Dear Anharad, I don't know if anyone else has answered your email. I was hoping to see some informed responses. But, as none seem to be forthcoming, I will offer an uninformed response. My remarks deal with the US, where there is no lacemaking tradition. 1. How dramatically have enrollments of young people, say under 20 fallen in recent years? How dramatically can you fall from practically zero? I started making lace in 1971 when I was 16 years old with another friend. She lasted for about two lessons. I was unique at the time and a visit to the local IOLI chapter resulted in much excited discussion of "young blood". I will point out that I am still unique, as I never meet another person my age who started as young as I did. So, if there were others, they haven't kept it up for 38 years, or they aren't involved in the International Old Lacers in a way that I would run across them. I started my daughter in lacemaking when she was 6 or 7 and for a while she seemed to enjoy it. She took some classes at the lace convention where she met the only other two young lacemakers, two sisters from the west coast whose mother was in charge of one of the conventions. My daughter stopped lacemaking and took up oil painting, sculpture and now jewelry making. The sisters were still at it into their late teens, I know. For one thing, my position as publicity director of the New Jersey Convention in 2004 resulted in several newspaper reporters asking if there were any young people at the convention, since newspaper reporters have a particular interest in posing people of different ages together. I started asking if there were any young people at the convention which resulted in a rather hilarious series of people reporting the sighting of young people to me in hurried communications in elevators or while running past me in the halls. There were the two sisters, who were, in fact, interviewed, and there was another young woman who had green hair and piercings who was reputed to be an excellent lacemaker. I caught sight of her, in an elevator, but too late for the reporter to interview and I estimated that she might be in her twenties or thirties. As I recall, this was a huge convention, possibly on the order of 350 people, but no men enrolled as students, and only 3 people younger than, let's say, 45. The Lost Art Lacers starts a few children in their children's classes every year and perhaps one will continue for a while. People have noted, here and elsewhere, that those who continue often tend to be home schooled. Whether this has to do with a greater ability to focus as a result of home schooling, an ability to chose to spend ones time more flexibly since one is not in a formal school curriculum which dictates activities, more parental support for the activity, or the fact that often the home environment of home schoolers is different, ie. perhaps less TV, is a matter of debate. 2. How many professional lacemakers/artists/designers are there among you who use bobbin lace as one of your techniques, even if only to make prototypes? The fact that you have not received any responses on this one suggests that if people are professional artists and designers they may not be on this list. One professional lace designer I met at a lace factory probably had no understanding of hand lacemaking technique, never consulted historical lace for ideas, and certainly never made a prototype in bobbin lace. She said the way she designed lace was to look at advertisements in magazines and see what motifs were popular, ie. roses, and then draw a design that could be carried out by Schiffli machines. I am finding a new interest among twenty something young people from the design schools around NY, and there is a young practicing artist in one of the lace classes I attend. She was of the opinion that she was the only person learning lace for the purposes of using it in art. This reflects another interesting thing that I am observing in young people who do want to use lace in art, which is that they don't have any money, so they don't join lace organizations or receive lace publications or attend lace learning opportunities such as the convention, so they have no idea what other lace artists from around the world are doing. I just met a person who actually supports herself making lace jewelry. She has been making lace jewelry and selling it at high end craft shows, and she did not know of the International Old Lacers or the entire world of lace resources until about 2 years ago. She took one course at a craft school, 15 years ago, and had one lace book, (Nottingham or Southard, can't recall) and has been making her own solutions to problems not addressed in those sources. There seems to be a huge divide between the hobby lacemaking world and the artistic world. The hobby world has classes, books, lending libraries, but the artists seem to be going it alone. In fact, it is actually somewhat painful to see artists re-inventing the wheel with a huge amount of effort, and they do not lack in effort, when many of the things they are discovering have already been discovered. At the rare times that young artists take an interest in the subject, I almost feel like an ethnographic specimen whose ancient art form is being discovered by a modern day artist. Weavers, on the other hand, automatically seem to fit into the hip, artistic world. Perhaps it is because they don't demonstrate in mob caps. (Seriously, we were trying to debrief a youngish member of the IOLI about why we don't have young members, and she mentioned our propensity for demonstrating in Prairie dresses.) I think that the term "lace" and the concept of oldness are linked in people's minds. In fact, at one, really not bad, modern art exhibit that featured modern art based on lace, the lace credentials of all the artists' grandmothers were given on the story boards. I do wonder, if we re-christened ourselves as "off loom weaving" if we wouldn't have more interest from the young. It would also be very good if we could offer beginning bobbin lace courses that are available to students in the design schools. We seem to have a demand for that here in the NY Metropolitan area, but we can't seem to fill it since there is no capable teacher who is willing to teach such a class, due to the problems involved in transportation of equipment. There is no actual lace teacher in NY. I am particularly interested in your lace teaching in Milan. After you start with the loop manipulated finger braiding (which I would have no idea how to do, but sounds very clever since you can't put it down) what do you do? In the US, it is the norm to start people off in Torchon lace, and only after the mastery of Torchon, do they attempt anything else, ie. Milanese lace. I think that one may lose a lot of people who might be quite artistic by starting with Torchon, since it is not a lace that lends itself easily to artistic expression. Do you have your students do an entire torchon course as a foundation for other laces? If not, what progression do you follow? <<The fact is that many people like to dedicate their time to activities that require practise and study in order to do them well, and sometimes with the desire to make something that we love popular with others we reduce its quality and in the worst cases decline into kitsch. Lace was born as a highly refined fashion textile, and (Please, nobody is to take this personally!!!) the most part of what we see nowadays simply does not reflect that. >> Beyond that, it seems that many people, including those putting on museum exhibitions, do not understand that lace is a particular textile technique, and they construe the word to mean a "thing that is white and has holes in it". Then they show art that has that characteristic, such as metal or ceramic with holes in it, rather than showing the bobbin or needle lace technique used in artistic and interesting ways. Again, we are hampered by the popular concept of what lace is, ie. white stuff with holes in it. People seeing a piece of modern lace in color would probably say, "where is the lace?" Perhaps, in fact, it is we who are confused. Maybe lace is white stuff with holes in it, and we are doing a new textile art that doesn't have a name. I will be very excited to see what the results of the Powerhouse Museum competition are. Since that seems to be one institution that appreciates lace technique, I am quite hopeful that it will bring us some exciting work. I recall a few years ago, hearing that a lace competition in Belgium resulted in practically no entries using any form of lace technique, and, If I recall correctly, the winner had made a work consisting of a thousand white paper origami cranes. Devon
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