CraftWorks

CraftWorks – two Craftprojects and Research about Collaborative Art as Change Maker
With funding from the Velux Foundation Trapholt and Aarhus University launched a collaborative research and action project in autumn 2021. The CraftWorks research project will explore, develop and test practice- and research-based methods that show new ways for art museums as relational universes of people and works in mutual exchange. The ambition is to explore how we can develop the museum institution into a space for inclusive, democratic exchange between different experiences and voices, while creating artworks of original value.

Trapholt Museum of Modern Art, Craft and Design has a strong practice of making collaborative artistic projects. For several years, Trapholt has focused on how to meet the challenge of engagement and meaningful communities at art museums through large-scale art projects with up to 1,000 participants. Researchers at Aarhus University have for several years gathered cultural actors in the research network Take Part, published and organized conferences on cultural participation.

The aim of CraftWorks is to develop new methodologies for art museums as democratic, polyphonic and relational spaces of people and art. Based on earlier collaborative projects, two large scale collaborative and artistically ambitious craft projects – Data Mirror and Things Matter have been initiated at Trapholt. We research what these projects do as respectively processes and unique art works, and how the projects challenges and affects participants, art museum, society as well as our understanding of art. How can we create inclusive exchanges between heterogeneous voices and personal experiences and at the same time extend the artistic field with new art works? The two collaborative craft-projects will be qualified through action research, which involves artists, project managers and researchers in exchange with leading international museums and theorists in the field. Through this, we will develop new methods for Trapholt and other art museums, which combine a relational and an objects focused praxis.

Research results will be published in research articles and in a final methodology book.

Research collaboration with Aarhus University

CraftWorks is established in partnership with Professor Birgit Eriksson at Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Tina Louise Hove Sørensen is connected as a postdoc and several national and international researchers are involved in the research to further develop Trapholt’s method and investigate, what impact and change it has for participants, the museum, society and art, that an art museum works in this way.

Karen Grøn is museum director of Trapholt Museum of Modern Art, Craft and Design since 2010. Before she was curator of interpretation and visitor development at Trapholt and curator of Art at the Women’s Museum in Denmark. Participation, engagement and generosity is the DNA of the work of Karen Grøn aiming at creating a relevant art museum for visitors, society and users through radical change both in programs, collections and organization simultaneously. Karen Grøn was Research Associate at Museums and Galleries in Education, Institute of Education, University College London 2006-07 and visiting researcher at Tate, London 2018-19

Birgit Eriksson is a professor of cultural theory and analysis at the School of Communication and Culture, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Her research interests include collaborative arts and culture; cultural taste and communities; the uses of the arts; aesthetics, citizenship and politics. She is the director of Take Part – Research Network on Cultural Participation and co-director of a research program in Cultural Transformations. Currently she is the lead of three research projects on art in deprived social housing areas, on citizen participation in cultural centres, and on collaborative projects in museums. Recent publications include Cultures of Participation: Arts, Digital Media and Cultural institutions (Routledge 2020). More info and all projects and publications at http://au.dk/aekbe@hum

 

CraftVærk articles and publications

Exhibition catalogues for Trapholt’s collaborative art projects:

Research articles based on research results in the Craftværk project:

  • Sørensen. T. L. H. (2024). Participation and affect intertwined, Linking participatory experiences and affect in a collaborative craft-based art project. In: Conjunctions, Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation. Vol. 11, No.1, 2024
  • Sørensen, T. L. H. & Eriksson, B. (2024). Ned af piedestalen. Dialogiske, feminine og kritiske versioner af den offentlige kunst og fælles kulturarv. I: Things Matter : Kritiske kig på kunst i det offentlige rum. Trapholt, 2024. / Abstract: Off the pedestal : Dialogic, feminine and critical versions of public art and cultural heritage / by postdoc Tina Louise Hove Sørensen & professor Birgit Eriksson. p. 122-131
  • Eriksson, B. & Sørensen, T. L. H. (2023) Data og Craft på det kollaborative kunstmuseum. I: Dataspejlet : Data og craft i fællesskabt kunst. Trapholt, 2023 / Data and craft at the collaborative art museum / by Professor Birgit Eriksson & Postdoc Tina Louise Hove Sørensen. In: Dataspejlet : Data og craft i fællesskabt kunst. Trapholt, 2023. p. 186-201

The following research articles and publications based on previous collaborative projects such as Stitches Beyond Borders and Among the Trees:

 

Collaborative projects
2022 DATA MIRROR
2023 THINGS MATTER
craftworks symposium