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This third and final volume in the Craft Perception and Practice series features 21 essays and critical commentaries by acclaimed Canadian practitioners, educators and curators, demonstrating the range of critical thought about craft as presented in symposiums, exhibition catalogues and art journals. Prominent academics and theorists provide insight into the relationship between skill, technology, history and personal expression.

The series of Craft Perception and Practice volumes gives recognition to the exciting new developments in contemporary craft practice and scholarship. This second volume brings together 22 essays and critical commentaries by 19 independent critics and curators, professional artists, art historians, and studio art instructors. Illustrated with 40 colour photographs of works by some of Canadas finest craft artists, the texts represent the depth and range of critical thought about Canadian craft presented at symposiums and in exhibition catalogues and arts journals.

In this lavishly produced hardcover volume, Plaskett has created an autobiography as colourful as his finest paintings. Plaskett begins with his early family life in New Westminster, BC, relates his encounter with abstract expressionism under Hans Hofmann, and then discusses the development of his mature style. Included are an introduction by the late George Woodcock, some 30 full-colour reproductions of Plaskett's paintings and over 90 black and white photos.

What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live if we're not intimately involved? Olivia Laing explores these questions by traveling deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists.

Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau examines the complex identities assigned to Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau. Was he an uneducated artist plagued by alcoholism and homelessness? Was Morrisseau a shaman artist who tapped a deep spiritual force? Or was he simply one of Canada’s most significant artists? Carmen L. Robertson charts both the colonial attitudes and the stereotypes directed at Morrisseau and other Indigenous artists in Canada’s national press. Robertson also examines Morrisseau’s own shaping of his image.

This collection of essays provides a historical and contemporary context for Indigenous new media arts practice in Canada. The writers are established artists, scholars, and curators who cover thematic concepts and underlying approaches to new media from a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Through discourse and narrative analysis, the writers discuss a number of topics ranging from how Indigenous worldviews inform unique approaches to new media arts practice to their own work and specific contemporary works.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style of performance-activism; his theatricalizations of postcolonial theory. In Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what's left for artists to do in a post-9/11 repressive culture of what he calls 'the mainstream bizarre'.