matt lambert defends doctoral dissertation on the intersections of craft, queerness, and institutional critique

matt lambert's research is an investigation of crusing with craft as a companion to explore how its languages and discourses contribute to processs of equity such as decolonization and can challenge ivory tower academic structures through its cracks and margins, the place of the undercommons.

Thinking with craft becomes essential in so called scyborgism. As La Paperson defines in A Third University is Possible a scyborg is a queer turn of word that I offer to you to name the structural agency of persons who have picked colonial technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes. La Paperson uses the scyborg within the academic institution to use the resources given for decolonial purposes when reconfigured. There is interest in how this idea can be expanded to other institutions such as the archive and the museum as well as the academy and artistic practice based research with craft as a companion.

Collaborating and kinship making with artists and institutions of a vast array of disciplines has the potential to reassemble or reconfigure the current cultural systems of queerness and body politic while shattering the boundaries academically imposed on craft as a field. Unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of cultural institutions and land there is an urgency to develop ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms. Through Natalie Loveless's development of polydisciplinamory a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating creates systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at in regard to the othered body, allowing joy and pleasure to become crucial in developing alternative models of instituional existence.

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator working toward equity, inclusion, and reparation through a “polydisciplinamory” practice spanning making, writing, curating, and performance. Their work is exhibited, published, and collected internationally, including in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design and Homografiska Museet (Sweden). lambert was a 2020 Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Craft and holds an MA from Warren Wilson College and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. They contribute writing internationally and guest edited Decorating Dissidence Journal, issue #15.

More on matt lambert - Home

Enjoy the abstract here: Cruising with Craft to the Ends of the Worlds: Practices of shattering, becoming scyborg and dancing with dragons as possible cartographies.