Encompassing interdisciplinary practices and emerging digital spaces and networks, my dissertation research explores how collaborative handicraft communities, economies and practices have moved online, onto platforms like Etsy and Pinterest. I argue that, because of the long-standing association between women’s writing and craft culture, these online craft spaces can help us recognize, re-interpret, and even experience the ways that handicraft has informed and shaped the work of nineteenth-century women writers, who were themselves working during a period of rapid technological advancement.
I argue that designing, discussing and making craft items offers a distinctive approach to analyzing literary texts because it is a culture of making that was not born online and instead is linked with a still-accessible legacy of craft practices and values in which popular authors like Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë participated.
My work suggests that literature-inspired crafts, newly showcased by online commercial spaces like Etsy and Pinterest, offer relevant pathways to understanding and interacting with the texts that inspired them because the texts’ generative context shares characteristics with the emerging online craft archive: to wit, its “sharing” economies, its collaborative practices, and its virtual communities. A Different Kind of Research
My work for this exhibition puts into practice some of the handicraft techniques that my doctoral research discusses. Using historical tools and techniques inflected with digital materials, I aim to engage with making as historical and contemporary practice--just as the authors I write about would have experienced it.