Oh, close your eyes and you wake up / Face stuck to a vinyl settee / Oh, the line was starting to break up / What was that you were going to say? / 

About

issue 04: craft

lunch 2021



Plates Issue 04’s lunch spread explores crafts of choice, circumstance, and cunning. 
 

Plates Issue 04 is available via our stockists. Though we also offer online editions of each contribution (available below), purchase the print edition for the full Plates experience. All sales go directly towards printing costs and contributor fees.


Contents:

  1. Letter from the Editor
  2. Seamstress by Piyali Mukherjee
  3. Concentric Scraps by E. Saffronia Downing
  4. Remnants by Anna Adami
  5. Finding the Words by Zach Whitworth
  6. Thank You for Joining Me and What Are We Doing Here? by Lily Homer
  7. Of the Bird’s Death, and Resurrection by Thomas Huston


Contributors:

Anna Adami lives south of Cooper Creek, in the Cross Timbers and Prairies ecoregion of North Texas. She holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her most consistent interest, in both writing and living, is love.

E. Saffronia Downing works with clay to map material residues across time and place. She forages local materials to create site-specific sculptures and installations. She has exhibited nationally at numerous galleries on the East and West coasts, and internationally in Japan. Downing received her MFA in Ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the co-creator of the digital publication Viralecologies.us.

Lily Homer (b. Chicago) is a multimedia artist exploring issues of disillusionment, contradiction, Jewish diaspora, and absurdity. She uses embroidery, welding, lacemaking, animation, collage, and crochet to create models of potential space that oscillate between representational and experiential, and between line and form. Homer brings her family history of craftsmanship in areas such as textiles, jewellery, and furniture manufacturing into her work. Through fibrous, pliable materials like thread, steel wire, rope, and fabric, she develops a visual language for her own experiences with anxiety, irrationality, and hope.

Thomas Huston is an artist and writer based in Chicago. Through his practice and exhibitions he has worked with artists including Shir Ende, Noel Madison Fetting-Smith, J. Michael Ford, Max Guy, Cathy Hsiao, Jennifer Chen-su Huang, Arnold Kemp, Gary LaPointe Jr., Frances Lee, Kelly Lloyd, Matt Morris, Risa Recio, Edra Soto, and Derrick Woods-Morrow, among many others. He works as an art handler at the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a MA candidate in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His mother is a priest and his father is an ecologist.

Piyali (Peels) Mukherjee is an Indian immigrant in New York, trying to evoke anything besides humour. Her day job includes working in AI research, specifically around the development of clustering models and neural networks. She moonlights as a sketch-writer, comedian, producer, and actor. Since 2020, she has translated her performance skills to writing satire and is unfortunately fueled by the insufferable hubris of tech culture. She’s also interested in learning more about linguistics, mythography, and the audacity of people who write emails opening with “I hope this email finds you well.”

Zach Whitworth hails from the Umpqua Valley of the Pacific Northwest.


This project is partially supported by an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, as well as a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, a state agency through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

︎ ︎ ©Plates 2021
︎ ︎ ©Plates 2021