What's the difference between art and craft? Nearly every definition of art includes the words “drawing,” “painting,” and “sculpture” combined with the application of creativity and imagination, while the definition of “craft” simply references the skill with which an object is made.

For many years, the conceptual art movement emphasizes the concept over the aesthetics and creation of the object.  Craft, on the other hand,  continues to emphasize the function and the process used to create the object. The different emphases of art and craft are what make them seem distinctly separate from one another. Additionally, fine art might be viewed as “stuffy” and driven by gallery-hopping elitists, while craft seems to be perpetually relegated to a grandmumsy, uber-kitschy domestic image. Yet there are practitioners of both the art world and the craft world who are confronting these artificial, highly arbitrary divisions head-on.

The artisans who embrace this hybridized craft-art come in many shapes and forms from Icelandic artist Hildur Bjarnadottir to the performance-craft of Art Yarn.  Their work is neither completely craft nor completely conceptual art, but is rather a conceptual craft. While these two examples are at either end of the craft-art continuum (Bjarnadottir is more on the “art” end while Art Yarn is more on the “craft” end,)  they are profound statements about what practitioners of art and craft can do when they cease to see the divisions between the two.

By embracing the diversity of approaches available within art and craft, Bjarnadottir’s scrumblings and traditional craft techniques become “drawings” by her inspired infusion of graphite into cotton yarn and “paintings” through her decoratively woven canvases. Art Yarn also defies the conventionality of knitting and crocheting with their performative “stitch and bitch” sessions, call "The Knitting Orchestra.” The Knitting Orchestra is comprised of a group of men and women wielding knitting needles, crochet hooks, and yarn to collectively become a creative, obsessive performance for their viewers.

These artisans are taking craft from the traditionally feminized domesticity of “women’s work” to the public art world, creating places in which to ask the craft world and the art world the really hard questions:  What is the nature of art? What is the nature of craft? And how can the practitioners of both bridge the places between?

Photos courtesy of Hildur Bjarnadottir and Art Yarn

Recommended Reading:

Immortalizing Insects: The Art of Silver Casting
There’s One in All of Us: Where the Wild Things Are