Let’s begin with repetition, with hands that remember what language fails to capture, with materials shaped by touch, place, and time. With gestures, tools, and techniques passed from one body to another, connecting labor to memory, and land to making. With ways of knowing surpassing a Western-centered epistemic order.
When such knowledge disappears, it erases whole histories of making, relating, and the realities these practices sustain. This erasure never occurs in isolation. It goes hand in hand with the dispossession from land, displacement of people, genocide, extractivism, and the ongoing colonial violence of political regimes today. The sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos names this systematic destruction of ways of knowing epistemicides, through which colonial and capitalist power installs Western knowledge as universal. Foregrounding craft as an epistemic practice that persists and confronts erasure challenges the hegemony of modernity’s rationalist universalism. Still, it is also an insistence on the necessity of its continuity.
Within contemporary Western art discourse, craft is often framed as a category evoking notions of tradition and manual expertise, while simultaneously marking its marginality. Positioned at the edges of art history, craft is coined as something to be historically preserved rather than lived. Although the violence of historical colonial “preservation” of objects through looting and dispossession has been widely addressed in recent decades, its logic continues to haunt contemporary efforts to introduce Indigenous and non-Western practices into Western institutions through a language of rescue.
How were artisanal practices separated from the category of art in the first place? What becomes obscured when craft is absorbed into institutional frameworks?
These questions often remain unanswered despite what appears to be a renewed fascination with craft. Practices are celebrated yet kept peripheral or singular, detached from their conditions of making, and framed as survivals of the past rather than as living, contested forms of knowledge in the present.
Seclusion and Preservation
These tensions shape the exhibition “Erasure”, which opened on November 22nd at the Goodwood Art Foundation in West Sussex, curated by Eleanor Clarke. It brings together works by Laís Amaral, Solange Pessoa, and Dana Awartani. Each artist engages practices rooted in inherited techniques and material knowledge, foregrounding the memories carried by specific forms of making. While the exhibition centres on questions of ecology, cultural heritage, and memory, it also draws attention to the hands that sustain these practices and to forms of manual labour that are often precarious, undervalued, or at risk of disappearance.
Spread across the Foundation’s Main Gallery and the adjacent Piggott Gallery, the exhibition unfolds within the contemplative seclusion of the Goodwood estate. Set on 70 acres of woodland and meadows, and featuring a sculpture garden, the site is geographically removed from the nearby towns’ daily life. It is a landscape both isolated and meticulously curated. After the closure of the Cass Sculpture Foundation in 2020, which established the sculpture park in 1992, the Goodwood Art Foundation was revived by Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond, who owns the 12,000-acre century-old aristocratic estate that also hosts annual auto and horse racing events.
Within this insulated environment, the Goodwood Art Foundation remains largely detached from the socio-economic realities of the surrounding rural communities, where deskilling and technological change have rendered once-specialized labor obsolete. My taxi ride from the train station reflected this disconnect. The driver told me about his former role as a newspaper press engineer, a position made obsolete by the rise of digital printing. While “Erasure” becomes a meditation on the persistence and precarity of traditional and indigenous craftsmanship, the driver’s experience bespeaks a subtle crack in the exhibition’s themes, wherein the institution’s discrete attention to preserving knowledge embedded in craft practices is contrasted with a disconnect from the wider surrounding social environment.
Fig.1
The Art Institution as an Intersection of Struggles
Staged within the Goodwood Foundation, an institution sustained by wealth accumulated through aristocratic and colonial histories, these craft-based practices are drawn into regimes of Western institutional validation and the art market, raising questions of value, authorship, and beneficence. It is here that a decolonial approach to craft intersects with another ongoing struggle: that of underpaid art technicians, cultural workers, and museum staff fighting for labor rights and recognition within Western art institutions. Coinciding with my visit, Tate staff began a seven-day strike organized by the Public and Commercial Services Union in response to a proposed 2–3% pay rise widely condemned as unlivable amid rising costs. At the picket line, one sign read: “Treat staff like art! Handle with care.”
What would it mean to think of decolonial and labor struggles alongside each other, not by relativizing one through the other, but by recognizing their intersection within the Western art institution?
While parallels can be drawn to the industrial logic of deskilling, practices rooted in Indigenous, diasporic, and non-Western traditions cannot be fully understood through this framework alone. If deskilling names the erosion of embodied expertise under capitalism, the marginalization of traditional craft is shaped by longer colonial histories in which knowledge was devalued or erased to universalize Western categories of art, labor, and authorship. Nevertheless, these parallels might allow for a way of speaking across struggles and differences to imagine worlds and knowledges otherwise, as the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar suggests? “Deskilling,” writes the British art historian John Roberts, “is what happens when the expressive unity of hand and eye is overridden by the conditions of social and technological reproducibility.” [1]
What becomes visible when the colonial division between art and craft is read alongside this rupture between hand and eye, specifically within the Western art institution? Could such a reading reframe craft not as a residual category but as a living repertoire of techniques shaping artistic production? And might attention to artisanship also prompt structural reflection on the often-invisible forms of manual labor that sustain exhibitions themselves?
Improvisation against Completion
Arriving at the Foundation, Lais Amaral’s layered paintings draw me closer through their textured, grid-like structures. Each of the exhibited canvases reveals itself as a record of excavation. Layers of black coating are scraped away to uncover traces of the colors beneath, making the act of uncovering as visible as the material itself. In Untitled V (Como um zumbido estrelar, um pássaro no fundo do ouvido, 2024) and Untitled XI (Cimento e água, Gamboa, 2023), acrylic paint, ink, spray paint, and oil pastel are combined with beads and straw to create textured, palimpsestic surfaces. Amaral’s scraping technique, involving Afro-Brazilian hair care tools, including combs and cuticle pushers, blurs the actions of domestic care with artistic labor. Tracing the act of scraping in her paintings, the painterly practice itself seems to become an act of resistance, one that is both intimate and improvisational, agitating craft as an intervening technique in histories at risk of loss and erasure.
With her first institutional show in Europe, the artist’s work seeks to address issues of environmental destruction by mapping relations between internal and external landscapes through her paintings. Her engagement with quilombo communities in Sapê do Norte sheds light on environmental degradation and cultural erasure. Craft in this context functions as politics; labor becomes a reclamation, and tools and techniques carry both personal and collective histories. As an homage to her family’s craft traditions and as a questioning of hierarchies of skill and value in contemporary art, Amaral describes herself as a self-taught artist. She first started painting in 2017 when she co-founded Trovoa, a collective centered around the experiences of racialized women in Brazil. The collective’s emphasis on reimagining forms of artistic production, through their collaborative network, laboring, discussing, and organising together, informs Amaral’s practice as collaborative and processual. In identifying as an artist-artisan, Amaral unsettles the division between art and craft, pointing towards the persistence of the artisanal within her work.
Curator Eleanor Clarke notes that even shortly before the opening, Amaral continued to retouch and scratch the canvases. Understanding the paintings not as finished objects but as provisional moments within an ongoing practice highlights sustained collective labor and handed-over skills over the logic of completion.
Fig.2
Engraved Collaborations and Obscured Conditions
In the open space between Amaral’s paintings, thirty-three soapstone sculptures from Solange Pessoa’s Nihil Novi Sub Sole (2022), first shown at the 59th Venice Biennale, form a dispersed constellation of carved spirals, geometric motifs, and spiritual symbols drawn from prehistoric Brazilian fossils and indigenous cosmologies. Common in rupestrian art across Minas Gerais, Bahia, and Pernambuco, the spirals signify creation and renewal. By engraving these forms into stone, Pessoa understands her sculptures as homages to the ancestral knowledge and the geological memory embedded in the material.
Several stones are placed outside the gallery, visible through a large window, while others inside retain faint green traces of weather exposure from previous environments. By allowing the elements to mark the sculptures, Pessoa treats erosion not as damage but as an active collaborator, framing the stones as temporal and changing objects that hover between natural forms and cultural artifacts.
While the sculptures link nature and culture, spirituality and ancestral knowledge, their mode of production is an easily overlooked but central element to Pessoa’s work. Since 2014, she has developed the series in collaboration with stone masons in Mata dos Palmitos, a region with a long tradition of stone carving. In the workshop led by Ms. Dionísia José Gomes, the artisans Celso Alberto Gomes, Tati, Mr. Newton, and Teodoro da Costa translate Pessoa’s clay maquettes into stone under her guidance. Framed by the artist as an homage to their craft, this long-standing collaboration appears even more precarious when viewed through the structures of the contemporary art market and biennial culture. The masons’ labor, so central to the sculptures, largely disappears within the institutional frame, highlighting the asymmetries of visibility embedded in contemporary art’s economies of authorship.
Inquiring the names of the artisans for this review is a symbolic gesture of recognition, yet it only scratches the surface. The material conditions of the collaboration remain largely invisible. How is their labor reflected in the economic relationship with the artist once the work enters the logics of the art market, with its valuations, profits, and circulation within galleries and biennials? Who benefits from the exhibition of their sculptures, and to what extent do the makers themselves share in its rewards? These questions intersect the precarious conditions of the masons with the broader dynamics of labor exploitation in Western art institutions. From installation technicians to curatorial and gallery staff, similar patterns of invisibility and undervaluation persist. The structural forces that marginalize artisanal work in an institutional context resonate with the demands articulated by striking Tate staff. This intersection highlights how exploitation operates across multiple registers of cultural production, whether in the translation of clay models into stone or in the maintenance, presentation, and circulation of artworks.
Artisanal Transmission against Destruction
Installed slightly away from the main gallery, Dana Awartani’s I Went Away and Forgot You (2017) occupies the Pigott Gallery, a small, light-filled pavilion reached via a winding path through the sculpture park. Inside, shafts of afternoon light fall onto a vast geometric sand pattern covering nearly a third of the wooden floor. Rendered in muted ochres, reds, and blues, the composition recalls the sacred geometry of Islamic tilework central to Awartani’s practice. Behind the floor installation, a 22-minute video shows the artist sweeping away an identical pattern inside her grandmother’s former home in Jeddah’s Old Town, revealing a Westernized tiled floor beneath. Drawing on her Palestinian-Saudi heritage, the gesture of cleaning becomes an act of repeated doing and undoing, in which the erasure of the pattern signals not only the loss of ornamental aesthetics but of the cultural memory embedded in the craft traditions it evokes. The quiet poetics in the fragile materiality of the installation are here juxtaposed with the destruction of cultural heritage through genocidal force and occupation, an ongoing brutal reality in Palestine.
Grounded in Awartani’s training at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, the work reflects the tension between the endurance and precarity of traditional artisan knowledge. Drawing on Middle Eastern craft traditions, her redevelopment of these techniques could be understood as an act of material witnessing and the transmission of craft knowledge. The sand pattern installation was installed using a stencil technique developed by the artist and executed by the technicians Elliot Steele and Phoebe Tonkin, who had previously been trained in installing the work at Lisson Gallery. What may appear as a marginal detail becomes another layer of the work’s value, underscoring Awartani’s attention to how skill circulates through repetition and shared labor. In carrying out the installation, the technicians themselves become participants in the craft process, extending the work’s lineage beyond the artist’s hand.
Embodied Networks as Living Repertoires
Here, the distinctions between artisan and art technician begin to blur, linking the efforts for recognition and fair labor conditions of cultural workers with the transmission of knowledge embedded in craft as a political tool against erasure. Resisting forms of epistemicide by giving material form to histories that survive through craft, precisely at a moment when Western aesthetic dominance reproduces itself through the systematic destruction of cultural heritage across historic Palestine, these practices extend beyond the decorative or nostalgic. Taking the expertise, knowledge, and collaborations involved in crafting seriously as shared forms of artistic production offers a bridge to the often-invisible labor that underpins the circulation of cultural memory and the functioning of contemporary art.
This bridge also highlights that the celebration of craft in institutions such as the Goodwood Art Foundation cannot persist in isolation. Its continuation depends not only on recognition but on the collective, largely unseen, processes of skill transmission, maintenance, and production. If craft is never an individual practice, but instead one that is passed on, reproduced, and shared, it prompts reflection on the broader networks that make exhibitions possible. From artisanal workshops and artist studios to galleries and institutional staff. Recognizing this interdependence is not merely conceptual. It demands structural change in the systems of recognition, value, and labor within the Western art institution, making visible similarities in the dynamics that the striking Tate staff raised in their fight against epistemic erasure. It also requires the institution to move beyond a symbolic logic of preservation to acknowledge the human networks, embodied knowledge, and sustained labor that make craft a living repertoire.
//
- Footnotes
[1] John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (Verso, 2007), 3.
Images:
Cover: Solange Pessoa, Nihil Novi Sub Sole, (2019–2021) Carved soapstone sculptures in ERASURE at Goodwood Art Foundation. Photo by Toby Adamson.
Fig.1 ERASURE, Winter exhibition (2025-2026) at Goodwood Art Foundation, featuring mixed-media paintings by Laís Amaral and carved soapstones by Solange Pessoa. Photo by Toby Adamson.
Fig.2 Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You (2017) © Dana Awartani, Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Photographer: Ron Amstutz
