To Touch
Tactile lacquer box from Seoul Museum of Craft Art.
September 2023 Issue 33 of Garland features the craft of touch. This issue completes our Sensorium series of the non-visual senses.
This issue explores varied ways of understanding touch: Objects made for holding, for handling. Pieces that guide new ways of moving. The experience of wearing something. The physicality of making. The feel of clay, cloth and copper. Skilful hands. Fingermarks left behind. A shared connection, and a sense of intimacy. Embodied histories of creating and understanding through craft.
Our tactile sense brings us into dialogue with the world.
Yasmin Masri, guest editor
- Tribute to Mavis Ganambarr by Louise Hamby
The five ways of touch
To bring into contact with your body
- Dancing Bodies, Moving Touch by Krishna Unny (MAP Academy)
- Marta Figueiredo ✿ Elementary Abacus
- Nikki Hind ✿ A feel for fashion by Nikki Hind
- Touching Art by Jane Théau
- Tactile stations at the Seoul Museum of Craft Art by Soo Jeong Kim
- Komboloi: A solution at hand for worried times
To grasp, to use your hands to understand
- Handedness by Robyn McKenzie
- Duncan Meerding ✿ A light touch
- Muslin: The unbearable lightness of being by Saiful Islam
- Jewellery in hand by Brune Boyer
- A wall of dreams from southern Bahia by Maria Fernanda Paes de Barros
To leave a mark, trace or impression
- The sensory archive by Nina Finigan
- Mother’s touch: An interview with ceramicist Richilde Flavell by Yasmin Masri
- Holding walnuts, like life, in the palm of their hands by Yunmeng Jia
- The sense of clay by Yulia Makliuk
- Vakr ✿ A fluid touch by Devyani Gupta
To be close, to connect, to be in community
- Touchstones: The sensual work of studio potter Jane Sawyer by Carolyn Leach-Paholski
- Stevei Houkāmau ✿ The skin of clay by Zoe Black
- Forging connection: An interview with master coppersmith Eldin Sprečo by Yasmin Masri
- Rabindra Shakya ✿ Gleaming Nepali repoussé by Gary Wornell
- Peranakan Tiles: Relishing architecture with colour and texture by Ananya Mallick
To make and build
- Peter Hawkesby ✿ Building a heart basket by Lucy Hammonds
- Whiria: Twisting together by Karl Chitham
- Chozetsugiko ✿ The transcendent technique of Meiji craftsmanship reimagined by Sachiko Tamashige
- Crafting entrails to recover forgotten worlds by Dana Falcini
- Lest we forget the skillful touch by Curtis Benzle
The guest editor for this issue is Yasmin Masri.
Special thanks to Vision Australia, Master Works and the Australian Design Centre.
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Mavis Ganambarr (1966 – 2023).