Craft Revivalists

 

I needed to read this, as I stare at my tomatoes: Don’t Be Weird About Gardening. [Food & Wine] 

Austrian village of Fucking to be renamed Fugging. I guess we’re moving to Austria!

Preservation society: meet the craft revivalists




Preservation society: meet the craft revivalist The ceramicists, rush weavers and other dedicated artisans saving rare skills from the brink of extinction 

Victoria Woodcock and Nell Card

 Interest in craft is booming. A report released by the Crafts Council last year revealed the number of people buying craft between 2006 and 2020 had more than quadrupled, from 6.9m to 31.6m people in England. And international online marketplace Artsy reported that sales of ceramics and textiles rose. This trend has also been witnessed globally by 109 and 95 per cent respectively in 2020 

But what of the flute-makers? The clog- makers? The wainwrights and tinsmiths? All of these artisan roles are classified as endangered – in some cases “critically endangered” – by the Heritage Crafts Association, a UK advocacy body established to safeguard traditional craft skills. Since 2015, it has been assessing the vitality of traditional heritage crafts in the UK and identifying those most at risk of disappearing. The Red List includes four crafts that have become extinct in the last generation, including cricket-ball-making and gold-beating. In 2019, once-thriving industries such as industrial pottery and damask-weaving were added to the 37 “critical” entries amid concerns that their specific skills would not be passed on to the next generation. A decline in many traditional skills is being experienced globally, from the creation of sea silk from clam secretions – a rarefied skill, literally hanging on by a thread on the Sardinian island of Sant’Antioco, where artisan Chiara Vigo is believed to be its last practitioner – to Chinese bamboo-weaving.  In 2016, however, the latter was listed as an intangible cultural heritage in Zhejiang and is now showing encouraging signs of revival – as are other crafts. In Japan, where a law passed in 1975 protects “traditional techniques or craftsmanship that are indispensable to the preservation of cultural property”, the lost 19th-century craft of Satsuma kiriko – colourful cut glass – has been vibrantly revived through painstaking research. In the UK, the Endangered Crafts Fund, which awards grants to practitioners of Red List techniques, last year enabled Glasgow bookbinder Gillian Stewart to learn and then teach the disappearing art of fore-edge painting (creating images on the edges of book pages). And thanks to the dedicated work of cockle fisherman Colin Davies, who started making sieves and riddles (the traditional tools for harvesting shellfish) in 2018, the craft has been brought back from extinction. 

Institutions such as Scandinavia’s Safeguarding Practices and the American Craft Council in the US are also focusing on preservation, while the Heritage Crafts Association is partnering with the Michelangelo Foundation to take the Red List to a European level. Individual efforts, meanwhile, include the 8,000sq m workshop near Paris run by Carpenters Workshop Gallery – a leading name in collectable design – to uphold the skills of the French arts décoratifs, and the charitable Hong Kong gallery Crafts on Peel, which was opened last year to perpetuate craftsmanship grounded in Chinese cultural heritage by giving it contemporary relevance. For creative director Penelope Luk, “traditional craftsmanship should not only be combined with innovative ideas but also with modern aesthetics”. And a wealth of designers and makers are doing just that: reviving centuries-old methods with 21st‑century verve, firing up old factories and bringing back near-forgotten ways of working with wool, clay or hand-harvested bulrushes, from Stoke‑on-Trent to Sydney.  Industrial ceramics “The British ceramics industry is on a cliff edge,” says Emily Johnson, whose forebears founded the now-defunct Stoke-on-Trent pottery Johnson Brothers in 1882. That date is also the name of the Hanley-based venture Johnson started 10 years ago alongside her father, Christopher, to breathe new life into the industry that used to thrive in her hometown. Her plan? “To keep ceramics production in Stoke-on-Trent and bring innovative designs to a traditional material, while celebrating heritage crafts skills,” she says. 

Johnson started with a series of chunky, irregular but functional tableware conceived by furniture designer Max Lamb. “People looked at me as though I had just landed,” she says of the moment she shared these designs with the city’s potters. “They were like, ‘You want to make that in our beautiful bone china?’” There was, however, one potter prepared to take the project on, using plaster models, hand-carved by Lamb with stonemasonry tools, to slip-cast the avant-garde jugs, plates and bowls – called “the Flintstones” by the factory workers.  . .

Straw marquetry 

When Australian industrial designer Adam Goodrum met Parisian master craftsman Arthur Seigneur, a wild kaleidoscope of furniture ensued. Since one of the duo creates products for the likes of Cappellini and Alessi, and the other is a specialist in the arcane 17th-century craft of straw marquetry, together they bring something new to the Rumpelstiltskin-like art of turning dyed stems of rye straw into intricate surface patterns. “The way the straw is inlaid transforms its curled stalks into an iridescent substrate,” says Seigneur. “It is a natural veneer that plays with light like no other lacquer in the world.” 

As A&A, the two creatives made their debut at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2018 with Bloom – a huge, vibrant circle of a cabinet bedecked in a geometric floral motif, which was acquired that year by the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. “There is a wonderful tension in the juxtaposition of our natural aesthetics – Arthur is more traditional while I am more modern,” says Goodrum. “We’re working on a collection of three new pieces that continue to evolve our exploration of form and 3D geometry, to push the boundaries of craft, design and art.”  Before moving to Sydney, Seigneur learnt his trade in the Paris atelier of Lison de Caunes – a linchpin in straw marquetry’s revival who took up the craft in the 1970s. “For years, I was the only one. Even 10 years ago there were only about three or four workshops that specialised in straw marquetry in the world,” says de Caunes. “My goal was to make this completely forgotten craft fashionable again.” She has done so with wall panels and doors in Cartier and Guerlain boutiques, and collaborations with designers such as Peter Marino and Cristina Celestino. 

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Katalin Kariko, the Scientist Behind the Groundbreaking mRNA Vaccines

The NY Times has a profile of Dr. Katalin Kariko, who struggled for decades against a system unwilling to consider and fund her ideas about how messenger RNA could be used to instruct cells inside human bodies to “make their own medicines”. Her work has culminated in two highly effective vaccines for Covid-19 and is being extended to produce possible vaccines for HIV, the flu, tuberculosis, and malaria.

Now Katalin Kariko, 66, known to colleagues as Kati, has emerged as one of the heroes of Covid-19 vaccine development. Her work, with her close collaborator, Dr. Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, laid the foundation for the stunningly successful vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on messenger RNA, or mRNA — the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery. She was convinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.

Stat also wrote a piece about Kariko and the development of the mRNA vaccines. It seems like Kariko will be strongly considered for a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her achievements. The Covid vaccines will save hundreds of thousands of lives alone, and if mRNA can indeed be harnessed to protect against HIV and malaria, the effect on the world will be immense. Give Kariko all the prizes and whatever she wants to be happy in life — she’s earned it and more.

“You Can Be a Different Person After the Pandemic”

Olga Khazan, writing for the NY Times in an essay adapted from her book Weird, tells us that if we’re not satisfied with our personalities, we can change them.

After all, the person who emerges from quarantine doesn’t have to be the same old you. Scientists say that people can change their personalities well into adulthood. And what better time for transformation than now, when no one has seen you for a year, and might have forgotten what you were like in the first place?

It was long thought that people just are a certain way, and they’ll remain that way forever. The Greek physician Hippocrates believed that people’s personalities were governed by the amounts of phlegm, blood, black bile and yellow bile that flowed through their bodies.

Modern science, of course, has long since discarded notions of bile and humors. And now, it appears the idea that our personalities are immutable is also not quite true. Researchers have found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality — extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness — within just a few months. Much as in Dr. Steffel’s case, the traits are connected, so changing one might lead to changes in another.

Put more succinctly: “Remember that your personality is more like a sand dune than a stone.”