Susan Noble

Research  Title: In Conversation: Collaborative Textile Craft Practice

How does the blurring of boundaries between art, craft and design impact on domestic traditional craft makers?
How are ingenuity, authority and identity articulated in traditional crafts?
What are the possibilities of collaborative practice within domestic crafts, principally in terms of decision-making, motivation, output and context?
How will autonomous craft practices such as knitting and crochet affect collaborative output differently to those that are more discernibly communal such as patchwork?

‘In Conversation' is an investigation into the rich knowledge, both explicit and tacit, of traditional domestic crafts, held by a community of practitioners, within a specific locale through practice; the focus is on textile crafts, such as knitting, crochet and patchwork.
The practice is collaborative, formed through discussion and negotiation, which generates artefacts that have mutual authorship and communal ownership that implicitly contain the individual's contribution. Observation of the emergent practice will allow for an exploration of how the individual contributions may have been changed by this interactive process and for the development of a new theory of collaborative craft making