Writing, handmade tradition, and contemporary art meet in Rebecca La Marre’s Craft Parlour

Ancient and modern approaches mingle in the artist’s thought-provoking new show at Western Front

By Emma Jeffrey

Tablets by Rebecca La Marre in the Western Front show Craft Parlour. Photos by Carey Shaw

Western Front, in collaboration with Peripheral Review and the Vancouver Art Book Fair, presents Craft Parlour to July 26

BASED IN SASKATOON on Treaty 6 territory, Rebecca La Marre has an interdisciplinary practice that includes ceramics, text, performance, and theory. And now her latest exhibition of clay tablets scrawled with text, Craft Parlour, on view at Western Front, brings all these convergences into focus.

Born out of her 2023–24 residency at Western Front and a collaborative workshop series involving 10 multidisciplinary artists, La Marre’s show explores the tension and dialogue between contemporary art and craft, tracing how handmade objects can carry intellectual, political, and personal weight. 

La Marre’s fascination with these themes began in her university days, while completing residencies and her master’s degree. 

“In 2017, I did a residency at a place called the Women's Studio Workshop in upstate New York,” La Marre says in a phone interview with Stir. “I did my master's in art writing at Goldsmiths in London, England, and in that program I learned a lot about the history of language and the philosophy of language and how language acts on bodies.” 

After completing her master’s degree, La Marre began learning pottery from her grandmother as a way to pass on and preserve family tradition. Ceramics became a strong passion for her, but she was faced with a conflict between her contemporary arts and writing practice and her relationship with clay. 

“I was struggling to think about how the work I was doing in writing and arts connected to the work that I was really enjoying doing with clay,” La Marre says. “I was encountering a big division between people that consider themselves to be craftspeople and people that consider themselves to be contemporary artists. So I got really curious about it, and I was trying to think about how to bring together the different strands of my practice and make them make sense together.” 

Rebecca La Marre. Photo by Dennis Ha

“I’m starting to see a lot of craft pop up in contemporary art exhibitions, and art writers can’t quite figure out how to talk about it.”

In 2023, as La Marre began creating works that sat at the intersection of craft and contemporary art, she was invited to do an artist residency at Western Front. She viewed the residency as an opportunity to further explore the relationship contemporary artists have to craft. 

“I was working on this project and thinking about ‘What are the intersections of writing, crafting, and contemporary art?’” La Marre says. “I was having conversations with artists who were straddling those disciplines, and speaking to artists who would admit to keeping a craft practice, but it was always paired with some kind of embarrassment or secretiveness. 

“I thought this was really strange,” she adds. “I'm hearing this come up so much, and I’m starting to see a lot of craft pop up in contemporary art exhibitions, and art writers can’t quite figure out how to talk about it. So I decided to get a group of artists together and have a conversation about why there’s this discomfort or dissonance.”

Partnering with Western Front and Canadian-based arts publication Peripheral Review, La Marre put out an open call to artists, and received an overwhelming number of applications. She selected artists from various disciplines and educational backgrounds to have a diversity of experience in her working group. 

“Each person in the group was working with something very unique to the other people in the group, but still in conversation with each other,” La Marre explains. “We had a person who works with metal, we had a weaver, we had a potter, we had a professor of art history who started teaching. Everyone we selected had some aspect of writing practice and some aspect of making practice in a craft tradition. 

“The basic idea was ‘Let’s get together in a room and talk about what we do and what we’re interested in, and see what happens,’” she continues. “Each time, I would invite a cohost to come and lead the discussion, and they would start by talking about their practice and then everyone would participate in some kind of discussion, experiment, or game.” 

La Marre found it meaningful to engage in these extended conversations with other people who were interested in similar things, and it helped develop a sense of vocabulary for the project. “It was this idea of experimenting in semi-public, and not feeling pressured to have to show a finished work, but establishing that there’s value in sharing things that aren’t finished yet,” La Marre says.

The material result of La Marre’s residency at Western Front is Craft Parlour, a series of ceramic tablets scrawled with text, as well as an accompanying written publication, which explores the axis of craft, contemporary art, and historical influence. Inspired by ancient wax tablets, which could be carved with an inscription and then erased with heat and reused, the tablets are glazed with a dry-erase emulsion to mimic a whiteboard-like quality. La Marre was fascinated by the continuity between ancient and modern technologies, as in the use of such terms as tablet and stylus. Each tablet is emblazoned with an individual phrase, such as “This is a surface for writing” and “The tongue could not be troubled to find a noise for anything so nearly not there.” 

“I’m hopeful that the text that’s on the tablet is resonant with the current moment,” La Marre concludes. “I have these writing tablets that I’ve used in various art writing workshops over the years installed on the wall. And what I’ve written across them is this text that I’ve been working on, which was inspired by the left and right column in bookkeeping. The idea of the left and the right column was developed in ancient Egypt, and was then brought to the Western world during the French Revolution. And this concept is the basis for where the terms left and right in politics came from. 

“So all of these things are connected; writing, accounting, math, bodies, and politics are all entangled together, and they impact each other,” she adds. “I think by looking at historical examples through the text, people coming to the show will be able to draw parallels to the current moment. It’s a way of contextualizing our world without directly engaging with what’s happening in the present moment specifically.”

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