Carceral Craft: the material of oppression or expression?
Short description
This project investigates the potential for oppression, as well as expression, in textile crafts made in carceral contexts. Drawing on alternative records to the sources typically researched, namely textile craft artefacts made in carceral contexts and their depictions in life writing, exposes craft’s potential to discipline but also provide agency. By studying craft made in historical and contemporary carceral settings, the project reveals latent functions of craft overlooked by craft research, which has instead become preoccupied with an identity of craft that is synonymous with wellbeing.
Departing from current research enthusiasm for craft that is understood to be synonymous with wellbeing, the research instead addresses the fundamentally ambiguous identity of historical and contemporary craft making.
Between 2000-2023, 12,700 academic papers were published with titles that include the terms “craft” and “wellbeing”. This surge in research represents a welcome attention to the productive place of craft in society, but has come to overshadow more problematic aspects of craft with enthusiasm for versions of the well-being narrative.
Making craft requires mental patience and physical discipline, demands manual repetition, consumes considerable amounts of time, and then often receives scant financial renumeration – features that can be understood to impose discipline on the maker. At the same time, making craft can also provide a space for individual expression within, or in spite of, these constraints. In situations where craft making must be covert craft (undertaken with smuggled tools and repurposed materials) its descriptions appears in life writing such as prison memoirs as a significant form of ingenuity and empowerment.
Carceral Craft: the material of oppression or expression? establishes an understanding of the relative ubiquity of craft practiced in carceral contexts through three case studies: batik production in prisons on the Indonesian island of Java; bead knitting in Turkish prisoner of war camps; lace making in colonial and contemporary South African prisons. Through these distinct case studies the project determines what attributes of production oppress makers and which allow for forms of personal expression in the absence of physical freedom.
The project challenges assumptions of gendered materials and labour in craft research through attention to examples of textile craft made by incarcerated men and women; updates the identity of contemporary craft to include realities beyond the romanticised vision of well-being; and offers a more nuanced understanding of what the textile crafts of the future may offer society.