ChristopherRobbins PhpWiki

This page has become a many-headed monster: at one point it listed my works related to craft, but really it has become a page that documents works created in the craft tradition that specifically misapply material

My projects

DmPlankedMechanical

My thinking

Craft matrix

Related - craft misapply

Scott Burton

misapply in furniture

Jean Blackburn

misapply in furniture, subvert, misappropriate

Richard Artschwager

Artschwager's sculpture, such as Door seen here often employs "fake" materials, such as formica patterned to look like a wood surface.

Elizabeth Demaray

Elizabeth Demaray misapplies the craft of upholstery and knitting to cover stones, warm trees, and even knit a cozy for a missle. She refers to these projects as "innapropriate caregiving." She created an apollo pod out of pillows, insulation, duct tape, and other stuff you can find around your house, and designed surrogate shelters for homeless hermit crabs. I'm not sure if her nonsensical solutions for non-problems carry a deeper meaning, but they sure make me feel good.

Los Carpinteros

Misapplied furniture craft with a sinister twist.

Martin Puryear

Craft, Indigenous references, Minimalism

"I think the way I work is probably out of step with what a lot of artists are doing in 2003, which is telling stories or conveying specific kinds of information, be it sociological information, psychological information, sexual information. Work that is really a vehicle for conveying kinds of information. I came from a generation where the work was itself the information and so there remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can hopefully speak. Whether it's through beauty or through ugliness or whatever quality you put into the work. That is what the work can be about. The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today or what you see people doing to each other or things like that."-Art:21

"What's the genesis for the ladder piece, "Ladder for Booker T. Washington"? That work is perhaps the most representational piece of yours from the past decade."

"PURYEAR: The title came after the work was finished, first of all. I didn't set out to make a work about Booker T. Washington. The title was very much a second stage in the whole evolution of the work. The work was really about using the sapling, using the tree. And making a work that had a kind of artificial perspective, a forced perspective, an exaggerated perspective that made it appear to recede into space faster than in fact it does"

Thicket, 1990