Open to BA, MA, and doctoral students in Craft or Design at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design (SE), KHiO – Oslo National Academy of the Arts (NO) and Aalto University (FI).

We invite students writing on craft practices to submit proposals for the ninth issue of The Vessel. The issue will be edited by an editorial committee consisting of three student editors, in collaboration with artist and senior lecturer at HDK-Valand Åsa Dybwad Norman and lecturer, artist, writer, and curator Ben Lignel.

For this ninth issue of The Vessel we are excited to collaborate with three Nordic craft schools, their students, and their teachers, to celebrate the art of noticing and describing, craft in action. What do we see when watching people make? What words can do justice to haptic and tacit knowledge and skills? These questions will be the base for looking and writing about crafts and design, in a transnational effort to develop a toolbox for looking at, and talking about, making.

See the full timeline with important deadlines and more information here.

The essays and descriptions gathered in this issue will pay tribute to craft students’ own fine-tuned knowledge, and to the precision of their observation. Sharing is a step towards promoting the art of noticing, and towards developing a literacy of the hand-made: a knowledge that we already have, but seldom articulate, about the way making gestures inform the way things are.

To inspire you, listen to this description of a tufting session written by HDK alumn Klara Albertsson, and/or this description of a cooking moment by graduating student Ann-Maj Risgaard. The texts are read by artist, educator, and writer Judith Leemann.

We encourage neurodiversity, unusual materialities, practices that are at the limits and boundaries of craft. We acknowledge - and want to resist - the fact that writing is often normative: we are looking for “a messy” approach to writing that credits your haptic knowledge.

Practical information

This open call has two components: We want to publish the texts of 12 student authors, four from each school. Parallel to the open call for contributions in text format, we are also looking for three student co-editors, one from each school. The co-editors will be invited to join two editorial sessions in Oslo, and to shepherd the publication from a collection of texts to the final issue of The Vessel #9: See me make, make me see. The student editors will be guided by faculty from the three schools, Åsa Dybwad Norman and Ben Lignel. Together with Dybwad Norman and Lignel, the student editors will be responsible for the editorial workload.

• To participate in the project, either as a student editor or a student author, you first need to register your interest by sending an email saying“I’d like to” to ben@hartlandvilla.com or asa.dybwad.norman@gu.se. You will get a reminder in August and an invitation to the online project presentation 11 September 2024.
• You can apply to be both a student editor and/or a student author. Your text can be submitted in either English, Finnish, Norwegian or Swedish. Texts written in a Nordic language will additionally be translated into English.
• Please note that to participate you need to attend the online project presentation 11 September 2024 and the Craft observation and writing workshop (October/November - TBD).

See the full timeline with important deadlines and more information here.

The project is supported by