Outstanding Slovak phenomenon
Katarína Hallonová
Wire craft is one of the youngest and, in the same breath, most known Slovak crafts. Providing additional income and concerned with repairs of kitchenware and house-to-house sales, it first emerged as men’s occupation, requiring certain amount of travel. Its beginnings probably date back to early 18th century, as there was an acute need to tackle catastrophic poverty and desperate social conditions faced by the population in economically most backward mountain regions in the North-western parts of the Trenčín County and, later on, in the Northern Spiš. Having a complicated historical development, wire craft gradually achieved unique forms, developing outstanding inner, as well as outer, organisation and material forms. It became a rather distinct economic, historical, ethnographic, social, sociological and cultural phenomenon, many a time controversial and one that, over a quarter of a century, not only influenced, both in a positive and negative way, destinies of the folks living or coming from these regions, but one that also formed an environment in which these folks lived and worked, including that outside our lands.
Further articles in the magazine Craft, Art, Design 02/2017:
- Outstanding Slovak phenomenon
- Karol Guleja’s heritage
- Wire craft in the Museum of Folk Art Production
- Dreaming of Drotária map
- Seventy eventful years
- Jozef Zoller: Dodko Drôtik (Little Wire) becoming master
- Milan Kočtúch: shepherd in heart
- Heritage of the Jurovatý family
- Research into wire craft in Slovakia
- From thread to wire
- Tradition or design?
- Keeping craft alive
- There is a dress, and then there is a dress...
- Art making intertwined with life
- How can be drawings embodied in space
- Thin Black Lines
- Works of art as pleasing as Belgium chocolate