Editor's Letter
by Andrew Page
"Post-Craft" or "New Wave Craft," “Neo-Applied Art” or “Design Art,” take your pick. A range of newly minted classifications are being offered up in a bid to identify, or reinterpret, a changing landscape for work made with craft media. From design showrooms to cutting-edge art galleries, there’s been a surge of new interest in work made with fiber, clay, metal, and glass. Art and design objects with functional references, decorative aspects, and/or distinctively sculptural sensibilities are issuing forth from the collective consciousness as a response to a hunger for texture within cool white-cube gallery spaces, offering more fragrant air than that sterile conceptual art realm where surfaces are pristinely milled and traces of the human hand hidden. The human longing for the organic, familiar shape is reasserting itself, even if sometimes for ironic effect, or to subvert the traditional associations of craft media.