Craft, Service and Communities of Care

Five people who make craft – and a difference.

by

The holiday season sees countless craft fairs offering sustainable and unique handmade gifts that delight the eye and recall a slower, more amenable world. But commerce, which so dominates this time of year, often obscures the values promoted by craft and the culture from which craft springs.

As contemporary avatars of traditions dating back millennia, craft objects warm and decorate bodies, store and serve food, and bring pleasure and beauty to domestic spaces. In this sense, craft is part of a community of care, a series of practices that create belonging by promoting generative and affirmative attachments.

Some 30,000 years ago, humans twisted plant fibres to make string and netting. Pottery fragments confirmed to be 20,000 years old have been found in caves in China. Craft helped humans survive in what American craft historian Howard Risatti calls “an otherwise indifferent, if not hostile, world.”

Today, physiological needs are more often satisfied by industry. But craft objects – even those that are abstract, experimental or without function – often retain visceral connections to a history of human survival.

Craft’s legacy of care, service and volunteerism is attractive to many. A commitment to creating objects that tend to the body extends to a social practice of nurturing community. Many contemporary makers pursue sustainability with their materials and processes, creating works that address the challenges now facing humanity. This can also be understood as a commitment to care.

Social practice exists within a web of guilds, councils and cooperatives that characterize much craft practice. These voluntary organizations promote the understanding and appreciation of craft, educating both the public and practitioners through exhibitions, workshops, speakers and the like. They also provide opportunities for social interaction and often serve the wider community through bursaries and charitable donations.

Maegan Black, former director of the Canadian Crafts Federation, the national voice for craft, emphasizes the importance of volunteers. The federation reports the 2020 fair-market value of contributed services as $147,148, down, due to the pandemic, from $174,509 in 2019. Service  is further recognized with the Robert Jekyll Award for Leadership in Craft, which honours individuals who have shown outstanding commitment to the craft community. 

Five Artists Who Care:

Here are five British Columbia craft artists who, like Jekyll, believe in keeping their studio doors open to assist others and engage with their communities.

Barbara Heller

Internationally respected Vancouver tapestry weaver Barbara Heller, the most recent recipient of the Robert Jekyll Award, is president of the B.C. Society of Textile Artists and the education director for the American Tapestry Alliance, which provides workshops, lectures and mentoring programs. 

Heller credits family influences for her commitment to service. In Jewish thought, the concept of tikun olam encourages individual responsibility to “repair the world,” making it a better place for everyone. This concept inspires her resolve to help others.

Heller’s meticulous tapestries call attention to environmental destruction, racial injustice and “things in our sorry world” that trouble her. Her tapestry One Way depicts the effects of climate change. It shows a pelican coated in oil as a flood inundates a town. Small insets depict invasive species and toxins found in waterways. Although woven with beautiful colours, the work carries an unmistakable warning.

Debra Sparrow

The word “craft” does not sufficiently capture the practice of Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow, who has worked for 35 years to revive Salish traditions. Her distinctive blankets are the “thread that holds us to who we are as human beings ... to the ways that we as humans reflect our connection to why we exist,” she asserts, describing them as “far more than craft.”

Weaving together strands of culture, community and relationship to the land, her blankets seek to repair damages wrought by colonialism. Sparrow says: “The work that I do is not only for me, it is for my history and my people.” 

Recently, she drew on Salish patterns to design large murals on the Granville Street Bridge and other structures around Vancouver. Her multi-year project, Blanketing the City, a collaboration with fellow Salish weavers and the Vancouver Mural Festival, are part of a reconciliation process that celebrates the resilience of Indigenous culture and reminds others that they live and work on unceded territory.

Lou Lynn

In 2021, metal and glass artist Lou Lynn received the Saidye Bronfman Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious honours, in recognition of her creative and technical mastery and her contributions to the development of fine craft. Her sculptural works, non-functional objects based loosely on antique tools, speak to the values of craft and the ways humans shape materials to meet their needs. 

Lynn, who lives in Winlaw, in the B.C. Interior, recognized early on her need to connect to a wider world and became involved with the Craft Council of B.C. Volunteer work was a way to advocate for others and access a community of friends and colleagues who understood the challenges of studio work and isolation, as well as technical and aesthetic concerns. 

Realizing there was little practical information about marketing craft, she developed workshops, including one specifically for Indigenous artists, and coordinated conferences that have helped artists across Canada improve their livelihoods.

Bettina Matzkuhn

Vancouver’s Bettina Matzkuhn has a long history of service to craft organizations including the Craft Council of B.C., the Canadian Crafts Federation and the Textile Society of America. She advocates for CARFAC fees to ensure artists are paid fairly, explains to the public why handmade items cost what they do, and sits on numerous awards committees.

In her own practice, Matzkuhn works with embroidery and painting on fabric, creating intricate pictorial works about environmental phenomena such as weather and climate change. She also makes soft sculptures that incorporate outdoor gear and industrial fabrics. 

In a recent series, SOS, she highlights the plight of people displaced by political and environmental turmoil, as well as the precarious state of the natural world, by embroidering life-jacket linings with imagery derived from nature, which also needs, she says, to be “kept afloat.” 

Debra Sloan

Debra Sloan exhibits her figurative ceramics nationally and internationally. A fixture in the Vancouver community, she is president of the North-West Ceramics Foundation. A frequent contributor to craft journals and a collector of Canadian ceramics, Sloan attributes her “volunteer compulsion” to the “DNA of service” vested in craft culture. 

One of her signature achievements reflects her years of collecting information about ceramic marks. In collaboration with the Craft Council of B.C., she created the online B.C. Ceramic Marks Registry, which dates back to 1922 and includes some 500 of the province’s ceramicists. With artist profiles, images and identifying marks, the registry is an invaluable resource for researchers and community members alike.

If you give or receive a handmade gift this season, look for evidence of the values of care and service. We face complicated challenges and difficult times, but craft can be a model for collective care and working together to improve the world.