Review: Manu­frac­tured

Craft Resur­rec­tion: Almost dead for all money, but not quite, craft is back as indus­trial art.

Manu­frac­tured By Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov. Chron­icle Books, 144 pp, 80 col­our images, hard­cover, RRP $90

Manu­frac­tured, sub­titled, The Con­spicu­ous Trans­form­a­tion of Every­day Objects, is in some ways sim­ilar to I Miss My Pen­cil. Most obvi­ously, it’s pub­lished by Chron­icle Books, but another thing shared is more eso­teric – it's a way of look­ing at things and decid­ing that they could be bet­ter, dif­fer­ent, or just plain quir­kier. It's about, to an extent, the way that artists and design­ers can look at com­mon­place items and reas­sess forms and func­tions.
The basis for Manu­frac­tured was the iden­ti­fic­a­tion of a new trend, a trend that has also hit New Zealand's shores, “the rad­ical appro­pri­ation of con­sumer goods as raw mater­ial for art– and object-making”. Yes people, there’s a craft revival going on. Recyc­ling, upcyc­ling, cus­tom­isa­tion, call it what you will; it’s tra­di­tional notions reapplied and relearned for the mod­ern age.
Manu­frac­tured looks at the cros­sover of craft, art, and design. It’s an inter­est­ing jour­ney which devel­ops from the premise that indus­tri­al­isa­tion was craft's death knell. Yet, rather than dying off, a rather ironic thing happened, that is the cus­tom­isa­tion of the mass-produced (once we hit mass cus­tom­isa­tion of the mass-produced I'm not sure where we'll be at…).
There's a lot going on in Manu­frac­tured, which was pub­lished to coin­cide with an exhib­i­tion at the Museum of Con­tem­por­ary Craft in Port­land, but one par­tic­u­lar object that seems to sum up the ethos to me is War Bowls by Dominic Wil­cox. Each of these bowls is made from legions of plastic sol­diers which are melted together. An "ironic take on the sense­less­ness of war", these bowls "high­light how scan­dal­ously mut­able the body (and the ves­sel) can be when sub­jec­ted to pressure".

– Michael Barrett

Image from Manufractured.

Image from Manufractured.

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