The bowl,hand dyed and woven reed, 2020.
The designer Dee Clements is fascinated by the fundamental connections between needs, craft, and culture. This social lens reveals rich connections between people, materials and objects that drives her practice. Many cultures live in harmony with the land and have histories of building agrarian economies and communities around materials harvested from the environment. Now more than ever with the onset of climate change is the gap between Hi and Low-tech design widening an indelible and irrevocable gap. Techniques of crafting materials into useful goods for everyday use, adornment and decoration in a manner that is sustainable and regenerative while nodding toward mythologies and traditions is what has most inspired these pieces. The evolution of designed objects from prehistory to today shows a lineage of ingenuity through material languages. It also shows where crafts became divided by gender and child-rearing. The roots of craft and design come from ancient cultures that designed tools and objects to solve everyday problems and decorate the quotidian. These works are part of a larger body of woven vessels that aim to challenge our assumptions about weaving - to make it amazing, unexpected, and exquisite by pushing materials toward a new, specific code. Touching on certain ethnographic lineages, these pieces look to anthropology and cultural histories to find the new language – in essence, looking backwards to find an informed way forward.