It’s that thrilling flutter of anticipation when I first lay my eyes on work I haven’t yet seen that keeps me perpetually enamored with the visual arts. And it’s the tangible familiarity of work that engages history, materiality, and process that – for me, as many – consistently tugs on threads of connection to craftwork. Jurying Arrowmont’s Bridging the Gap: Contemporary Craft Practices was an invigorating glimpse of innovative explorations and fresh voices of young artists in the field who use the traditional language of craft to tell a new story.

These 35 artists under 35 present work that challenges the viewer’s sense of material – whether transforming familiar objects into new forms, imitating one material with another, pushing physical and structural limits, or rendering the medium unrecognizable. They tease at functionality, or reject it altogether. Aesthetically, the work ranges from clean and minimalist to seductively textured to space age sleek to frenetic and intuitive. Many of the artists, as compelled by the state of our country and world, address pressing social and political matters, both subtly and provocatively. Some pieces closely and recognizably converse with traditional craft, while others obliterate the very need for the age-old debate of whether or not we must define “art” versus “craft” in the first place.

This exhibition is both a broad cross-section and a drop in the bucket of the craftwork being made today visibly or invisibly in the US and around the world. I hope that this show inspires new perspectives, defies outdated delineations, and contributes to the ever-expanding and limitless language and expression of the contemporary craft field.