#shakenmake

The Cotton Factory, November 2 to December 3, 2017

By Melissa Bennett

The Hamilton-based artist collective Shake-n-Make prioritizes collaboration as a mode of working, usually among its two members, Liss Platt and Claudia Manley. With The Hand of Craft, the exhibition recently installed at The Cotton Factory, they extend the reach of this modus operandi by working with over 80 sewers to create a 15.5 by 6 foot quilt top, made of many small fabric hexagons stitched together by hand using the English paper piecing technique.  

They organized workshops over two years in Hamilton and Sackville, New Brunswick, including one at Sackville’s annual community event, A Handmade Assembly. In all workshops, they engaged sewers with all levels of experience, bringing people together around the materials in an encouraging way. They favour slowly-made works in order to build appreciation around labour, which is an overarching subject of the work; the term itself is depicted in a bold font. The quilt top is ambitiously large, and took hundreds of hours of work by many hands. The bringing together of people, various skill levels, and various perspectives on the craft itself, are all strengths of the piece.

Shake-n-Make regularly exhibit their works in a fine art context—they’ve been doing so for decades. Past works use a kitschy aesthetic to investigate the ways in which vernacular and contemporary quasi-folk art operates in mass media and within a gallery context—but The Hand of Craft is not kitsch. It is reminiscent of a British regal, and perhaps patriotic, banner in its scale and the use of the colour purple; its construction method also harkens to a golden age of hand sewing in Britain, when decorative sewing became more popular after the Industrial Revolution. By many accounts, paper piecing was a craft that began as an economical and practical way of creating large blankets using available fabric scraps. The craft reached its heydey in the 19th century when, in the western world, women of means and class privilege found more leisure time, advancing textiles in a more artful manner. This pastime could be a solo one, but often included a social element, as does The Hand of Craft in its community-based approach. In its installation at The Cotton Factory, the quilt top is surrounded by large graphic illustrations of hand sewing techniques, which provides an added visual and design element that situates it further as a gallery piece full of historic and contemporary references.

In bringing the art world together with everyday sewers (some of whom are also artists), Shake-n-Make build on the ongoing dialogue they cultivate between fine art, which is often publicly displayed, and craft, which is often part of a private realm. As Shake-n-Make point out, sewing is traditionally women’s work, the effort of which is usually hidden from public view. They raise this idea in part as dialogue around the value of domestic work, which is traditionally gendered.

In a recent video interview, the artist Greg Staats spoke eloquently about collaboration, saying that: “sharing comes from a place of compassion, and it sets up a dialogue for reciprocity.” Indeed this is one of the greatest outcomes of The Hand of Craft: a forum for people to get together in a productive way, and one that includes slow and meditative actions, shared labour, and the achievement of a collective goal.

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The exhibition is located on the third floor of The Cotton Factory at 270 Sherman Avenue North, in Hamilton, Ontario. It is free and open to the public: November 2 to December 3, 2017. Remaining exhibition hours are: Friday, December 1st:  9am - 5pm and Saturday December 2: 12-5 pm. Full details here: http://www.akimbo.ca/akimbos/?id=112865

Melissa Bennett is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.