereign Potters 199 The SPAB Manifesto (1877) 6, 145 Sri Lanka (craft practices) 171. See also Dumbarra Textiles weaving (Sri Lanka) craft communities 114 identity issues 174–5 invented traditions 172 Kandyan craft, authenticating 172–4 Talagune (landscape) 173 St. Laurence Gate (Drogheda) 24, 33–4 Staiff, Russell 1 Standing Rock Reservation (North Dakota) 130 Steele, Robert, Medieval Lore 255 Steinle, Peggy 72–3 Stephenson, Allan 86 Strzygowski, Jozef 42 surrealism 72 sustainability and resilience 12–13, 95, 113–14, 181, 188, 210, 259 Sutton-Smith, Peter 194 Svensson, Marina 223 tableau vivant exhibition 28 tangible craft/heritage practices 1–2, 4, 7, 32, 116, 136, 138, 188 tapestries 13, 22, 82, 85, 89–91, 97–8. See also specific tapestries tapis tressé 101 Tara 69 taskscapes 188, 260, 264 Taylor, Kim 136 Taylor, Una Ashworth 25, 35 n.20

278

Teotik 44, 57 Territoire Textile (2017) 101 textiles/textilework 100–1, 107, 134 craft practices 95–6 embroidery and weaving 97–9 (see also Dumbarra Textiles weaving (Sri Lanka)) masks and 104–7 The Textiles Traditions of South Asia (exhibition) 179–80 Thomson, Tom 196 Toronto China Club 199 Toronto Industrial Exhibition 203 n.29 tourism 162, 166, 223–4, 231 and global marketing 187 Jingdezhen 227–9 tradition 6, 8–9, 44, 50, 63–5, 68, 72, 93 n.22, 113, 135, 159, 163, 237, 258 and capitalist time lags (Biên Hoà ceramics) 74–5 of cheesemaking 115 of craft skills 7 Eurocentric linking of craft 22 invented 172 textiles 180 weavers vs. newcomers 174–5 traditional crafts 2, 8, 63–4, 72, 181, 184 n.37, 229, 240 and colonialism 9 skills 223 ‘traditional craftsmanship’ 3, 10, 230, 264 traditional workmanship (Røros) 143. See also heritage conservation, field ‘The Medieval Project’ 148 ‘The Outbuilding Project’ 148–9 re-evaluating pastiche 152–3 reproduction at Kaffestuggu outbuilding (Plate 16) 149–52, 150, 151, 152 sub-field of, initiatives 147–9 Trafalgar Castle School 204 n.44 Trần (1226–1400 AD) dynasty 66, 68 Trần Hưng Đạo 73 Trần Nguyễn Hãn 73 Triviño, Sarabeth 95, 100, 103, 107, 111 n.54, 111 n.55 beading and crochet technique 104 cultural and political repositioning 104 metissage 103 Ruka (2016–2017), Plate 10 103–4, 110 n.44 Trudeau, Justin 127–8 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (Plate 13) 127, 137, 138 n.1 Tuck, Eve 133 Uncle Sam 44 Unique, authentic, and always affordable (slogan) 74

Index United Ireland 25, 30, 32, 34 n.7 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 1 Convention of the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 10, 18 n.59, 263–4 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage 257 heritage programmes 113 Heritage Site and Intangible Cultural Heritage 187 ICH programme 10, 12, 18 n.59 living expressions 255 Recommendation for the Protection of Moveable Cultural Property 10 Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity 159 traditional craftsmanship 3 Venice Charter 7 World Heritage Convention 7, 224, 226, 241 World heritage list 148, 159, 237, 242 van Eyck, Jan 84 Venice Charter 6–7, 17 n.36, 151 principle of historical equivalence 145, 150 Venkatesan, Soumhya 182 Verdery, Katherine 167 vert de Bien Hoa 65 Vespuci, Amerigo 65 Vetter, Susi 88 Victoria, Queen 50, 57 Golden Jubilee (1887) 50 Victoria and Albert Museum 39, 50–1 Viet Cong 64 Vietnam 63, 75, 78 artistic movements 71 Biên Hoà ceramics (see Biên Hoà ceramics) colonialism 65, 67 Vietnam War 71 Viollet-le-Duc, E. E. 5–6, 144–5, 153 ‘virtuoso performance’ 188 Volpe, Giorgia 95, 100–1, 107, 110 n.35 cultural metissage 102–3 Fil de lin, fil du temps (2005) 101, 110 n.36 La Grande Manufacture (2018) 101 Les Cercles de Fermieres 101 Meeting Point (2008–2016) 101–2, 102, 110 n.42 Tricobus (2006) 110 n.37 von Herder, Johann Gottfried 146 Wabula akayole 247–8 king’s bowl 249 Wagamese, Richard, sweetgrass solidarity 113, 136 Wajmapu 103 Walker-Tisdale, C. 121

Warrior, Robert Allen, sweetgrass meaning of solidarity 136 Waterton, Emma 210, 215–16 Watts, George Frederic 209 ‘England’s Michelangelo’ 210 Portraits of Mary Watts 209 studios 212 Watts, Mary Seton 208, 210–11 ceiling panels in Limnerslease 213, 213 craft workshop model 216 cultural philanthropy 211 design and craftwork 212 engagement with community 213 HAIA and activism 215 ‘heritage assets’ 212 ‘Limnerslease – Saving the Studios’ 212, 214 Portraits of Mary Watts 209 Watts Picture Gallery 208 Watts Studios, principles 214–15 The Word in the Pattern 216 Watts Gallery: Artists’ Village 187, 207, 211, 215–16 Do-It-Yourself initiatives 217 map drawing 207 Watts Gallery Trust 210, 212 Wayúu tribe 105, 112 n.57 Webb, Aileen Osborn 17 n.37 Wendt, Albert 9 Wharton-Durgaryon, Alyson 6, 11, 21 dynamic cultural relationships 11 Wild Rose Competition 199 Wilkin, M. A. 30 Wilkinson-Weber, Clare M. 181 Williams, Barbara 194 Williamson, John, The Oak King, the Holly King, and the Unicorn: The Myths and Symbolism of the Unicorn Tapestries 93 n.22 Winters 210 women baskets 245–6 and China painting 189, 191–3, 195, 200, 203 n.29 handcrafts 97 heritage 113 history and craft practice 11 history of industrial textile work (Québec City) 101 mats (KRT) 242–3 migrants 22 ‘philanthropic’ organizations 19 n.68 quiltmaking practice 130 United Irishwomen 120–2 vulnerability and victimization, clothes 97–9 Wayúu tribe 105 Women against Pit Closures (1984) 97

279

Index Women’s Arts Association of Canada (WAAC) 194 china clubs 199 exhibition catalogues 198 wood-burning kiln 229, 230 World Crafts Council (WCC) 7, 10, 113 creative craft cities programme 7, 12 English Heritage 187 In Praise of Hands, exhibition 7 World Heritage List 8, 18 n.59, 148, 226, 237, 242, 251 n.29

280

World Heritage Site 114, 143, 148 ‘World Heritage Trust’ 7 The World Intellectual and Property Organization (WIPO) 8 World Market 64, 74 World’s Premier Mineral Exploration & Mining Convention 103 Yeats, WB 117 Zipf, Catherine 198

281

282

283

284



Plate 1  Painted wall decorations by Sopon Bezirdjian, Beylerbeyi Palace, Istanbul (1865). Photo: Alyson Wharton-Durgaryon Plate 2  Biên Hoà hundred flowers vase c. late 1960s. Photo: Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương

1



Plate 3  Nguyễn Quốc Chánh, Guerilla Mode, ceramics, 2017. Photo: Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương

Plate 4  LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry One (‘Setting Out’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry One (‘The Start of the Hunt’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photos: Paul Mills 2



Plate 5  LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Two (‘The Drought’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Two (‘The Unicorn Dips His Horn into the Stream to Rid It of Poison’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photos: Paul Mills

Plate 6  LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Three (‘Fleeing Across the River’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Three (‘The Unicorn Leaps the Stream’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photos: Paul Mills

3



Plate 7  LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Four (‘Surrounded’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Four (‘The Unicorn Defends Himself ’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photo: Paul Mills

Plate 8  LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Five (‘The Ground Hornbill is Killed and Carried Home’’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Six (‘The Unicorn Is Killed and Brought to the Castle’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photo: Paul Mills

4



Plate 9  LEFT: Keiskamma Art Project, Tapestry Six (‘Restoration’) of the Intsikizi Tapestries, Series 3. RIGHT: Tapestry Seven (‘The Unicorn in Captivity’) of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, Cloisters Museum, New York. Photo: Paul Mills

Plate 10  Ruka, Sarabeth Triviño (2016–2017). Photo: Sarabeth Triviño 5



Plate 11  Perra Egoista, Laura Acosta (2011–2013). Public textile installation and performance. Performed by Emilia Benitez, Photo: Daniel Ayala, Location: Parque Saavedra, La Plata, Argentina 2012

Plate 12  The Morning Milk, Dermod O Brien, Private collection. Photo: Anthony O Brien 6



Plate 13  AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde adjusts a blanket presented to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau following speeches at the Assembly of First Nations Special Chiefs Assembly in Gatineau, Tuesday, 8 December 2015. CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Plate 14  Yellow Star Quilt, South Dakota State Historical Society. Courtesy of the Museum of the South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre SD 7



Plate 15  The townscape of the historical centre in Røros. Photo: Giedrė Jarulaitienė

Plate 16  The construction of the new outbuilding in the backyard. Photo: Giedrė Jarulaitienė

8



Plate 17  The facade of a potter’s house decorated with plates. Photo: Magdalena Buchczyk

Plate 18  Horezu plates and a selection of pigments in the potter’s studio. Photo: Magdalena Buchczyk

9

 Plate 19  A master artisan

showing a blanket he made for his newborn child. Photo: Chamithri Greru

Plate 20  The new designs developed by artisans. Photo: Chamithri Greru

10



Plate 21  Dish with Dogwood flowers, Mary Ella Dignam, 1891, 2 x 23 cm, Gardiner Museum, Collection of Barbara and Peter-Sutton-Smith, G11.86. Photo: Gardiner Museum

Plate 22  Small Pitcher, Florence Helena McGillivray, 13 x 11.5 x 8.2 cm, Gardiner Museum, Gift of Barbara M. Mitchell, G14.71. Photo: Gardiner Museum

11



Plate 23  Detail of terracotta frieze, Compton Mortuary Chapel (1898), exterior. Photo: Elaine Paterson Plate 24  Interior gesso work, Compton Mortuary

Chapel, Compton Potters’ Arts Guild, Surrey, England, 1899–1904. Photo: Elaine Paterson

12



Plate 25  A potter performs potting at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum, 2009. Photo: Maris Gillette

Plate 26  A potter performs his craft for tourists at the Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum. Photo: Ping Lin, 2014

13

 Plate 27  The Sanbao International Ceramic Art Center in 2004. Photo: Maris Gillette

Plate 28  Kasubi Royal Tombs interior showing regalia. Mats and baskets for the four kings buried inside Muzibu Azaala Mpanga. Photo: Remigius Kigongo

14



Plate 29  Kasubi Royal Tombs interior showing regalia. Four baskets, one for each of the four kings inside Muzibu Azaala Mpanga. Photo: Remigius Kigongo

Plate 30  Kasubi Royal Tombs roof interior constructed like a basket. Photo: Remigius Kigongo 15

 Plate 31  Indigo check tweed, Skye Weavers. Photo: Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

Plate 32  Brawl, 2014, Kate MccGwire, mixed media with pheasant feathers in antique dome, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: JP Bland

16