My work and that of others in the Christchurch Creative Space was featured in an animated article by MsBehaviour of Mohawk Media.
There’s something that fascinates me about the finished product of craft/art not being the physical object itself, but the digital representations of the object.
People often ask me “what are you going to do with it when it’s finished” when they see me working on a piece of cross-stitch. My answer is almost always “take a photo of it and put it on the web, what else would I do with it?”. The actual finished physical pieces just sit in a folder in a cupboard, they’re not the point of the work, the point is to take things from the digital realm, reproduce them in a medium that takes a lot of effort and thought to give them a vibrancy and three dimensionality, then return them to whence they came.
I think partly this is because all of my career has been about publishing things digitally, but it also comes back to my training as an art historian. The Mona Lisa is not the small, somewhat unimpressive and grimy looking physical collection of dried paintstrokes in the Louvre in Paris, it is the picture of the painting in millions of books, and the memory of the image in the minds of millions of people.
I’m not sure if this thinking goes against the ‘take back control of the material production process’ ethic of the maker/crafter culture, or whether it runs alongside it in a complementary way, as the divide between the digital and physical worlds increasingly and inevitably blur.
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Returning to its true form
My work and that of others in the Christchurch Creative Space was featured in an animated article by MsBehaviour of Mohawk Media.
There’s something that fascinates me about the finished product of craft/art not being the physical object itself, but the digital representations of the object.
People often ask me “what are you going to do with it when it’s finished” when they see me working on a piece of cross-stitch. My answer is almost always “take a photo of it and put it on the web, what else would I do with it?”. The actual finished physical pieces just sit in a folder in a cupboard, they’re not the point of the work, the point is to take things from the digital realm, reproduce them in a medium that takes a lot of effort and thought to give them a vibrancy and three dimensionality, then return them to whence they came.
I think partly this is because all of my career has been about publishing things digitally, but it also comes back to my training as an art historian. The Mona Lisa is not the small, somewhat unimpressive and grimy looking physical collection of dried paintstrokes in the Louvre in Paris, it is the picture of the painting in millions of books, and the memory of the image in the minds of millions of people.
I’m not sure if this thinking goes against the ‘take back control of the material production process’ ethic of the maker/crafter culture, or whether it runs alongside it in a complementary way, as the divide between the digital and physical worlds increasingly and inevitably blur.
Like this: