Cover of Studio Magazine 15.1, Spring/Summer 2020: Land

My attention to the handmade came through my studies in urban planning. “Hands are crucial means of thinking the world, pathways of understanding,” note Amin and Thrift in Cities: Reimagining the Urban [1]. They point out that not only do hands bring the city into being through manual construction, but hands also write the city into being — through stories, policies, accounting, design, bylaws, description, instructions and signage, and as such, writing is also a form of making by hand, of bringing the world into being in much the same way as crafted objects do. Writing and craft have always been intimately intertwined: writing as a craft in its own right, as the hand brings the world into being through text.

Amin and Thrift’s words resurfaced when I became the editor-in-chief of Studio, drawing on my experience in editing and journalism to transition into a leadership role in a field that at the time was new and uncharted territory to me. When I arrived at the publication in the summer of 2019, I inherited a magazine that my predecessor, Leopold Kowolik, had shifted and enhanced into a thoughtful and critical expansion of academic and thought-full writing about craft. My own goal with Studio was to continue this work by growing the audience and raising the publication’s profile. As a journalist, I was intrigued by the possibilities presented by writing about craft: here was a way to write, commission and edit articles that would use craft — as a portal, vehicle, foil, trojan horse, spoonful of sugar — to talk about the world at large. And over the past six years at Studio, I learned that the storytelling potential of craft is much larger than I had ever imagined.

Cover of Studio Magazine 16.1, Spring/Summer 2021: Technology

Writing about craft is often relinquished to those who care passionately about craft and making, and yet, as a trained journalist and experienced news editor, I strongly believe that writing about the handmade is not only a beautiful way of encountering the world, but that critical craft writing — or craft criticism — is a genre in its own right.

Crafted objects provide a tangible reference point for understanding complex and complicated histories, temporalities and relationships. A handmade object is a repository of history, knowledge, culture, tradition, memory and desire. Its production and presentation are reflective of countless individuals from extraction to processing. Its appearance is an accumulation of learnings. Its political economies, a performance of audience desires, market forces and capital accumulations. Its geographies provide lessons in the production of space, from material source to trade classroom, from sites of fabrication to artist studios, from galleries and showrooms to repositories and vaults.

Cover of Studio Magazine 19.2, Fall/Winter 2024-2025: Spectacle

A glass vase is, among many other things, a carving out of negative space and memory of breath. A table, an archive of the passage of time and pressure: its grains, figures, textures, the woodworker’s patience and calculated touch. A weaving is a score of notations, annotations and data visualizations, a bowl the response to a quick prayer as manifested through a series of physical and chemical reactions.

Studying design is a particularly alluring way of understanding society over time: How problems are identified, and which aspects of a potential solution are prioritized, what processes, practices and procedures are involved, and what the esthetic tastes — indicative of power and class allocations — determined the appearance of a space or object.

During my time at Studio, I learned about the storytelling capacities of craft writing, or its potential for extending what philosophers refer to as object-oriented ontologies, by commissioning, developing and publishing accessible articles for an interested readership. Beyond this, I also became acutely aware of the importance of critical craft writing to Canadian makers, artists and designers; the challenges facing small magazines in Canada; and what craft can mean to individuals and communities.

There is a scarcity of platforms for writers to publish about craft. Overall, there are relatively few magazines, journals and periodicals devoted to critical writing about craft, and fewer still for a mainstream audience. Here, I am excluding specialty publications geared toward practitioners — whether hobbyist or professional. Many of the publications that exclusively feature critical writing about craft are published by organizations and are often centred on more esoteric subjects or constrained focuses. In Canada, we’re fortunate to have magazines such as Ornamentum, published by the Canadian Society of Decorative Arts, and regional publications such as Fusion, produced by the Ontario Clay and Glass Association, the Saskatchewan Craft Council’s The Craft Factor (1976-2004), and Alberta Craft Magazine (just returning to circulation). Other than Studio, there is no other print (or online) national magazine devoted to contemporary Canadian craft and design.

Cover of Studio Magazine 15.2, Fall/Winter 2020-2021: Accessibility

Studio has an unusual structure for a magazine in that while it is published by Craft Ontario, a provincial craft council, its mandate is national and is supported by subscriptions from other craft councils and organizations throughout the country. And while it has grown from a members-focused newsletter into a national publication with articles geared toward a wide readership, it is still considered a special interest magazine. Studio also contends with the challenges that have accompanied critical craft writing since the very first time the craft-versus-art question became entrenched in western cultural discourse. Critical writing about craft appears in other art criticism publications, but is rarely presented as such.

There are corollaries to Studio elsewhere in the world. In the United States, the American Craft Council has published the quarterly American Craft since 1941. And in the United Kingdom, the Crafts Council published Crafts. Their last issue, issue 299, The alchemy of making, was published in January of this year, a sobering end for a publication that has been a guiding light for craft writing. While the U.K. Crafts Council is transitioning the publication into a new membership-serving platform, the end of Crafts was attributed to “rising production costs, reduced print advertising revenues, changing consumer habits and a challenging financial climate [2].”

Unfortunately, these challenges are by no means unique to Crafts; many other arts publications have shared the same fate. Canadian Art (known as artscanada between 1968 and 1983), one of the most established national print magazines that published on art in Canada, was shuttered in 2021. There are only a few national arts magazines in Canada (including C Magazine, Border Crossings, Esse and Black Flash), and the end of Canadian Art was a blow to the art ecosystem — from artists and writers to gallerists and collectors — which it has not quite recovered from.

In the academic sphere, the Journal of Modern Craft remains one of the few (if not the only) scholarly journals. The journal describes itself as the “first peer-reviewed academic journal to provide an interdisciplinary and international forum in its subject area” and “the main scholarly voice on the subject of craft, conceived both as an idea and as a field of practice in its own right.” In the introduction to the first issue of the journal in 2008, the editors write:

“Craft need not be seen as a readily identified set of media and practices — ceramics, fiber, glass, metal and wood, as the conventional catechism has it. It can instead be grasped as a variable and problematic dynamic that is loose in the cultural landscape. [3]”

Craft historian and scholar Julie Hollenbach, writing in Studio about cultural appropriation in craft, points out that art history, as a modernist project, is founded on exclusionary fixations; contemporary writing about craft often echoes this, centring “conceptual and material mastery of the craftsperson as a feat of individual genius.” She also points out that most writing about craft does not fall under the umbrella of art criticism. Rather, the social and political economies of craft are more often examined and analyzed through other disciplines such as anthropology and gender studies.

“This thing called craft is internally diverse,” notes T’ai Smith, “or rather underpinned by several subcategories [4].” Critical craft writing is a catholic and hybridized form, not quite art criticism, not quite reportage, and until recently, not quite fully acknowledged as a genre of its own beyond instructive texts. Craft criticism, premised on “craft as an idea [5],” engages with its materials, sites, processes, markets, circulations, people, representations and reproductions to interrogate their meanings. This categorical refusal to be constrained or restricted to any one genre offers a giddying freedom in writing.

Cover of Studio Magazine 16.2, Fall/Winter 2021-2022: Generation

Writing about crafted objects allows for narrative complexity in storytelling. Narrative complexity is the ability to provide historicity, highlight connections, convey context, and suggest implications. It is both an understanding and a communication, and it assumes a political positioning in opposition to the tendency to optimize, reduce, abstract, distill, simplify and condense. It requires research methods that can acknowledge and solicit multiple knowledges, that can contend with various chronographies and futurities, that can complicate space, site, location and scale, and that can account for paradoxes, counterintuitions and inherent tensions. Craft criticism can engage with what other forms of art and cultural criticisms cannot through the restrictions of their discipline. Writing about craft can and should include labour practices, sites of production, critical race, political economies, infrastructure and community studies, alongside esthetic evaluations, historical relations and descriptive observations.

In a letter to the editor published in Craft Horizons (the predecessor to American Craft) in 1977, reader Lillian Ball writes:

“Craft Horizons has a responsibility not only to promote craftsmakers in America but to contribute to their growth and development. For this reason, I feel comprehensive critiques should be an integral part of a well-rounded format. Replacing the technical descriptions of exhibitions with sensitive assessments of the aesthetics values involved would be more thought provoking. Qualified criticism is a difficult thing to give constructively, even more difficult to take. Yet without it, how can we expand the horizons of craft as art?”

In addition to the limited avenues for publication, there are even less opportunities to learn how to write about craft critically, with hardly any programs to support emerging writers, journalists and critics in craft writing. Craft historian Sandra Flood points out that “Who wrote about craft and the way in which it was written about contributed to a distortion of the perception of craft and craftmaking [6].” Recently, there have been a growing number of interventions into redefining what Canadian craft is, and who belongs in the archives of craft and design. In the Canadian archives, craft tends to be the domain of white craftsmen (women’s work was regarded as domestic or functional). Through funding and advocacy work, this has shifted over time to include those historically excluded — women, outsider artists, immigrants — and yet, official histories would displace many who belong within a consideration of what constitutes Canadian craft.

Here is where Studio plays an important political role in supplementing, challenging, addressing and filling in the gaps in Canadian craft discourse and archives.

Cover of Studio Magazine 17.2, Fall/Winter 2022-2023: Subvert

While at Studio, I have worked hard at recruiting and supporting emerging writers, and sought to draw in writers from other genres to encourage them to consider craft writing as a genre. The articles we have published at Studio during my editorship have explored wide-ranging topics. These have included: colonial resource extraction and environmental accountability through the clay works of Dana Prieto (Spring/Summer 2020); Ruth Cuthand’s beaded representations of pathogens that sicken and endanger the lives of historical and contemporary Indigenous communities; unusual crafting materials including mycelium (Tosca Terán in Fall/Winter 2020; Xiaojing Yan in this issue) and LEGO (Ekow Nimako, Spring/Summer 2022). We’ve featured interviews with artists such as Meghan Price, Izzy Camilleri and Kye-Yeon Son, craft scholars including Glenn Adamson and Anthea Black, and curators including Wanda Nanibush and Alan Elder. I introduced new and ongoing sections into the magazine: Focal Point, which highlights the work of a craftsperson whose work transcends boundaries (for example, Jason Logan’s inkmaking practice, Azza El Siddque’s funerary installations); Provocations (an essay series that prompted different ways of thinking about craft), where some were poetic interventions, such as Alyssa Alikpala’s environmental collaborations, while others were more critical, such as Hollenbach’s examination of shadow archives, and historian and textile artist Sheimara Hogarth’s critique of diversity and inclusion in craft institutions.

Beyond providing a platform for critical writing about Canadian craft and design, I have found that Studio serves two other important purposes for Canadian craftspeople, designers, artists and makers. First, it makes important and valuable contributions to the archive of Canadian craft while eschewing traditional hierarchies and gatekeeping through democratic acknowledgment of all crafts, makers, geographies, materials and eras. And as a “champion of Canadian craft,” Studio has featured the recipients of the Saidye Bronfman Award, administered by the Canada Council of the Arts in recognition of the careers of exceptional fine craft artists. This celebration and documentation of Canadian craft and design has made Studio something of a lodestar, a point of pride for the people featured within it.

Secondly, the place that Studio occupies in the ecosystem of individuals, institutions and marketplaces that forms around Canadian craftspeople and designers is important. The magazine is a valuable and growing archive that, since its inception, has consistently reflected attitudes and values in Canadian craft and significantly contributed to the inception, development and growth of various Canadian craft and design communities.

I am grateful for the people, events, objects and knowledge I have collected over the last six years and I look forward to my continued relationship with the magazine, and I hope to support its continued evolution in different capacities.

[1] Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 86.
[2] https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/crafts/update-about-crafts
[3] Introduction to The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 5–12.
[4] T’ai Smith, "The Problem with Craft," Art Journal 75, no. 1 (2016): 80–84.
[5] Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 1.
[6] Sandra Flood, “Craft in Canada: Overview and Points from Canadian Craft and Museum Practice 1900–1950,” in Exploring Contemporary Craft: History, Theory & Critical Writing, ed. Jean Johnson (Toronto: Coach House Books; Harbourfront Centre, 2002), 27.