Maria Elena Buszek - Extra/Ordinary Craft and Contemporary Art (2011)

For my last blog post, I wanted to circle back to something recommended to me after the first assessment: Maria Elena Buszek’s Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. The two chapters that have really stuck with me are Dennis Stevens’ “Validity Is in the Eye of the Beholder” and Louise Mazanti’s “Super-Objects: Craft as an Aesthetic Position.”

Stevens’ essay reframes craft as a set of overlapping communities of practice rather than static fields, each defined by its own materials, vocabularies, and internal systems of validation. He describes how these communities form through “shared sensibilities, artifacts, vocabularies, and styles,” and how younger generations of makers (especially within DIY and digital craft movements) are challenging twentieth-century hierarchies of legitimacy. I see my own practice sitting within this shifting terrain: not quite within traditional studio craft, but definitely within a post-digital, feminist network that values care, repetition, and ornament as intellectual labour.

Mazanti’s concept of the super-object expands this further. She argues that craft objects occupy a semi-autonomous space between art and design: what she calls a “super-object,” which draws meaning both from material culture and aesthetic contemplation. This framework is useful for understanding my own stitched, beaded, and embellished works, which function both as tactile artifacts and as vehicles for narrative and critique.

Together, these essays have helped me see craft as a discursive system rather than a medium: a site where communities negotiate value, identity, and belonging. My practice participates in this expanded field of craft that Mazanti and Stevens describe, one that collapses boundaries between art, design, and lived experience.

In many ways, this book has been the theoretical anchor beneath the semester’s experiments. It clarified why I’m drawn to embellishment and surface (not as escapism, but as an argument about meaning-making itself). Within Buszek’s framework, beauty and labour become sites of resistance, and ornament becomes both method and message.