A conversation with Angela Eastman

Transcript from episode twenty seven of the Good Folk Podcast.

This week’s transcript is free to all as it is delayed from last week while I was attending the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon. Enjoy!

SPENCER GEORGE: Angela Eastman is a very cool person. I truly don't know how to say it any other way. She lives a life that many of us dream of, or at least one that I do. Connected to nature, to craft, to teaching, and creative practice. As soon as I encountered Angela's work, I knew I was going to be a fan. And I was right. 

This is a conversation about many of my favorite topics: the distinction of art versus craft, learning to find our role as creative practitioners in natural systems, the importance of care in our artistic practice, why we need good teachers across all fields. 

It is also a conversation that challenges the things we assume are true, asking us to look at alternate pathways to challenges such as invasive species, increasing material consumption, and the industrialization of fields we have traditionally labeled as craft.  It is a conversation that asks you to pay attention to the world around you and let the path take you where it may, and I could not have left more inspired and energized. 

Angela Eastman is an artist and teacher from Hillsborough, North Carolina. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and completed the Core Fellowship program at Penland School of Crafts.

She has participated in numerous residencies, including at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (ME), the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts (GA), MASS MoCA (MA), Vermont Studio Center (VT), Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (OR), and SIM and Nes residencies in Iceland. 

Angela is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the John C Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC, and is focusing on basketweaving with invasive vines. 

In addition to sculptural work, Angela creates jewelry, baskets, metalwork, and ceramics through her design business Flag Mountain Studio. Angela also teaches art workshops to adults and youth. She is an advocate for craft education as a vital component of understanding the material world we live in. 

Art is one of the many—though I posit our best—ways to understand that world. I find myself now looking closer and looking deeper. I hope this conversation challenges you to do the same. 

SPENCER GEORGE: You know, it does what we need it to do, but nobody can ever figure it out. So, Angela, it's super nice to meet you. I know you've been in communication mostly with Vic, but I was just stalking all of your work this morning and it sounds amazing. I'm so excited to get into this conversation. 

ANGELA EASTMAN: Likewise. Thanks for having me. 

SG: Yeah, of course. Thank you for being here. I'm a folklorist and I work with a lot of people who study craft and weaving and I actually just wrapped up a whole unit with my students about material culture and the art of craft. So I'm really interested in the many, many things that you do as an artist and person in the world and all of the things that you're creating.  I think I would love to start—because I was reading your bio on your site—and if you could just tell us a little bit about the projects that you do, but also your approach to what craft is and how you define that. 

AE: Hmm. Yeah. So my work is kind of meandering always between a lot of different craft mediums. I kind of have always had a hard time choosing just one to work with. And so I tend to work with materials that I'm able to really grasp and manipulate with my hands. 

I have a very tactile relationship to materiality. So even if I'm working with like steel, you know, I do some blacksmithing and I'm so I'm forging it. I can't actually touch it with my hands because it's 2000 degrees. But I still have a very… like, I still do some of the manipulation process with my hands, actually. 

So I think craft to me is really deeply engaging with that relationship with the hand and allowing the hand to be the thinking, designing part of the art making process. I mean, I guess that sounds kind of, yeah, very kind of like woo-woo. But I think that non-mental relationship is kind of inherent to me in craftsmanship and in having this relationship that is very felt. Craft really feels like it's always like connecting me to history as well and to the ways that people throughout human relationships with materiality have been finding ways to manipulate and and create vessels and, you know, the things that we need to survive. Vessels and tools and clothing and all the things. 

So I think a lot about how the work that I'm doing and the processes that I'm using—you know, the techniques that have been developed over millennia to create something. I think a lot about that history and how what I may be doing, whether it's weaving a basket or manipulating metal, how those processes have been developed over many, many, many hundreds of years of humans interacting with materials. And I think that's kind of a core element of craft—that understanding of my place as an artist in this long lineage of other humans. 

SG: That was so beautifully said. I was actually going to ask you to elaborate on this quote from your site, which I love, and you kind of answered this, but you said, “At the heart of all of my work is a delight in materiality and a conviction that sharing the process of craft creates meaningful connections to histories of labor and place.”

As someone who's working so deeply in place-based folklore, I just love everything you're talking about with all of this and the idea that craft is not just someone behind their pottery wheel making something, or just one weaver. To me, so much of the role and importance that craft plays is exactly as you're saying, connecting us to these histories, but also connecting us to one another. 

I don't know if you want to elaborate on that a little bit more with kind of the pieces of laborlore and labor history in there, because I find that really, really interesting. And we're also able to shift this now into a little bit of your own work and your own relationship to craft and the work that you do with Flag Mountain, which I for sure want to talk about. 

AE: Yeah, I mean, like you say, craft often is viewed as something that people take up as a hobby or, you know, something that you do in addition to your more serious career. I've never really understood that because I feel like viewing craft as something that's non-essential, craft and art as things that are—and we can talk about like the kind of weird distinction between the two—but yeah, viewing those as non-essential is only makes sense in a like very capitalist view of the world where things have to be extremely practical in order to be viewed as essential and as necessary. 

And, you know, I've seen in my classes so often the necessity of making things with our hands and seeing people who, yeah, who do maybe more kind of like, societally essential work, but who need for their own well-being to be making things with their hands. 

It's just so clearly calming and connecting to some deeper sense of being human I think to be working with our hands. Yeah, I'm a firm believer that that is like absolutely essential to every person's well-being—being able to have the opportunity to make things with our hands and have that experience of connecting with other people while making and connecting with this lineage of other makers throughout history. 

So yeah, I agree. It's really super important, super, super critical. And now maybe even more than ever. There's so many wonderful things that technology enables in our lives and can make our lives much easier in a lot of ways. But the move away from people making things with their hands, I think is moving towards a less human world. So I think it's really important, and I think a lot of people are really responding to that and feel the need to be working with their hands. 

SG: It definitely seems like coming out of the pandemic specifically, there was this move of wanting to go away from technology and to return to working with your hands. It's the running joke that everyone started taking pottery classes coming out of [the pandemic], and there was kind of this explosion in that.

I lived in Durham for the last little bit and Durham's got a big metalworking thing and lots of things with forging are happening. But we have this idea that art is for the function of beauty and enjoyment and craft is about usefulness and necessity. You make a cup because you need a vessel to drink water out of, right? And that's craft. But if you're making like a ceremonial goblet, that's art. 

Again, this is all very stereotypical, but I had a long conversation with some of my students. They went to a museum they had to pick different cups and write about them and we we got into a whole debate about the idea of art versus craft. And what kept coming out of it is that art is what craft has become now that we no longer need to make our own mugs because of processes of consumption and material culture that we can go and buy a mug at Target. So now if you're crafting something yourself, you’re doing it as an object of art and not as an object of function. 

I can't quite wrap my head around the idea that things can't be both, right? They can be both useful and beautiful. And it is very, very interesting in kind of the world of creative production and material culture that they get so defined down these lines. 

We see at folklore festivals, you know, craft is something that people want to come and they want to see a woman quilting who's been doing it for eighty years. And it's taken seriously and also not seriously in the same way that art is. So I would love to hear your thoughts on unpacking that a little bit more or how you think about art versus craft, because it is an ongoing debate in this world, I think. 

AE: Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, it's always felt  so unnecessary to me to draw any dividing line in my own work. I, you know, struggled for a while to kind of like, figure out where I fell in, in that binary. I spent a couple years at Penland School of Craft and was kind of more in the craft world in my twenties.And then I went to grad school and got my MFA and was very much—you know, I went and got an MFA and started making  performance art because that's what you do when you go to grad school. 

So I definitely have kind of like bounced back and forth or wove in and out of the different communities of art and craft because that's kind of what they are is communities, I think. And I mean, I can't help but think also just about the different ways that those communities interact with the economy and how, you know, if you label something as art, if you sell it in an art market, you're going to make four times as much money as you would if you sell it in a craft market. That’s a generalization but it largely holds true. Like, a cup is made and there's a general understanding of those processes and appreciation of craftsmanship as those got outsourced and became invisibilized. The things that we use every day are being made very far away, so then there's less of an appreciation for the, you know, the high technical skill that goes into making, you know, a basket that you buy at Target for $10. 

Because I'm a basket maker, I know that every basket is handmade. There's no basket making machines. So the person who made that basket was an incredibly skilled artisan who happens to be working, you know, at a factory in the Philippines or something. And it's a little bit of a digression, but I think that the the way that craft kind is connected to the market at kind of like a lower tier than art is. 

It does kind of keep our blinders on to the realities of globalized trade. And I think that there's like a lot of political history to that. I think it's more like political question than  we often like to go into. But in terms of my own work and where I kind of  perceive of myself, I really don't make a clear distinction. I kind of like to be able to like move between both worlds and yeah, show up at more kind of art centered residencies and have these conversations with people and go to super folky and conceptual spaces as well. For me, I feel like there's not a not an important distinction, but I think it's important to kind of understand  the context in which that distinction came to be. 

SG: It doesn't feel like a digression at all, and I actually want to kind of continue down this political thread a little bit. We've been joking that this is “season three” of Good Folk, of the podcast. We don't really define it by seasons, but if we went by numbers, that's where we'd be. And unintentionally, this season has really taken on a bit of a thread of arts and activism and how so many artists are also serving as activists in their own right and doing things to kind of work with new communities and train new artists and raise awareness and really diversify these spaces. But also share messages and weave those political threads into what they do. So I would love to dive down that hole a little bit more in thinking about the way in which this conversation about art vs. craft is also deeply rooted in stereotypes and globalization and capitalist practice. 

There’s a huge thing I feel like I see a lot of in the world of folklore studies with craft being something that has a lot of regional stereotypes and regional associations, often specifically with rural Appalachian cultures. The way we think about that in this podcast, as well—you know, we’re kind of bringing together and empowering Southern artists, but so much of the work we're also doing is trying to shift a little bit of how we view the term folk and think about, you know, what an urban artisan looks like as opposed to, like we mentioned before, the woman who's quilting up in the mountains and this idea that folklore preserves that because we see it as important that, now, the Smithsonian-funded person can go up to the mountains and think to themselves that they’ve found someone who knows something that we don’t know how to do and now we’re going to pour all this money into that. 

Not that that’s an entirely bad thing, but it also paints a portrait and a picture of artisan or craft work as things are are passed traditionally and not something that, you know, a young person living in downtown Raleigh is going to go get involved in and pick up. I know you teach a lot of workshops and have created a lot of these spaces and Vic and I were just saying like, we’ve gotta get on one of your metalsmithing classes. Like, these are incredible! 

AE: Yeah!

SG: And the work that you are now doing now in that medium. So yeah, I would love to just kind of dive down that political and activist hole a little bit more, and if you want to shift into talking about some of the work that you do as a workshop leader and instructor, and as a craftsperson and artist.

AE: Yeah. I mean, I kind of just follow the medium. And I think in the past couple of years, as I've started to teach more workshops, I've workshops, I've just kind of been responding to the to what people seem to be interested in learning, while also kind of like, just opening up some of my own practices. I've been teaching the things that I'm already kind of doing. 

I mean, something that is kind of at the intersection of where my more political or kind of like theoretical art practice, like growing out of the work that I was doing in grad school, and then bringing it kind of more into my current life as a self-supporting artist and teacher and a grower is that I've been involved in agriculture since I moved back down to North Carolina. That's kind of been an important element that's led me into some of the workshops that I'm teaching now. 

So I've been focusing recently on working with invasive species and leading weaving workshops where we go and harvest kudzu and wisteria and bittersweet and other invasive species like that and then weave baskets with it. 

And these are always really fun, interesting workshops where people are kind of encouraged to challenge their pre-existing understandings of invasive species and ecological responsibility and to think about weaving. To think about how those species are kind of our current neighbors and have honestly kind of a lot to teach us in terms of climate resiliency and growing in these kind of liminal spaces. You often see these species kind of crop up in previously disturbed areas. So along the sides of highways and abandoned lots and in places where humans have come in and started to develop. Spaces where there was previously, you know, a rich ecosystem there and then it's been disturbed and now these species are kind of the first to be opportunists and kind of jump in and start growing there. 

And they're really vilified. You know, there is a lot of sadness and the loss of biodiversity. When you look at the side of a highway, and all you see is this like wall of green, that's one plant kudzu where previously was a whole forest of diverse species. There's a lot of sadness there in seeing the ways that our development practices have led to that loss of biodiversity. 

But at the same time, these plants are kind of incredible growers and are very useful to humans. And many of them have long relationships with humans. Kudzu has been used for thousands of years in Japan as both textile fiber and also for culinary and medicinal purposes. 

So having the opportunity to kind of go into the kudzu jungle with people and pull up vines and talk about that, about what ecological responsibility looks like. We're not eradicating the vines in these very small excursions into the kudzu but we are having this conversation about the reality of our environment and about how nature is always changing, always evolving. Challenging the idea of kind of a native and a non-native species and where that line gets drawn. It's an interesting question to kind of, yeah, to look into what the narrative around invasive species is, and then weaving a vessel from them allows people to, you know, create this very useful thing that comes out of this, this kind of vilified plant. 

So those have been really wonderful experiences and also really nice to be able to kind of partner with landowners and offer this experience of pulling out something that is not useful to them. And I'd love to do more of that—to partner with landowners and also like environmental organizations to do invasive species cleanup and things like that. 

That's kind of one example of a teaching experience where I'm able to kind of bring a little more of a theoretical or—I wouldn't really call myself an activist, but more of a political alignment, I guess. And then my other workshops are really often just for the love of making. I would say that is kind of where where I come to them from and it's really important for me to be able to create spaces where people can feel supported in exploring new things and making things of beauty and things of use. 

I have a lot of admiration for my students. I feel like it can be so hard as an adult to try something new and the fact that they're just showing up and trying to learn a new thing is kind of like constantly inspiring to me. 

SG: I think the work you're doing with invasive species and all of this, but specifically that sounds incredible. I am what I call an environmental folklorist and my work has all been in the coast of South Carolina looking at changes in biodiversity and how different natural processes are adopting resilient strategies and how humans can then learn from that. So specifically how if politicians aren't talking about climate change, the people who are artists, and how are we thinking about ourselves not in separation from the landscape but able to shift and adapt. 

I was interviewing a botanist this summer who was also talking a lot about invasive species but about different plants growing different kinds of resilience and how we can then reflect that in creative practice and in our art. So personally, I'm obsessed with this concept and this idea and I'm like, I need to sign up for that immediately.

But I would love to hear more about the work that you do both with farming. I find there are so many artists who also work as farmers and have these deep relationships to land and I don't think that's an accident. Oftentimes I think there is a draw to make sense of the world in very physical ways which lead so many of us to this work and I think that's a really incredible thing that you do that I would love to hear more about. 

And within that, I'm also interested in your own relationship to place and landscape, that you're working with your hands, you're working with nature, you're working with the dirt. But what do place and home kind of mean in your work and in your practice? And how do you think about that with the work you do now in North Carolina, and the work you've done before this? 

AE: Yeah, so I moved back to North Carolina in 2020, kind of right at the beginning of the pandemic. I had been living in Detroit prior to that, which is where I got my master's and then stayed in Detroit for a couple years. So moving back to rural North Carolina was definitely a shift in, you know, just in the geography that I was surrounded by all the time. I moved back because my father was very sick with cancer and he passed away in the summer of 2020. So, you know, the pandemic was going on. It was a challenging time to be moving anywhere, challenging circumstances. 

That's when I started working at a farm that was near where my mom lived. And so the, you know, the process of learning about farming, and of like getting back into basket weaving, because that's when I simultaneously started working with plants that I found growing nearby. 

I kind of had learned how to basket weave years before. At that time, when I started farming, I also started weeding vessels. And it was all very much linked to my own process of healing and, and kind of trying to find a way to root in and settle in back where I had grown up. 

I never really thought that I would move back to North Carolina. You know, I left after high school and moved to Colorado and then moved all around. 

SG: Vic and I both did the exact same thing. [Laughs]. And both also moved back in 2020, so…

AE: Wow. [Laughs]. Okay.

SG: It’s a common thread on this podcast for sure. 

AE: Yeah, yeah. It had never really felt like home to me when I was growing up. My family is from the West Coast. Originally, I was born in Oregon, and then I moved to North Carolina when I was ten and went to middle school and high school here and was like, get me back to the West Coast. I'm like, not from here. 

It's funny how as a kid, you can have these very like, certain ideas of where you belong. And I did not think I belonged in the South. So moving back here a few years ago and starting to work on the land is really a big shift in terms of considering the possibility of this place being home. 

And I think like, it was so necessary for me to be having that relationship with the land itself and with getting to know these different species of plants that I was working with to understand their weaving capabilities. I was kind of just out there, like, rooting around in my mom's garden and pulling up vines and starting to understand and develop an actual physical relationship with this place and I think that that's the only way we really know home. Or, for me it's so important to know. I would say that the process of my work kind of shifting more towards natural materials and towards fiber has been largely because of this seeking a sense of home and a sense of grounding myself and my art practice in the physical land and in the plants that were growing there in Orange County, North Carolina. 

So yeah, it's a very personal relationship that I feel like I have in the sense that it can just become more and more like hyperlocal in terms of getting to know like one very, very specific piece of land. And that's kind of my goal. Hopefully something that's going to manifest in the next couple of years is being able to purchase a piece of land and really root down even more into that sense of home and place. 

That kind of commitment to a particular, very hyperlocal environment, I think is also so critical and so aligned with the sense of craft and history that we were talking about earlier. So it feels like that's the next step for sure. 

SG: You are completely speaking to my dream, which is—I'm also in Orange County, actually. And the long term goal is, I'm like, I want to buy land and root down in Orange County. I'm thinking so much about the way you're describing a relationship to home and place and also being a relationship to the land and knowing the land. It feels so relevant for me. My kind of life metaphor has always been with pine trees and with this fascination and obsession with pine trees. And so when I moved back to North Carolina, that was how I like approached my whole worldview. I got very much into the lore of the loblolly and longleafs. As a climate person now, I'm looking at how loblolly pine trees are becoming the symbol of climate resilience and their kind of fight against saltwater and the rising salt marsh. 

But in my own practice, the story of the longleaf pine tree—which I actually went and got tattooed on my body after this—but it is a whole thing about how longleaf pine trees have roots so deep that they can spin out in circles like a hundred feet wide in a storm even though they're super super tall and skinny, and thinking about how that can serve as a metaphor for creative practice for my own existence in the world. 

And all of that is also how I understand home. I also was a kid growing up in North and South Carolina thinking, one day I’m going to go West. I’m going to go live back in California. And I ended up in New York City, which was a completely different thing. But now I’m thinking about how the way I understand home is just as a place where there are pine trees. And I have found that in places all around the world. 

I've never really framed it in that way and so I really appreciate you kind of shifting my thinking of home can also be about the landscapes that are there too and the feeling of that and being rooted in that. I'm wondering since we all kind of have these experiences in North Carolina what are some of the natural kind of processes or plants or species that bring up that feeling for you? 

For me, it’s now so deeply rooted to pine trees and I’ve spent a lot of time out in Hillsborough surrounded by the longleafs and the loblolly forests out there. And I know Vic is down in Moore County, where we met, which has some of the oldest longleaf pine trees in the world. And I know that for me, specifically, that is always going to feel like home. 

But thinking about North Carolina through that lens for you, are there any plants or, or animals or species that come to mind for you? 

AE: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I feel like maybe it's just because I've been working with it so much. But honestly, the kudzu really. It's funny for it to be a symbol of home when it does have this reputation as being like such an invader. But I think that there's something that maybe speaks to me a little bit about that, too, kind of having grown up like as a kid, moving, moving a lot and so always being the outsider, kind of moving into a school where I felt like I like was the new kid and wasn't part of the—I didn't have like family roots in a place. So yeah, I mean, seeing those big drapes of kudzu coming South, I feel like is, is a little bit of a sense of homecoming. 

And then I think a lot of like the water birds that we have in North Carolina, herons and kingfishers. I've been trying to go down to see the tundra swans in eastern North Carolina every winter for the past few years. I grew up bird watching with my mom, so a lot of the birds that we have definitely have their their sight and their calls definitely make me think of home. 

But it's an interesting thing. I mean, you know, I was born in Oregon, spent a lot of time in the West in different places. And I think that sense of home can be something that you kind of carry in your pocket a little bit. I think it's so important to, wherever you are, have the practice of paying really close attention to the natural rhythms and the plants and animals that are there. And that's kind of how you find home wherever you are. It always has been for me. Yeah, we're home wherever we are, in a lot of ways, because we're on the earth and the earth is, yeah, filled with plants that are reminders of where we come from. 

SG: I think the core for me of being an artist is to learn how to pay close attention. And that's also my folklore work. I think both are fields that  ask you to think critically and compassionately and to really notice the world around you and exist not just in it but also with it. 

The kudzu feels like such a great thing here. And I was actually gonna say when you were speaking about it earlier, especially with how kudzu is such a symbol of Southern culture as well. There's something really interesting with that in thinking about kudzu both being invasive, but also being very much rooted in southern iconography. There was a great Bitter Southerner piece that actually just came out that a bunch of people sent me all about kudzu, which I have only read about halfway through it. It's been in a tab on my computer, but it’s looking at kudzu as an invasive species, but also shifting and reframing our perception to that a little bit. 

It's really interesting for me to think about symbolism and iconographies, both in relationship to place, but also in relationship to landscape and the way in which we think of the South. Culturally the South is thought of as such a monolith, but when you actually drill down into the environment and to the environmental iconographies of a place, you start to realize just how different every part of the South is. The coast of North Carolina is so different from the Piedmont, which is so different from the mountains, and that's just one state. 

I know you've spent a little bit of time kind of working across the state and have done some work up at Penland, which I love Penland, so I'm really excited to hear that. I think it might be time—I'm looking at the time on our conversation—to go all the way back. How did you get involved in the creative practices and the crafts that you do and what was that process like? 

You do so many incredible things and one thing I was thinking about as we've been talking is how there's this idea that to be an artist is, you get formal training with it, you go and you get an MFA and craft is often something that like you just kind of learn, whether it's through a workshop or someone who taught you but it's passed down in different ways. I'd be interested to hear about your own approach to learning the skills that you now teach and pass on and how you think about that in relationship to the larger conversation about art and craft. 

AE: Yeah, so I've always been making things. I got my undergrad degree in studio art, mostly metal work then. And then I was living in Asheville and I had started throwing pots, doing pottery, when I was a teenager. That was my first job, working in a pottery studio. I got involved with the ceramic studio in Asheville after college and then was accepted to the Core Fellowship Program at Penland, which is a two-year work trade program. And that's really where I learned my bag of tricks. 

As I tell people, the structure is that you can take any class while you're there. And so I was kind of all over the place. I got into making jewelry while I was there and took a lot of metal classes, both small metals and then also blacksmithing and large scale metalwork and did ceramics and woodworking. I kind of grew up doing woodworking projects with my dad as well. So I think it's just always been around, whether in my family, with the people that I am around, I've always just been around a lot of makers. 

And then I've just continually kind of sought out experiences where I'm learning new crafts. You know, for a while I really felt like I needed to kind of… I was like okay, Angela, it's great to learn all these different things but you’ve got to choose and focus in at some point. I think that there is just—in art as in craft as much as in the kind of general society—there's so much emphasis on specialization and on focusing and finding your kind of niche career path and that doesn't really work for me and maybe doesn't work for a lot of people. I'm much more of a generalist and I really just love learning and love learning new ways of making things and and being able to then pass those on. 

I've just kind of continually sought out new teachers. And as I've been focusing more on basket weaving in the past few years, I've been seeking out basketry teachers, some of whom are continuing the work of traditional craft and are some of the very few people who work with their particular material, whether that's black ash basketry, or white oak basketry. There's very few people and very few young people who are still know how to manipulate those materials and harvest them and prepare them. 

So it feels important to me to be seeking out ways of learning those crafts, and teaching them and being able to pass them on. My heritage is Irish and English and so it's also been important for me to seek out teachers who can teach me willow basketry, which is a traditional basketry style from Ireland and England. That's also been important to kind of try to find ways to connect my own lineage with the crafts that I'm working with. 

So yeah, it's always so exciting to learn new things and to find new ways to connect with people and material. And then now as I've been teaching more and kind of thinking about how to bring those new skills into my community where I live, there's just so much work to be done and it's kind of endlessly exciting to think about. 

SG: Considering that we live in this world of mass capitalist production and everyone is now turning to Amazon and everything we do is online, does it feel almost radical to you in a way to be kind of returning to the source of making things or passing some of these traditions on? Or do you think about it in relationship to, if we don't pass these things on, what happens to them, to the skills and knowledge? 

AE: Yeah, yeah, I would say both. You know, when I was in grad school, I was kind of making work that was theoretically about the evils of Amazon and about globalized trade and kind of pointing towards a conversation around it. 

And then after leaving the academy, it kind of felt like what's actually like way more radical and way more real is to just engage with the slow production of goods and to find as many ways to opt out of the existing systems of the way that goods are sold and moved around in our world. 

There's just so much invisible destruction and invisible terrible labor situations that we just don't see and therefore don't have to think about. I feel like it's very radical to try to remove yourself from those systems and to encourage other people to remove themselves from those systems. 

So yeah, it does feel like it's really—it's harder to opt out in a lot of ways than it is to just kind of go along with the ease and efficiency of buying something. I really do think it's important to try to both support people who are making things locally and to be more engaged in a local economy and to just kind of understand the implications of buying things that come from the other side of the world. 

I was doing this project for a while where I was trying to track where all of my purchases were coming from and kept this kind of like spreadsheet of the countries. So often you can't really tell where something is manufactured and where all the different parts of it are manufactured, but you just go through a day of doing that and realize. It's not that global trade is inherently a bad thing, but so many steps of it are invisible and therefore able to be badly sourced, for lack of a better way of putting it. Yeah, it feels important to me to just be as transparent as possible in what I'm surrounding myself with. 

SG: I wonder if a good start for a lot of people with it is what we've been talking about, which is this kind of just level of consciousness and act of paying attention. A good example is right at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned that there is no machine that weaves or that could create a basket, and I would have never known that. And now I think I'm going to view every basket I see in any sort of home design store completely differently. 

And so I wonder if maybe a place to start for a lot of people is just to raise conscious awareness of where you are getting your objects and the way in which they are produced. And hopefully with that, you know, then it can lead to more down the line. I would love to not have to ever buy anything on Amazon ever again and to see more people be able to do that too.

I’m also thinking of even within that—I work in the publishing world, and we talk about how Amazon was set up to be a rival to local publishers and now we don’t even really have Barnes and Noble anymore. And so just how this one thing has become such an enemy for all of us. I'm thinking about Bed Bath & Beyond closing. Like, Bed Bath & Beyond is not good but it's maybe better than Amazon. And then within that local makers and independent makers are getting impacted most of all. Even something like Etsy, which was started in so many ways to support artisans and craftspeople and now I go on Etsy and everything is the same as it is on Amazon, where you don't know really where it's coming from or it feels very mass-produced.

So I don't know, it's a tough question and it's a tough place to be because I don't know where the best places are to even seek out local crafts people these days unless you are going to craft fairs or you are living in a place where you have access to places like Peel Gallery. That’s a place that comes to mind. But businesses that support and empower local artisans and we're lucky in North Carolina there is so much of that here but I also know that is not the case everywhere. 

So I don't really know where we go from here. But maybe raising consciousness and awareness of these things is a place to start. 

AE: Yeah. And I think also just, you know, empowering people. Many people are already are out of necessity finding creative ways to make things and to source things. And so empowering people to, like, believe in their capacity to make the things that they need and to be able to fix things and mend things, I think.

You know, taking home economics out of public schools is so awful in so many ways, because it just disables people from the ability to mend and create, you know, low cost solutions to the things that they need in their homes. So I think that kind of empowerment of teaching people how to mend and fix things is super important as well. 

SG: I make it a personal effort in every class I teach somehow to teach my students how to sew. Like, we'll have a craft day. I did this last semester where I was like, okay, I'm going to teach you all to sew. I grew up thinking I was going to be a fashion designer and like making all my own clothes. [Laughs]. I'm not very good at it but I can fix things. And so I taught them all how to fix a hole and sew on a button. And then I had other students bring in things they make, and so certain students were teaching crochet and I had one student who does Bonsai and came in and taught everybody about Bonsai and it was so cool. It was really incredible to see the way community was fostered through that and it's something I've been thinking about in the back of my mind throughout this whole conversation.

When you are engaging in traditions of craft and working with people, you're working with people and you're working in community and community can be fostered through that, which in my mind is maybe why there's such a rise post pandemic [in craft]. I think people really want community. I found myself taking pottery classes coming out of the pandemic just to meet new people in a place where I didn't necessarily know anyone. 

So much of what we do on this podcast is about art and community, so I'd love to hear about the role community has served in your work as both a student and a teacher, but kind of the way the arts community in North Carolina, how have you experienced it? And what does it kind of look like or mean to you? 

AE: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm still kind of getting to know it in our specific local location of Hillsborough and Chapel Hill and Durham. And mostly I've gotten to know people through teaching, you know, which I kind of started teaching workshops just because I needed to make some money and to support myself through the kind of like strange grab bag of skills that I have acquired. And it's been really great to to find so many people who are may or may not call themselves artists, but who are really, you know, really value see the value of making things. 

I spent a lot of time in the mountains. The Appalachian community of artisans and makers has its own particular flavor, which is so steeped in tradition and in the feeling of the mountains here. I really appreciate that community and it fostered a lot of my own desire to become a craftsperson early on when I moved to Asheville. 

So yeah, I think it's a very kind of wide and expansive community of artists but also farmers and musicians and I think there's a lot of overlap between different creative people and people who are just trying to live in a way that is a little bit alternative to the kind of dominant idea of getting a career and just kind of like barreling down life on your career path. I've been really inspired by the variety of ways that I see people living creatively, whether that's through whether that's as artists and craftspeople or as in other ways. 

SG: When you think about the community or the future of the community of craft and the role it plays in our world, what does that look like for you? 

AE: I don't know. I mean, I try not to get too apocalyptic about it when I think about it. But I think that there's always going to be a real importance to being able to make things and fix things. I don't think that that technology is going to take that away. And so I think that there's just going to be a kind of a morphing and ever adapting way of blending technology and craft and tradition. 

We've been talking about how being kind of aware and paying attention to how the world is changing will kind of enable us as makers to respond in ways that are both bringing that sense of history and our kind of awareness and understanding of historical ways of making things into whatever, you know, situations we need to respond to in the future. 

SG: I'm writing my master's thesis about social collapse and apocalypse and artistic response. So now I'm like, oh my gosh, I want to get on a whole rabbit hole of like craft versus survivalism and all of these things. But I'm realizing that we are pretty much at our time, which is so crazy. And I definitely am going to try to get signed up for some of your workshops and keep an eye out on everything. I look forward to seeing what you do in the community that you build with all this in Orange County and beyond. We will have to have a conversation about survival schools versus craft schools at some point. I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on it. 

AE: Yeah, there's a lot of overlap, I think. 

SG: There is a lot of overlap but it is very odd how they draw to very different communities. Maybe we can unite them somehow. That's the long-term part of arts organizing. 

But Angela, thank you so much for being here and for just such a fascinating and interesting conversation and for everything you do. We do always end our podcasts with one final question and we leave it open to people however they want to take it and that question is what do you believe in? 

AE: Thank you so much. It's been such a lovely conversation. I believe that the world is really fundamentally a harmonious place. And, you know, just like we touched on earlier, I think that it's our kind of responsibility to try to find that harmony and be in alignment with that harmony. And that comes through paying close attention to natural rhythms and the way that nature mends itself and is always evolving. So yeah, I guess I believe in paying attention. 

SG: I could not agree more. Thank you so much. For anyone who wants to follow your work or sign up for workshops or stay up to date, where can they find you? 

AE: Flagmountain.studio is my website and also my Instagram. 

SG: And we will link to all of that here. Angela, thank you so much. This is such a great conversation and I'm so excited to follow everything you do. Wherever you are in the world, have a good day. Good night. Be good. Stay good.

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