Studia Vernacula

Making cultural heritage

Sirpa Kokko — 2024-09-27

Putting the making in place-making: the role of traditional crafts skills and community-led conservation in the re-framing of historic environment services

Alexander Langlands — 2024-09-27

As Europe confronts a polycrisis of transitioning energy supplies, food sovereignty, climate change, and threats to national securities, it would be easy to lose sight of heritage as an essential component within the cultural fabric of communities. Yet as both a tangible and intangible process heritage is indispensable in offering a forward-looking resilient future for communities at the local level. This paper explores the case of Wales in light of cuts to government funding for heritage and historic environment services. It examines what changing definitions of heritage mean for how it is delivered and interrogates how notions of ‘community’ can be critiqued to extract workable co-production solutions for the sustainable conservation of built heritage assets. The case is made for a re-framing of state-led heritage delivery to better address the ambitions of the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 with practical, participatory craft ‘hands-on’ heritage as a key element.

Keywords: heritage, resilience, communities, placemaking, Wales, participatory, co-production

Reviving an old shade of red: dyeing with rotted alder buckthorn bark

Liis Luhamaa — 2024-09-27

Alder buckthorn (Frangula alnus Mill., paakspuu in Estonian) is known as a traditional textile dye source in many European countries. Primarily, berries and leaves were used for dyeing, as was the bark. Several Estonian archival sources mention that alder buckthorn bark was used to dye woolen yarn red. The descriptions usually state that to get red the bark was left to rot outside over winter before dyeing. Although fermenting alder buckthorn bark in wood ash lye to achieve red has been described in historical and contemporary literary sources, no experiments with combining rotting the bark and using boiling method have been reported.

This article gives an overview of alder buckthorn bark dyeing, focusing on printed and archival Estonian sources that describe methods to dye woolen yarnred with alder buckthorn bark. A six-month-long practical experiment was conducted to test the influence of rotting on colours achievable with alder buckthorn bark. Two methods of rotting – on the ground and underground – were tested. The results show that rotted alder buckthorn bark gives a warm orange-to-red colour that can be turned violet by soaking the dyed yarns in wood ash lye. The lightfastness of the achieved colours was in line with the typical light fastness of natural dyes, displaying a greyscale rating of 2-3, on a scale of 1-5.

These results unveil Estonian historical methods of dyeing red with rotted alder buckthorn bark, a local dye source used in Estonia in the 19th century and earlier. The dyed yarns can be used as visual references when searching for alder buckthorn bark dyed textiles in the museum collections and can help interpret dye analysis results of historical and archeological textiles.

Keywords: alder buckthorn, bark, natural dyes, dyeing traditions, 19th century, rotting

Traces of callimanco in Estonia: purchased worsted striped fabrics from the late 18th to early 19th centuries

Tiina Kull — 2024-09-27

Estonia has a rich textile heritage, with large collections preserved in the museums. This study focuses on historical callimanco fabric samples or swatches from the 18th and first quarter of 19th centuries. While the iconic striped skirt of folk costume has become a symbol of Estonian identity, a subset of professionally crafted fabric in skirts and bodices has been overlooked in scholarly investigations.

The research explores potential links between striped fabric samples found in international 18th and 19th-century pattern books and the striped skirts and bodices integral to Estonian folk costumes. While foreign studies, such as Dr Michael Nix’s examination of the Norwich fabric industry, shed light on fabric trade routes, no clear connection to Estonia’s museum collections has been established.

This article aims to bridge these gaps by analysing items in Estonian museums, focusing on potential connections with callimancoes manufactured in Norwich, England. The study is crucial, given the lack of comprehensive research on this topic since Aino Voolmaa’s 1971 footnote on kamlott and Eevi Astel’s 1998 belt book adopting the term. By employing technological-comparative analysis, the study examines each individual artefacts’ technological aspects, weaving density, fabric width, yarn twists, and surface gloss. Microscopic analysis aids in identifying fibre materials, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the fabrics. The article closes with a comparison of stripe patterns in Estonian museum fabrics and those in foreign fabric sample-books and concludes that these fabrics indeed came from Norwich, England.

Keywords: historical wool and worsted fabrics, stuff, callimanco, Norwich, historical striped skirts, traditional clothing, kamlott, kalmink

Artistic development opportunities based on the reconstruction of reverse printing

Jaana Päeva — 2024-09-27

This article presents the role of artistic development and the potential for the modernisation of techniques based on the practice-based research project “Reconstruction and Artistic Development of Historical Relief Print Technique” conducted at the Estonian Academy of Arts. The aim of the project was to recreate, as faithfully as possible, a unique relief printing technique used in the studio of leather and bookbinding artist Eduard Taska in 1924, and based on this experience, to adapt the technique to meet today’s needs and conditions. The article provides an overview of the recreated historical technique, and then focuses on the results and analysis of the development activities derived from this. The three aspects of the research are presented. First, the article introduces experiments with different printing plate materials and methods for preparing the plates. Second, it analyses printing results with different types of pattern designs and third, the article compares printing results on various kinds of leathers and leather-like materials.

Keywords: artistic research, leather-work, relief printing technique, reverse printing

The expressive capacities of decay in Cabo Verde’s Carnaval Soncent. A case study of the ‘Hired to Farm’ allegorical car

Lodewyk Marthinus Barkhuizen — 2024-09-27

Carnaval Soncent is a festival held on the island of São Vicente in Cabo Verde, located approximately five hundred kilometers off the west coast of Africa. Central to Carnaval Soncent are the allegorical cars (referred to as parade floats outside of Cabo Verde) that come into being through informal craft processes. Significantly, the designers and makers embrace, even welcome, the material demise of these larger-than-life artefacts that they so painstakingly construct. This paper considers how this embrace of the material vulnerability of the artefact – its decay – forms an essential part of its expressive capacity. Using the notions of ‘conceptual compression’ (Fauconnier, Turner 2003) and ‘performance characteristics’ (Skibo, Schiffer 2008) I analyse the ‘Hired to Farm’ allegorical car, from the 2017 edition of Carnaval Soncent, to illustrate how it functions as a visualised memory. The analysis suggests that, during its composition, the allegorical car’s conceptual content becomes entangled with its materiality, creating a meaningful tension that facilitates the eventual de-composition, or release, of its emotionally charged content. This release detangles the content
and materials to, once again, make them available for the re-making of shared experiences, memories, and the community.

Keywords: decay, carnival, Cabo Verde, artefact as process, collective effort, circular economy, conceptual compression

Craft teachers’ graduation theses in Latvia

Māra Urdziņa-Deruma — 2024-09-27

Cultural heritage is taught as part of the craft curriculum from the beginning of general education in Latvia. At the end of the craft teacher training programme, students complete a final thesis in which one of the tasks is to develop teaching content for the chosen theme and class. This article asks how traditional culture is reflected in students’ final theses, using content analysis as the research method. 210 final theses containing studies on traditional crafts were selected for the study. The research findings identified four types of traditional cultural expressions: technique-, artefact-, ornament- and research-focused theses. The final theses examine both Latvian traditional culture and the traditional cultures of other nations.

Keywords: artefacts, craft techniques, design, teacher education, traditional culture

Circular economies and the regeneration of land, craft, and biodiversity. Cultural ecologies of connection

Patrick Dillon — 2024-09-27

The idea of a circular economy is based on self-contained enterprises employing local people, producing goods and services from local resources, minimising waste and maximising internal recycling. Historically, farming systems in northern and western Europe operated in circular economies with integral craft practices. We now call this ‘traditional’ farming, and in recent times it has been replaced by industrialised systems, which are generally monocultural, based on the throughput of externally derived inputs, with waste as well as product leaving the system. Chemicals in fertiliser and pesticides are ecologically damaging. Crafts that have had utility for generations become redundant.

This article utilises cultural ecology as a theoretically based, and practically verified, behavioural approach to addressing how we are placed relative to the land and the actions we take within it. Cultural ecological modelling is used to make a case for regenerating traditional farming systems so that they are economically viable modern alternatives to industrial farming. Regenerative business models are emerging connected with environmental and lifestyle matters, such as organic farming, animal welfare, localised cuisine, sustainable fashion, heritage crafts and their products. Other developments are in services catering for the growing demand for leisure, educational, and heritage experiences. Digital technologies and social media globalise the potential market for new products, while the circular systems remain tailored to specific localities. This benefits communities culturally and ecologically, improving biodiversity and human and animal wellbeing by reducing some of the damaging externalities associated with industrial farming. The resurgence of traditional crafts is promoted and intangible heritage enhanced.

Regeneration requires people to have greater involvement in decisions about the management and regulation of their local environment. Devolution is proposed, which reconciles locally adapted custom with statutory forms of governance. This would promote adaptive cultural ecological governance reflecting the synergistic coexistence of nature and culture.

Keywords: biodiversity, circular economy, craft, regeneration, cultural ecology