UNC Asheville Public Health Graduate Students Complete Novel Research With Craft and Communities in WNC
Craft can, in many ways, be a vehicle for community building. It happens when a group of people settle into easy conversation, their hands busy with a knitting project. Or when the knowledge of basket weaving is passed from generation to generation. In a class of pottery students, they share ideas and in doing so, form a community.
Local artist Andi Gelsthorpe grew up snapping beans and shucking corn with her family, seated in a circle, connecting with each other over a shared task. So, when she hosted fabric tearing sessions for the community to help create her Ephemeral Labyrinth installation, she made sure participants were seated together in a circle.
The structure may be familiar to anyone who has attended a quilting bee, or a knitting circle, a pottery class, or even a paint n’ sip event. But in what ways does this impact our health, both on an individual and community level?
UNC Asheville public health graduate student Isla Neel reports the way Gelsthorpe’s tearing sessions allow participants to “get back into their bodies” by providing an interactive and inviting community space as an alternative tool to talk therapy.
Neel wrote in her artist portrait of Gelsthorpe as part of the Craft and Community Health, Wellbeing and Vitality report:
“Andi feels strongly that creativity is a human birthright. People need open access to beautiful spaces, and the labyrinth installation was intentionally built by the community, for the community.”
To create this report, six graduate students in the UNC Asheville-UNC Gillings Master of Public Health (MPH) program were paired with six Community Vitality Fellows, artists with fellowships from the Center for Craft, to study alongside them for a semester.
During this exploratory research partnership between the MPH program and Center for Craft, students Isla Neel, Claire Rice, Juhi Barot, Michael Ratliff, Kerstan Nealy and Caralee Sadler Farr studied the ways craft benefits community health, under the tutelage of Ameena Batada, co-director of the MPH program and professor of health and wellness.
Each student completed interviews with the Fellow they were paired with to write an Artist Portrait of them, documenting the work they do and the specific ways it connects to their community’s wellbeing. Together, the class created a collective framework of the patterns and connections among the craft artists, processes, and outcomes related to individual and community wellbeing.
Anna Helgeson, grant program manager, Community Vitality at the Center for Craft, said this report can act as a measure of proof to the impact of craft, something the artists can use to promote their work and garner further funding and support.
“Having this study is a resource for artists to be able to sustain and maintain a healthy practice,” Helgeson said. “It was really fun to see the selected artists and the applicants for the program shift their thinking around what their practice means and what their practice does. Some weren't necessarily doing community-based health work, and they were able to fold that into the vocabulary that they use to describe their work and be able to contextualize their work in a different way. While sometimes they are making aesthetically pleasing objects, there's more to it than that.”
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