Craft Year 2015

Thanks for watching everyone!

In celebration of Craft Year 2015, the Manitoba Craft Council is pleased to partner with Video Pool Media Arts Centre to bring you this program of shorts by three Manitoba artists whose work intersects with craft: tamara rae biebrich, Chantel Mierau and Seth Woodyard.

While documentaries and how-to videos are ubiquitous online (and we love them!), the works presented here emerge from a place deep within the artists’ practice and speak to craft in subtler ways.  With humour and sensitivity, they reflect on the role of repetition and process, material and necessity – concepts inextricably intertwined with thinking about craft.  The sensual and subversive nature of craft is surfaced through a lowered visual field that draws our eyes downward to the hands.  The identity of the makers is blurred; the focus is on the larger community and a common human experience.  Time-based media have a unique power to make visible the invisible;  in this case, the labour and sheer time itself that making entails is revealed.

Thank you to Jennifer Smith for the hidden work involved in bringing these videos to a wider audience and to the artists for sharing their vision.

-Tammy Sutherland, Manitoba Craft Council Programme Coordinator

The videos were available for viewing from Friday, September 25 at 5pm to Sunday, September 27.