Common Craft: Translations Text/ Image/ Drawing/ Print

Common Craft was a reciprocal mail-art research and teaching project run in 2018 between staff and students of the Art and Craft Department, Oslo National Academy of Arts and Illustration specialism, Glasgow School of Art. The aim was to examine local and disciplinary practices of drawing and print in separate locations—and how they might usefully collide within the work of students reviewing their practice as they began their professional lives as practitioners. Over the course of the year parcels were sent via air mail between the institutions initiating a call and response series of artworks. In addition to staff exchange between the institutions we also ran a joint intense workshop in Glasgow mid-way through, when the students met each other for the first time, collaborated in drawing outputs and in curating a work-in-progress show. From simple starting conditions, this project generated exceptionally complex and thought-provoking debates and outcomes for both staff and students involved. Examining the works produced, alongside the suitability of print and drawing as mediums for material exchange, this talk will address the themes of translation and disjunctions of distance raised by the act of repeatedly attempting to send parcels of art, via mail, from one institution to another. We were inspired in part by translation theorist Lawrence Venuti’s aim of preserving difference, strangeness and ‘otherness’ when communicating across languages and cultures (Venuti 1995: 303).