TNNUA Fibre Arts

From August to October 2019 I had the pleasure of joining Tainan National University of the Arts as a visiting practitioner. TNNUA is a university built on the core values of nourishing life with the arts and caring for the community. As a visiting practitioner, my role was to collaborate with academics, students and cultural institutions, sharing my knowledge and perspective as an international designer.

With support from the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute and together with the head of the Fiber Arts faculty, Wu Pei-Shan, we led a group of students from the Masters of Applied Arts course and visiting students on a series of field trips, site visits and artisan workshops.

The purpose of the program was to undertake research into two heritage crafts, rattan basketry and shell ginger weaving, and investigate their potential in contemporary fiber art and craft production. With students from the Masters program, we visited Puyuma Elder and rattan and bamboo master craftsman Ahung Masikad in Eastern Taiwan. A series of interviews and short videos were conducted as we were introduced to important cultural sites and headed deep into the mountainous jungle of the Haiduan area in Taidong County to seek out the rattan vine.

Students then participated in three workshops to learn the foundations of working with these materials; a rattan and bamboo furniture making workshop with Ahung Masikad, an experimental basketry workshop with artist Sekijima Hisako, and I led a design thinking intensive studio to help students understand the dialogue between material, object and everyday life. The results of the experimental workshops culminated in a pop-up exhibition at the NTCRI in Miaoli.