Born in 1990, I am an artist and craftswoman from Glasgow, Scotland living in Copenhagen. I graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a degree in Jewellery Design, was the Artist in Residence in the Jewellery department at Designskolen Kolding and completed an MFA in Jewellery Art from HDK-Valand in Sweden, yet little-to-none of my work has been wearable. Instead of applying material towards the body, I synchronise with them by directing bodily meanings towards material translations. Akin to our corporeal skin and bone, and existing with qualities of sensitivity and contrast (mineral/protein, hard/soft, matte/shine, fixed/responsive), porcelain and silk form kin through transparency, delicacy and resistance.
Constantly reacting to shifting environments across Scotland and Scandinavia, I have been seeking kinships with materials to understand and express the ways that my body deviates and evolves. Combining craft with narrative and auto-theoretical research practices, I intend to perceive and inhabit liminal space. Holding concerns on the un/known and un/predictable aspects of existing in an ailing world and body, I seek a cathartic meeting place, between body and material. Weakened by arthritis and potential over-exposures to cancer, I redirect my embodied faults and fears and imagine getting closer to, or merging together with, sensitive materials that obscure robust natures. Prompting transitions towards new and developed states of being, I create in order to reclaim identifications of the vulnerable body; to conjure up recovery and to promote growth. By questioning notions around the unresolvable contradictions between self/other and the discrete/distinct, I use my artistic practice to portray freedom and to materialise resistance.
I use a single needle - a tool more often intended to repair - to deconstruct and distort my depictions printed on pre-woven silk. In shredding the luxurious material that involves substantial forces of precious labour in production, I release the individual fibres and expose positions of privilege and separation. Through processes of splitting, fraying, folding and knotting, the body is multiplied by countless threads coloured by information. Much like bodies themselves, the work is constantly evolving; breathing and twisting, the fibres are activated by the viewer. Entropically, the coded thread fades and tangles as I register my shifting interests; from states of being to transformations of becoming.
Engaging narrative and auto-ethnographic research approaches, Frayed Bodies exposes one’s own vulnerability through craft practices workable from home, during recent times when health anxieties have become globally pandemic. Decentring concepts of the unified and stable self, Frayed Bodies imagines the multiplicity of our bodily nature, by creating and expanding concepts of being.
Instead of applying the material to the body for optimisation; Loose Gatherings collapses my body into partial, printed compositions. This reversal facilitates the de/construction and re/positioning of body, material, image and colour. Considering the multitude of beings and cultures that both build and threaten our permeable selves, I adapt traditions of needlework to offer a meditative and intuitive expression of the way different diseases touch or threaten my body. My corporeal aspects expand and stretch to create Biometric Fibre. Performing as an archival study, measurements and calculations of bodily characteristics are represented by elongated images of the ear canal, a frontier between inside and out. Appearing both bodily and decorative, the formation evokes animation and sentience. Vibrant colours shift through threads, becoming suggestive of a coded or glitched screen; the blend between physical/digital aspects is obscured. Emerging at the beginning of lockdown, Extracts of Care (2020), involves a considerable number of threads, knotted to strengthen and augment a weakened porcelain facade. By deconstructing multiple strips of material left over from previous processes, I produced a palette of threads in my own skin tone. Rearranging them, I reimagined the formation of cocoons to explore ideas of collective care.
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Anna Tegeström Wolgers
Professor of Craft, Textile Art
Anna T. Wolgers works across multiple disciplines in arts and craft. For the last 15 years Anna has worked mainly in the textile field exploring the semiotics of textiles and their narrative values. Textile materials, tactile and visual recognition are elements that Wolgers works with.
Wolgers has participated in numerous international and national exhibitions including public commissions and collaborative works with museums, where she has curated projects/exhibitions. Wolgers is chairwoman of the textile network Fiber Art Sweden
Email:
www.fiberartsweden.nu
www.annatw.se
www.kasiden.se
Yuka Oyama PhD
Professor of Craft, Jewellery Art
Yuka Oyama is a Japanese-German artist who grew up in Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, USA and Germany. Oyama’s artistic practice incorporates sculpture, jewellery, video, photography, public interventions, choreographic experimentations and performances.
Her life-sized, wearable sculptures, object-human hybrids – objectified humans and personified objects – display disconnections often felt in contemporary life: the degeneration of human-to-human emotional communication and our sense of belonging. Oyama employs everyday objects to upset these disconnections, facilitating our ability to act beyond set conventions.
Oyama was one of the core members of the artistic research, Critical Costume 2000 -Costume Agency (2020) based at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where she acted as the curator and the creative director. Oyama’s research considers critical adornments, material culture, and identity.
Katarina Andersson
Senior Lecturer and Programme Director MA Craft
Katarina Andersson is a senior lecturer and since 2016 is the programme director for MA Craft. She is an artist and designer and her work extend between sculptural objects and tableware. Ceramics and glass are her main materials. Her work involves both semiotics, the relation between materials, objects in relation to space and objects as mediators.
Katarina Andersson has worked as a curator and project leader for various craft projects. She was previously senior lecturer at Konstfack at the Ceramic and Glass department, where she led the pilot project in artistic research Keramiska väggmaterial i offentlig miljö.
Email: