Nicole Burisch

I just got back from a whirlwind trip to the annual NCECA (National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts) conference, held in Seattle this year. I was there with the other members of The Brick Factory (a performance collective we formed during a residency at Watershed last summer). We presented a series of live performances over the course of 4 days as part of the Project Space exhibitions. Performances ranged from ceramic-themed reworkings of well-known historical performance art works, new original works created specifically for NCECA, and a few off-site interventions. For more information and documentation, check out The Brick Factory website, where we will be adding more posts soon.

Three new(ish) publications with writing about craft, curatorial practice, and contemporary ceramics:

• The exhibition text for the Craft Off series is included in a publication produced by the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival that documents the performances and projects from the M:ST 5 Festival in 2010.
• “Ceramics as Evocative Object,” a review of Robin Lambert‘s work Service: Dinner for Strangers is included in the December 2011 issue of Ceramics Art and Perception.
• Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, (which includes “Craft Hard, Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism,” the essay that I co-authored with Anthea Black) continues to receive reviews and mentions from a number of sources, including: Liminalities, Art Libraries Society of North America, Crafts, The Journal of Modern Craft, Bitch and BUST magazines.

I’m halfway through a two-week residency at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts right now. The residency is called “Actions+Material” and was organized by artist Summer Zickefoose around the theme of ceramics and performance. I’ve been getting my hands dirty, trying on wigs, eating delicious meals, and having excellent craft-and-performance chats with the other residents. We are collecting documents, traces, and texts on the project website, and hopefully scheming some future projects…

I just participated in a textile-focused workshop this past weekend at Concordia called Cut On The Bias, which included participation and discussion with researchers, artists, and theorists from various backgrounds:

“Cut on the bias, a term from tailoring and the fashion industry, refers to fabric that is cut on a diagonal at a 45 degree angle to the warp and weft of the fabric. The term literally refers to cutting against the grain, and metaphorically to stretching familiar patterns, and to finding room for maneuver in an otherwise familiar material.

An important goal of Cut on the Bias is to develop networks laterally and internationally. Participants have been drawn from variety of backgrounds and circumstances – some work in dedicated textile programs, while others create and study textiles alongside other careers.”

We had some really great discussions and I’m excited to see what kinds of further collaborations, and projects might emerge. Posts, articles, profiles, and information can all be found on the COTB site.

I’ll be presenting as part of the (Dis)embodied Feminisms: New Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality and Identity symposium at McGill University. The symposium runs from May 13-15, 2011 and the keynote speaker will be Brooklyn-based performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson.

The paper I will be presenting draws from my thesis research about intersections of craft and performance art:

Working It Out: Craft and Performance in Contemporary Art

Art historian Jayne Wark has argued that “the relationship between feminism and performance art since the 1970s has become so inextricably linked that it is inconceivable to speak of one without reference to the other.” Projects such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1973-4 Maintenance Work Projects, and Martha Rosler’s 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen both used the performance of domestic tasks in order to make public women’s unrecognized labour. Similar aims were at play when feminist artists of the same period, such as Evelyn Roth or Joyce Wieland used so-called “feminine” craft processes and materials such as knitting or embroidery as a means to elevate or re-value these kinds of creative work.

Recent exhibitions such as Gestures of Resistance (2010) and projects such as Wednesday Lupypciw’s The Ladies’ 500-Metre Challenge (2010) have included aspects of both craft and performance, often with a focus on the live performance of (craft)work as a means to address issues of labour, skill, and aesthetic value. This paper will draw links between these contemporary works and the clear historical precedents found in the concerns and methods of feminist artworks mentioned above. Furthermore, this paper will investigate how a problematic association between craft and domestic/feminine realms remains a feature in how craft-based practices are understood and framed within contemporary art. Here, new craft-performance hybrids will be examined for the ways in which they complicate and rethink relationships between craft, domesticity, traditional gender roles, and distinctions between the private and public spheres.

From enavril.com: “Pour une troisième année consécutive, le mois d’avril fourmillera d’activités culturelles qui témoignent de l”actualité de la fibre et du textile en art actuel, en design et en patrimoine. L’événement En avril… aura lieu à travers le Québec et se déclinera en une programmation variée, avec conférences, expositions et ateliers.”