With the recent plethora of wilderness survival shows and surge in small-scale farming, Americans are thinking about and reevaluating what it takes to survive. On March 30, the Currier Museum of Art exhibition Abigail Anne Newbold: Crafting Settlement will do just that.

A room-sized art installation will invite visitors into a fictional homestead on the fringes of modern society. Custom-designed dwelling structures made using timber-frame joinery and a bike-pulled covered wagon are among the many unique handcrafted objects that will populate the gallery, set for self-sufficient living and on view through July 14, 2013. In the context of our uncertain times, Crafting Settlement poses urgent questions about the complex dynamics of living and making a home.

Newbold is an artist and “maker,” who is part craftsperson, part designer. In Crafting Settlement, she combines age-old woodworking and textile techniques with modern materials such as nylon to create finely crafted items that populate a personalized domestic space, influenced by Shaker design and the vernacular architecture of New England farms. Objects on view will also include those Newbold has collected from flea markets and modified to suit her contemporary aesthetic—think Shaker rocker with neon yellow nylon webbing. Newbold’s one-of-a-kind and visually alluring objects such as tools and a sleeping bag elevate what are typically mass-produced consumer items to the status of high-design and individualized production. The effect pushes craft practices into a modern context and explores the value of cultural heritage to our contemporary times.

Crafting Settlement is Newbold’s most ambitious art installation to date. It builds on the artist’s longstanding interest in the qualities that make a home, which originated while she was hiking through the backcountry of the Southwest United States carrying her home in a pack on her back. Themes of portability, survivalism, and the relationship between necessity and comfort continue to pervade Newbold’s investigations into the meaning of self-sufficient living.

The exhibition Crafting Settlement will feature a hands-on Settlement Lab, where visitors of all ages can explore the content of the installation in more depth.

Based in Massachusetts, Newbold has recently exhibited at the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Newbold received a 2012 Artist Award from the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts and a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellowship, among other distinctions. Newbold earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Arts in Boston and an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

Abigail Anne Newbold: Crafting Settlement is part of the Currier’s Contemporary Connections series, which features new work by early- and mid-career artists from New England made in dialogue with the Currier’s collection, architecture, and regional histories and location.

About the Currier
The Currier Museum of Art is located at 150 Ash Street, Manchester, NH. Open every day except Tuesday. Museum admission: adults $10; seniors $9; students $8; children age 17 and under are always admitted free. More information: www.currier.org or call 603.669.6144 x108.