you find me in a shoebox. 2020. 4” x 6 3/8”.
Fine Shosenshi paper yarn, thick paper yarn, twisted paper yarn, cotton thread, cotton embroidery floss, wool yarn, aida cloths, Penelope cloth, watercolour pastel, heavy cotton paper, found blend fabric, batting, heavy woven cotton.
SLOPPY CRAFT IS ARCHIVAL LOVE
Sloppy Craft is Archival Love. 2020 OCAD U Material Art & Design Thesis.
Sloppy Craft is Archival Love is an experimental research project investigating the power of sloppy craft to challenge binary understandings that inform value assignment and classification in craft, taking the object worlds of zines and stitching samplers as its material modes of reference.
This thesis holds that the term ‘sloppy craft’ may be used not only in reference to the making of objects which are intentionally unfinished and messy in appearance, but also to that making which is inherently radical—in the ways in which it is made, or in the meaning that it holds. Sloppy craft facilitates that—given the agency to make and classify one’s work on one’s own terms—craft can break from norm, tradition, and common understanding in ways that give it resounding presence.
The very nature of the making of zines and stitching samplers is involved in processes which are fluid, adaptable, multi-faceted, and which refuse fixity. They both work to embody sloppy craft’s capacity to act as carriers for uniquely personal narratives that might otherwise have been erased. This series of hybrid zine-sampler pieces invites the viewer into a scene piled with traces of odd familiarity—my own personal archive of objects unfinished, unnamed, and unfixable—brought together in sloppy craft’s archival love, which is to say, a love that determines its own means of keeping.