Art = Craft = Design
Art is Craft is Design because there is no tangible difference between the disciplines. Read more about that here.
This site chronicles creative endeavors across multiple disciplines. It showcases my personal projects while also featuring instructions on various techniques and recipes, as well as musigns on theory. For easier navigation, it organizes posts according to the following categories: cooking, experimenting, making, and thinking. Though I hope you can see how each category bleeds into the others.
Who
My name is Mari Miller, and people have always been telling me that I’m doing it wrong. That science has no place in art. That I shouldn’t write poetry in an art class. That DIY is not serious design. That industrial designers should only learn enough typography to get by and instead focus solely on industrial design. That I don’t need to relate so much of what I make to world history. That if I were serious I’d focus on improving my drawing skills more.
I am a maker. Over the years, I’ve identified with the terms artist, sewer, knitter, crafter, and designer. But as I’ve come to realize that there is very little difference between art, craft, and design, I’ve come to identify more as a maker. Not ‘maker’ as a more masculine term that separates people who 3D print and tinker with arduino from people who engage in traditional crafts (which are often seen as feminine), but ‘maker’ as in a multi-disciplinary creative who does not place a hierarchy on their various skills.
My earliest lessons in making came from watching Pau Pau (my grandmother) cook and repurpose broken items. Chinese cooking often does not use set measurements and is highly customizable. That practical and experimental attitude towards creation influences everything I make. I often refer to it as the “spirit of Chinese cooking”. Formal schooling could not get rid of it.
In 2009, I graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an Emphasis in Art History (which means I majored in studio art and minored in art history). In 2021, I earned a Master of Design in Industrial Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For my thesis, I developed plastic-free modeling materials.
And now that I’ve finished formal schooling, I simply make, without a need to classify any one thing as belonging to rigid disciplines. That’s why you’ll see a post about photography under the categories of both cooking and making.