Daniel Fountain
Queer Crafts explores why so many LGBTQ+ practitioners are drawn to certain materials and processes as a way of expressing identity and queerness. It asks a range of questions such as: What is queer about craft? What does it mean to make queerly? What makes a hand-crafted object feel queer? How do practitioners navigate spaces and traditions shaped by cis-hetero masculinities? How might we move beyond binary, gendered understandings of craft? And how can the malleability of materials reflect the fluidity of gender and the body?
Bringing together craft studies and queer theory, the book offers one of the first sustained dialogues between these fields, showing how they can both enrich (and at times challenge!) one another. It moves beyond the field’s traditional focus on textiles and North American contexts by engaging a broader range of materials, including textiles but also ceramics, paper, wood, metal, and glass, and by highlighting practitioners across a range of international contexts and positionalities including work by practitioners from China, Pakistan, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Australia, and those who are part of the Vietnamese and Nigerian diaspora. Through a focused analysis of work made from textiles, ceramics, wood, paper, metal, and glass, this book explores how contemporary artists, designers, and practitioners identifying as LGBTQ+ use a range of craft materials and processes to explore their identity and queerness.
NOTCHES: Why will people want to read your book?
Daniel Fountain: I hope readers are drawn to the book because it reframes craft not simply as making, but as a powerful site of identity, politics, and cultural expression. For many LGBTQ+ practitioners, craft is not just a mode of production but a way of being in the world—a lived, embodied, everyday practice. I’ve aimed to write in an accessible and engaging way, weaving together theory and practice to explore what is both a deeply personal and complex subject. Ultimately, the book speaks to artists, designers, craftspeople, scholars, and anyone interested in how materials carry meaning and are tied up with both the crafting of identity and community.
NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?
DF: I’ve been working on this topic for almost a decade, and I often describe my approach as “hybrid” and “non-binary”, very much invested in approaching the material sensitively from a range of perspectives that is interdisciplinary and attempting to better traverse the chasm that is often set up between theory and practice. I come to it as an artist, curator, and researcher (someone who has made work, curated exhibitions, and written about these practices), so I’m closely connected to the material from multiple perspectives. My background is primarily in textiles, and much of my earlier research focused on their role in queer-feminist activism, from hand-crafted protest banners to projects like the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. My edited collection Crafted with Pride: Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain (2023) explored these ideas specifically within a British context and more from a material culture led perspective as opposed to studio art and craft.
Over time, I became increasingly aware of the need to look beyond textiles and to engage a broader range of materials and practices on a more global scale—particularly the work of contemporary practitioners operating across different contexts, from the street to the studio and within wider cultural industries. That shift fundamentally shaped the book. Each chapter focuses on a specific material and two practitioners, allowing for a close, grounded engagement with their work while remaining attentive to its visual and material qualities, rather than drifting into abstract theory detached from lived experience.
That said, I’m left with many questions. I would like to expand the conversation to include a wider range of practitioners, as each material opens up multiple (and sometimes conflicting) perspectives. While my focus is on contemporary practice from the late 1980s to the present, the materials and processes I discuss have much longer histories, often stretching back to prehistory. It was important to acknowledge that the relationship between craft and queerness is not ahistorical, and each chapter situates contemporary work within broader historical and theoretical frameworks, considering how artists reference, reinterpret, or reinvent these traditions as sites of queer possibility.
Inevitably, I had to draw boundaries, but many of the works I examine engage deeply with earlier histories of sexuality and representation. Artists like Paul Yore and Athi-Patra Ruga, for example, draw on colonial histories, using techniques such as quilting and needlework to challenge and reframe inherited visual languages. These kinds of connections—between past and present, material and meaning—continue to generate new questions for me. I see the book as part of an ongoing conversation rather than a definitive account, and there is still so much more to explore, from ancient artefacts like Moche “sex pots” to Indigenous queer practices of basketry and weaving—plenty left to unpick, if you’ll pardon the pun.
NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?
DF: While the book is grounded in histories of sex and sexuality, its themes extend much more broadly. Even with a focus on contemporary practice, it traces connections across time and materials, showing how certain ideas recur in different forms and contexts and I was quite careful in making sure there were extensive footnotes and references to a much longer history of the subject even if I didn’t have space and opportunity to do so in the main body of the text. Across the chapters, several shared concerns emerge: worldmaking, subversion, the crafting of the body, and craft as a form of archiving. It also engages with healing and care through making, the politics of visibility, joy as a form of resistance, the erotic, and the recent influence of digital cultures, among others. These themes often cut across specific materials and historical moments, creating unexpected connections between practices. Because of this, the book isn’t intended to be read strictly from beginning to end. Readers are invited to move through it in their own way, following particular materials, themes, or practitioners, and drawing out their own connections and resonances along the way.
NOTCHES: How did you research the book?
DF: I researched the book through a mix of long-term relationships, new conversations, and some archival work. Several of the practitioners featured are people I’ve worked with over many years – such as LJ Roberts and Paul Yore – whose practices I’ve previously explored in articles and exhibition catalogues, so those conversations developed quite organically. Other parts of the project involved building new relationships and undertaking more targeted research. For instance, my work with the glass artist Tim Tate began during this project and has since grown into an ongoing collaboration.
A key aspect of the methodology is its grounding in oral history. I wanted to privilege the voices and lived experiences of practitioners themselves, allowing the book to emerge through the “grain” of the community rather than imposing a rigid framework onto it. This approach resists reducing queer experience to fixed categories, instead opening up space for nuance, disagreement, and expansion—both within academic discourse and beyond it.
There were also plenty of surprises. I came to the project very aware of my own material biases, having previously focused almost exclusively on textiles. Like many people, I carried assumptions about so-called “hard” materials such as glass and metal, imagining them as more rigid or less expressive. In reality, I found the opposite to be true. Many practitioners spoke about the extraordinary fluidity of these materials—particularly in their molten states—and some explicitly connected this to the fluidity of gender. I was also struck by how adaptable these materials can be. In the chapter on metal, for example, I discuss wearable chainmail garments by Affect Metals, where thousands of interlinked pieces create a fabric-like structure that drapes and moves with surprising softness. Across different practices, artists also described deeply embodied and even spiritual relationships with their materials, speaking about trust, energy, and intention being worked into the making process itself. These insights not only challenged my assumptions but reshaped how I think about materiality altogether.
I wouldn’t say there were many major challenges. Although, as ever, securing image permissions and funding for reproductions is a familiar hurdle in academic publishing. A more substantive challenge emerged around the politics of naming. The project initially began as an exploration of craft within contemporary art, but it quickly became clear that framing it in those terms risked reinforcing the very binary I wanted to question—that between “high” art and “low” craft. In reality, both my own approach and that of many of the practitioners in the book actively resist such distinctions. The art/craft divide has less to do with different kinds of creative practice and more to do with structures of power. It echoes and sustains a range of limiting binaries—male/female, masculine/feminine, superior/inferior—and is entangled with patriarchal, capitalist, classed, and colonial systems of knowledge. Many artists and writers, including matt lambert and John Paul Morabito, have embraced the idea of working “beyond the binary” extending it across both gender and disciplinary boundaries.
This also raised a practical question: how to describe the practices in the book. Labels such as artist, craftsperson, or designer can be meaningful forms of self-definition, but they can also be limiting. Some practitioners choose to foreground queerness in their titles (for example, identifying as a “queer designer”) while others resist this, concerned that their work might be reduced to a single interpretive frame or subject to bias, particularly in more hostile contexts where visibility can carry real risks. Others reject conventional labels altogether. Hansel Tai, for instance, describes himself as a “cybersmith,” reflecting the way his work draws on digital pornographic cultures as a key source of inspiration and material for his jewellery. Rather than imposing fixed definitions, I’ve followed each practitioner’s own terms as they were expressed at the time of publication. At the same time, I use the broader term “practitioners” throughout the book as a way of holding space for the fluidity of both disciplinary and personal identities, while avoiding unnecessarily restrictive categories. It’s by no means a perfect fit but it seemed to be a more capacious and inclusive term of reference to group a range of material practices under.
NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?
DF: As with any book, there are many stories and practices that didn’t make it in—I could easily have written several more volumes and still not have scratched the surface. Attempting to write a definitive and complete compendium of queer craft is an impossible, and perhaps an un-queer task. The structure of the book, with each chapter focusing on a pairing of practitioners, necessarily meant making difficult choices about what to include and what to leave out.
Even within individual materials, there is far more to explore. The textiles chapter, for instance, centres on forms of needlework—particularly knitting, quilting, and needlepoint—but this only represents a small part of a much wider field. Practices such as weaving, loom-based production, embroidery traditions beyond those discussed, felting, lace-making, and dyeing processes all offer rich and distinct ways of thinking about materiality, labour, and identity, and could each warrant sustained attention in their own right. More broadly, I would have liked to include a wider range of practitioners, particularly from underrepresented regions and communities, as well as those working across hybrid or emerging forms that blur the boundaries between physical and digital making. Expanding the scope further into earlier historical periods, or into more community-based and vernacular practices, would also open up important new perspectives.
Ultimately, the book sets out a framework rather than an exhaustive survey. What was left out is as important as what was included, and I hope it invites others to build on this work, bringing in new materials, voices, and approaches to continue expanding the field. In the Preface and Introduction, I describe the book as a patchwork in this sense, something that can be added to or unpicked and reconfigured into endless variations.
NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?
DF: I have designed this book with a range of audiences in mind, hoping that it will be both a useful pedagogical tool and a personal guide through which to navigate the spectrums of queerness, crafts, and the compounded term, queer crafts. It will be most relevant to scholars and students working in fields such as craft studies, art history, queer theory, and trans studies, as well as practitioners who may use it as a helpful resource book or a kind of studio companion.
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?
DF: History is, quite literally, always in the making! The works in the book speak directly to very live debates around censorship, archiving, and the uneven politics of care (and often neglect) experienced by LGBTQ+ communities today.
This is especially evident in the ceramics chapter, where the practices of Rose Schmits and Nikki Green sit in dialogue with one another despite their different cultural contexts and personal experiences of trans identity. Both practitioners draw on the inherent malleability of clay as a metaphor for trans embodiment—highlighting how identity and the body are not fixed, but can be shaped, revised, and remade over time. What is particularly powerful is how both engage with the visual language of Delftware, reworking this well-established ceramic tradition to situate trans experience within a longer craft lineage. By subverting its familiar blue-and-white palette and decorative conventions (such as dark lavender in the case of Green’s work), they insert new narratives of embodiment, legitimacy, and belonging into a historically canonical form.
Their works often take the shape of chamber pots, sinks, medicine jars, and urinals—objects that are at once familiar, humorous, and unsettling. But this playfulness sits alongside a much more urgent political register. These pieces speak directly to the contested nature of bathroom spaces and the ceramic infrastructures of the built environment, making them especially resonant at a time of increasing hostility and rising hate crimes against trans people in public space. At the same time, the durability of fired clay means these works also function as long-term material archives. They hold traces of contemporary trans experience in a form that is designed to last, offering future testimony to resistance, care, and survival during a particularly hostile time for trans communities in Europe, America, and beyond.
NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?
DF: A small break from writing as a lot of exciting projects are currently underway. I am about to curate a touring exhibition of work by the glass artist Tim Tate, which will travel to several major museums and galleries across the United States between 2027 and 2029. I have also recently begun working with the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia and will be there in June 2026 as Scholar in Residence for the Windgate Arts Residency Program working with a cohort of international artists working in wood, which will culminate in an exhibition. These encounters and collaborations have been highly generative, opening up new directions for research while also deepening opportunities for public engagement and community dialogue around the work.
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