Skin Crafts: Affect, Violence and Materiality in Global Contemporary Art

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Skin Crafts discusses multiple artists from global contexts who employ craft materials in works that address historical and contemporary violence. These artists are deliberately embracing the fragility of textiles and ceramics to evoke the vulnerability of human skin and - in so doing - are demanding visceral responses from viewers. Drawing on a range of theories including affect theory, material feminism, skin studies, phenomenology and global art history, the book illuminates the various ways in which artists are harnessing the affective power of craft materials to address and cope with violence. Artists from Mexico, Africa, China, the Netherlands and Indigenous artists based in the unceded territory known as Canada are examined in relation to one another to illuminate the connections and differences across their bodies of work. Skin Crafts interrogates ongoing material violence towards women and marginalized others, and demonstrates the power of contemporary art to force viewers and scholars into facing their ethical responsibilities as human beings.

Reviews

Skin Crafts not Skin Grafts is a conceptually, witty and compelling opening to Skin Crafts. In Julia Skelly's powerful narrative, textiles and ceramics act as material metaphors for violated, black and indigenous skin. Moving in the space between skin and critical craft studies, Skelly skilfully unpacks the affective, visual and political power of key art works, Lubaina Himid, Doris Salcedo and Nadia Myre among them, reflecting on the violence and scarring caused by colonialism and discrimination. Essential reading. * Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths University of London, UK *
Forensic, crafty coolness pervades this sly, salacious, suffering text. Dispassionate, elegant, surgical examination of bodies, their performance of violence, trauma, wounds Excoriating, visceral and repugnant, otherizing damage done unto queer, female, migrant and indigenous bodies, those colonized and enslaved, this text screams salvation from each page. * Catherine Harper, University for the Creative Arts, UK *

Author Bio

Julia Skelly is a lecturer in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada and the author of Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (2017).