Manufractured

Conspicuous Transformation is the major trend in visual and material culture today. Increasingly, a select group of artists, craftspeople, and designers are using a vast array of consumer goods as their raw material for object-making: athletic shoes, paper plates, plastic army men, pen caps, and more. By deploying techniques normally associated with the world of craft (such as sewing, weaving, crochet, collage, assemblage, and so forth) upon these synthetic items, they create something wholly new, something that combines the uniform and mass-produced with the unique and handmade. Their work provides an exciting new model for creativity, a way of showing how innovation, invention, and beauty can emerge from even the most familiar, ordinary, and seemingly banal products.A wide array of these exciting new art and design projects are presented here, with insightful commentary on the trends and cultural phenomenon that inform this process, in a volume published to coincide with a show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland in 2008.