The 2024 graduates of HDK-Valand’s Master’s Programme in Crafts represent a diversity of practices that contribute to what contemporary craft means today. Studying during political and economic precarity unseen in recent decades, their work emerges in a time where very little can be taken for granted. While our current era is rife with anxieties, doubts and even nostalgia – we may also be living in a time that will renew appreciation for craft practices. Difficult questions regarding obsolescence, difference and purpose have long been familiar to craft.

The craft fields of jewellery art, ceramics and textile art studied at HDK-Valand demand an appetite for acute attention to the material world. For the 2024 graduates, this attention is manifest in practices that explore the ubiquitous and the rare, the familiar and the unnerving, the joyful and even the ugly. Over the two-year Masters, students have undertaken investigations of topics as disparate as heritage, illness, family, appropriation and violence. Making in response to these themes has resulted in works that deftly deploy speculation, sloppiness, humour and even
sorrow.

A bellwether is understood to predict a trend and offer an indicator of patterns to come. In the 15 th century the term referred to the lead sheep of a flock – honoured with the headache of a lifetime from wearing the flock’s bell around its neck. Today the term appears in economics, as well as politics. The graduates of 2024 are hardly a flock. Instead, the bellwether they represent for contemporary craft is healthy variety. Shared is a commitment to understanding the world through crafts materials. What differs are the backroads, slipstreams and, at times even, motorways each have travelled in the making of their work.

 

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