matt lambert

Scyborg Craft : Institutions as Technology for Third Space Making

In my PhD I want to look at the role craft can play in 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. I am interested in how this idea can be expanded to other institutions such as the archive and the museum as well as the academy through the lens of craft.

I am interested in collaborating with multi-media artists and institutions of a vast array of disciplines to reconfigure the current cultural systems of queerness and body politic while challenging the boundaries of craft. By unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of cultural institutions and land I am interested in ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms through a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating to create systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at in regard to the othered body.

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working towards equity, inclusion, and reparation. They hold a MA in Critical Craft Studies from Warren Wilson College and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. lambert was born in Detroit MI, US where they maintain a studio. They have exhibited work nationally and internationally including at: Turner Contemporary, Margate, Uk, ArkDes, and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, US. lambert represented the U.S in Triple Parade at HOW Museum, Shanghai, China, represented the best of craft in Norway during Salon del Mobile, Milan, Italy and was the invited feature at the Benaki Museum, Athens ,Greece during Athens Jewelry Week. lambert has actively contributed writing to Art Jewelry Forum, Garland, Metalsmith Magazine, Klimt02, Norwegian Craft and the Athens Jewelry Week catalogues and maintains a running column titled Settings and Findings in Lost in Jewelry Magazine.

Principal supervisor: Maja Gunn
Assistant supervisor: Jessica Hemmings and Ellen Roed
Admitted to Konstfack
Project period: 2020-2025