Research Point: The persistence of craft in the 21st Century

Before addressing the question, I want to say that there is an implication in the question that there is no good reason for the continued existence of textile crafts in the modern world.  Which of course is a questionable premise to start from. And I am assuming that the question is referring to the Developed World, because craft shows no sign of being less useful than it always has been in other parts of the world.

Halloween Craft kit

Summer crafts - foam rockets

It seems to me, reading for this course, and more specifically for this research point, that there is more than one meaning to the word crafts, and that this leads to all sorts of unhelpful apparent contradictions and sets up some distracting diversions when I am trying to think about the place of crafts in our world. And the most unhelpful of all, I think, is the separation of the word craft from the idea of craftsmanship.

The rest of this blog entry is my thoughts about some of the confusions around craft and craftsmanship, the apparent separation of it from the idea of 'craft', where this strange state of affairs might have originated, and about what the future of crafts could be if this were put right. I have generally written it from the starting point of my opinion, bringing in references to written and made works which illuminate (I hope) my train of thought.

Crafts as an expression of tradition

Sometimes people write and speak about tradition in crafts as if 'tradition' referred to the techniques used to make particular things, and the typical patterns that have been used to make or decorate them in the past. And in this context, there can be some confusion about the fact that craftsmen often use their adeptness and the aesthetics of their craft to adapt and change traditional techniques and patterns. Or use them to express poetic ideas, address design problems which only arise in the modern world, or use materials which were not available to their predecessors. So people start to wonder if they are actually craftspeople, or are in fact artists, or designers instead. (1)

I think the apparent conflict betrays a misunderstanding of what craftsmanship is. A misunderstanding I think is in line with the presumptions in Tom Stoppard's epigram: 'Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.' In fact, in my opinion a person is a labourer, not a craftsman, if they do not sometimes take the opportunity to adapt their skill to new conditions, ideas, or materials, or at least see this as legitimately part of their work.

A basket made in 1985 by Mohawk artist Mary Adams
It has distinctive curls and miniature sweetgrass baskets hanging from the lip.
It seems to me that this shows both great skill, and witty imagination ie great craftsmanship.

Looking historically at any tradition, any craft, one can see a long line of skilled craftsmen who were  making, not exactly the same thing as their teachers, but something that incorporated both the techniques and ornament of those teachers and something of their own time. This is inevitable in any lively human activity.

Here is a Link to an outline of this happening in English ceramics, which also refers to the way historical changes inevitably bring changes in design and technique in crafts.

Lustreware
William de Morgan 1880

Tin-glazed lustreware
English 'after 1475'
V&A

Early 19th Century child's
lustreware bowl & saucer

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”
—Alexander McQueen (11)


What do we call ourselves?
In an article in the Journal of Modern Craft online, Ramona Barry interviewed some jewellers about what they called themselves, and found that they were generally flexible about this, caring more often about not being pigeon-holed than about what they actually called themselves. One of these interviewees, Vicki Mason, is quoted as saying 'I'm a jeweller, perhaps not as some would know it in the traditional sense, but I make objects to wear essentially, and this is what jewellery aims for for the most part. It's about making objects to be worn.' (1)

Vicky Mason
Red sewn brooch 2008
Powder-coated brass, polyester thread, hand-dyed
Photo by Terence Bogue

Which begs the question as to who is asking craftspeople to label themselves, and why? I will think about this question later on in this post.

The Basic Necessity of Crafts
So, I believe that tradition in craft is more usefully thought of as the visible and tactile expression of the deep history of our culture since the first objects were made by our ancestors. The crafts are evolved adaptations of the techniques and skills derived from the response of the indigenous population to their practical needs, using available materials, and naturally reflect the aesthetic values derived from experiences of living with, or making, craft-made objects.

A waterproof bag made by a Native American
using the waterproof materials to hand.
From the collection at the Royal Canadian Museum in Toronto

People sometimes speak, and write, about crafts as a route to self-actualisation - the pinnacle of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, as if we only start making things when we have safety, enough to eat, a sense of belonging, love and meaning already in our lives. The truth is self-evident that the creative urge is much more fundamental than this. People have always made things in order to eat, in order to have somewhere safe and dry to live and clothes to keep them warm. And people make things in order to earn a living, attract a mate, and signal their membership of a particular group. And the people who are most drawn to the making of things are those people who do more of it, seek out teachers, and become skillful at it.

Crafts are Here To Stay

The satisfaction we derive from the experience of skillful making, or using of objects made well by other human beings, is not something that will go away with one or two generations of factory-made objects designed with profit in mind. Archaeologists have found clothes sewn from animal skins by Neandertal humans 500,000 years ago. The Cro Magnon people made weapons, but also made 'well constructed huts with central hearths for fires; necklaces & pendants, cave art, little statues made from ivory, antler, bone.' Human beings have been making things for so long that the ability to craft useful objects is likely to have contributed to our evolutionary success, and perhaps even to have been selected for by natural forces. So it's going to be a good long time before our tendency to create things is going away, even if we can buy them ready made in a factory. (2)

Solutrean needle,
the world's first identifiable needles
Image from Human Journey

I see the last 60 years of the history of objects as representing an abberation in an otherwise unbroken history of respect for good craftsmanship. Respect, because good craftsmen made objects that were well designed for their use, resilient, and intrinsically attractive by virtue of having been well made. 

There have been signs in the last 20 years or so that this respect may be returning. The introduction to a 2007 book about the resurgence of crafts in art and fashion, states, 'Along with the quiet proliferation of handmade work in the art world, there is a similar prevalence in fashion design, industrial design, and the book arts. The participants profiled in this book all share a dedication to materials and processes.' (4)

The executive director of the Crafts Council writes about a number of artists, marketing organisations, design organisations, and trade and investment fairs using the skills of craftsmen, in the November/ December edition of Crafts magazine. Referring to the British Business Embassy during the Olympics, she concluded 'To my mind it highlighted the current strength of the crafts sector and how seriously it is being taken by government and business alike.'(5)

Stack-ed Desk
Rolf Sachs / David Linley, 2012
A desk made with no screws or nails, which was
used to illustrate Rosy Greenlees' article (5)

Craft as a Marketing Term:

The trouble with assuming that this means a resurgence of crafts in general is that it appears to be driven by the wish to make money. Which carries with it the risk that the use of craftsmen is merely fashion and will quickly pass. Although even if this is the case, all that is lost is that particular hyped up market, not the world of crafts and craftsmanship.

The use of market mores to talk about crafts seems to me to be a fundamental source of the confusion, and the loss of connection between crafts and the idea of craftsmanship. There is a huge market for people who want to learn crafts and another (up to 26 million people according to the Craft Council) for those who want to buy craft-made objects. (6)

But most of the market for people who wish to engage in crafts appears to be for kits which allow for no creativity. Chris Chrombie, chief executive of Hobbycraft, told an interviewer in 2009 that 'our research puts the value of the UK hobby market at £2 million.' The craftsmanship associated with this kind of market is of the kind that Tom Stoppard was referring to in the quote above. What I would call no craftsmanship at all. So the fact that it is, despite this, called 'craft', has detached the word from it's specific meaning of special skill.

Craft as 'the other' for Fine Art
Howard Risatti, in his thorough and readable approach to the theory of craft, aimed 'to show how the craft object is a fundamental expression of human values and human achievement that transcends temporal and spatial boundaries as well as social, political and religious beliefs.' 

In other words that craft does not have to define itself in relation to fine art, because it has its own nature and virtues which are independent from those of fine art (but overlapping in places). That it has been difficult for the crafts to find their way to this realisation because of fine art's need to define itself as being unlike crafts, and because of the cultural hierarchy of creative endeavours that this has set up.(3)

Slow Textiles:

One thing that seems to identify craftsmen/artists in our capitalist world is the slowness of the work. When time is money and profit is everything, spending months on making one object can be difficult for non-creative people to understand. Shu Hung and Joseph Magliaro editorialise about the craftsmen they interviewed for their book, 'They admit to spending months on a single piece with no end in sight and, in fact, luxuriate in their long production time. They abandon efficiency to pursue completion in their work, with the results sometimes landing far away from the original design.'(4)

This is not a new idea, of course, as it relates to many movements since the industrial revolution trying to engage us in the political process of slowing down, re-evaluating the importance of the human element, both in the making and the appreciation of an object. One of those movements was led by William Morris, and he wrote about the ideals of craftsmanship, but even he was only partially able to reconcile these ideals with the need to make a profit. (7)

The following is a quote about slowness from thetextileblog.blogspot.co.uk, which I have been following for the last few months because many of the opinions expressed in it chime with mine. 

'Slow, means the physical and mental process of slowing down, taking a breath, allowing a human timescale rather than a machine one, to take control of events within our lives. In the context of design, this means re-examining the process of production, repositioning technology, and allowing room for a human dimension. It used to be considered, and still is within large sections of society, that the large scale use of technology and industry in a way that divorced itself from the human dimension, was an affirmation of our progress and destiny as a species, that it could produce items faster than hand or small-machine production, seemed almost a negligent by product, the larger the scale and the faster the production, the better. The near boast that things could only ever get better, looking at much of the pollution, degradation of the individual and social quality of life in general, as well as the lack of concern for what actually happens to the millions of items produced every day, is a very hollow, even shallow boast and perhaps shows the human species as it really is, hands forever reaching for that distant shiny future, whilst having two feet firmly sitting in the mud of reality.

Slow can be added to practically any title, giving new definition and dynamism to a subject or discipline, particularly in the creative field. To be able to stop, contemplate, be inspired, is probably the most important aspect that a human can add to the creative process, indeed, the most important. So in some respects, slow could actually be defined as human, Slow Design being the human intervention within the design world. The design and craft world needs to take an holistic approach to both designing and making. The complexities of human life, both inner and outer as well as our ability to observe and reflect, needs to be entwined with the design process, not just at the end, as a form of human veneer, but at every stage of each and every discipline from start to finish.' (8)

I first heard of the slow textiles movement when following a link from the craft council website to a textile artist who works in Brixton. She was a member of the Slow Textiles Group, and I am thinking of trying to talk to her, or to them, about the way they think about what they do. (9)

Hopes and Fears for Craft

I initially ended this blog with a quote from William Morris from a series of lectures entitled 'Hopes and Fears for Art.' (10) But the world has moved on in over 100 years and while his fears were similar, for his own area of 'decorative art', his hopes were confined by the social and cultural milieu he lived in, where people lived and worked with a fixed hierarchy, in a world where you had to pick your career from a limited number, sometimes before your were born, and then stick with it until you died. The difference in work patterns now, with portfolio careers, and the ease of changing career, and the advent of the internet as a place for exchanging opinion and selling relatively small market goods, could result in an even greater resurgence of crafts. Or it could leave us with only very few with the necessary years of practice to develop craftsmanship. 

Bibliography

(1) www.journalofmoderncraft.com Post by Ramona Barry August 20,2011

(2) Early humans; Examples of cultural behaviour affecting gene selection

(3) 'A theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression' Howard Risatti 2007 University of North Carolina Press

(4) 'By Hand: The use of craft in contemporary art' Shu Hung & Joseph Magliaro eds. 2007 Princeton Architectural Press.

(5) 'A decade of design' Rosy Greenlees Inside Edge, Crafts Nov/Dec 2012

(6) 'Consuming craft' research by the craft council

(7) William Morris's ideals

(8) www.thetextileblog.com

(9) Slow Textiles School

(10) Hopes and Fears for Art - a series of lectures by William Morris 1881 Link to the collective commons readable version
(11) Alexander McQueen quoted on the Metropolitan Museum NY website Link to Met museum

Raised and Structured surface textures continued

I found that although I had spent as much time as I thought reasonable on this exercise, I kept coming up with more things I wanted to do. I also made the mistake of finding 'The Art of Manipulating Fabric' by Colette Wolf, Krause Publications, 1 Oct 1996, which I think I must have bought shortly after it came out and immediately lost somewhere in the piles of fabric in the loft. As you do. This exercise was the motivator for me to find it again, and the result was the following:

Furrowing

I saw a woman in a tweed coat with deep wrist bands
of furrowed tweed which looked interesting, and warm.
Mine is uneven and might look better in a thicker fabric.

Fraying

I frayed the hessian on top of the silk,
and then the other edge of the silk on top of the hessian.

Slashing

Two layers of fine silk slashed over printed cotton.
It reminds me of a photo I saw at the Saatchi gallery of
Marilyn Monroe showing through a traditional oriental image.
To demonstrate how insidious is the influence of the West.
I'm thinking about what images I would use...

Seamless Tucks

These are tied tucks in a regular square pattern.
I like the way this looked with muslin.
It's so floppy but it takes the forms very well.

Cording

The cord is sewn into the back with herringbone stitch.
This is one of the shapes from a design inspired by a
photograph of water in the swimming pool.

English Smocking

This English smocking has a few rows with red thread on top.
It's surprisingly deep, and surprisingly regular.
If the fabric were altered, could this one show imprisonment
or something analagous?

 Italian Smocking

This italian smocking is very hard to get on film.
Not least because it's fiddly so it's only a very small piece!
I like the way it looks but it was quickly clear to me that
muslin is too fine and flimsy and it would be better to use
calico or something of similar weight, to allow the
interesting regular structure to show off.

Quilting

Machine quilting of 2 layers of cotton
The gaps between the rows can be stuffed, or have threads
pulled through them to make it stick out further.

The plain back shows the patterns of the stitches more clearly.
I love Durham quilting, that is just white on white, using the
shadows cast by the quilting to make the pattern.

Relief

One piece of calico was folded in half diagonally,
gathered in the middle, sewn onto a square, and stuffed.
Although it is quite firmly attached, it looks
as if it's just sitting there ready to leap away like a grasshopper.

Threading ribbons and fabric strips through fabric

I used hessian because of the loose weave which allowed me
to use wide ribbon and strips of fabric. This is the selvage
of the hessian, which has two blues woven into it during manufacture.

 Finally, no sewing involved, PVA moulding.

This fabric was moulded around two spherical bottle tops
of different sizes. The fabric is quite stiff when it's dry,
but will clearly keep the shape well.

This one was pushed into the centres of little cookie cutters
 in various shapes. It looks to me as if sharp edges work
better than rounded ones for this technique.

Project 6 Stage 4 Raised and structured surface textures

For this exercise I tried out a variety of techniques to give 3D qualities to fabric. This page shows examples of what I tried out.

Gathering

Lines closer together give rows
of them in both directions. This
reminds me of the bodice of
an Edwardian silk dress in the V&A
so I tried to make the bulges squarer...

Gathered lining fabric gives ovals
of folds.

But used the wrong fabric - in this
case net curtain material, which ended
up being too shapeless to hold the
squares.

Muslin gathered in circles made little
bulges like mushrooms or the
bulges on the membranes of cells.
I like.

Folding & Pleating

These straight pleats reversed at the end
 to give an interesting structure.
I found the easy pleatability of this
fabric was attractive and conducive to
experimentation.

This stiff organdie started as plain
straight  pleats but easily turned
into the shape of a lily pad.

These folds in thin printed cotton
were secured with stitching to allow them to
hang down in a regular rank 

This organdie was given straight
pleats and then sewn in a fan
shape to give a 3D wing-like
structure

I used lines of stitches to change the
colour of areas on this pleated stripy
cotton upholstery fabric

This was made of two strips of
woven polyester with yellow on one side
and red on the other. I folded them at
right angles to each other to make
this variegated 3D ribbon.

Tucking

Pin tucks in muslin gives lines of shadow.
Which emphasise the irregularity of my
machine sewing...

Pin tucks in two directions makes
nice little boxes, or as at the top of
this, a web-like appearance.

Project 6 Making the applied fabrics sample

For the sample I wanted to pursue my further ideas about the 'tree fern' image, with darker more complex waviness, leaning towards the feeling that tangled roots or ivy give me.

To do this I chose a fabric with both matt and shiny areas in a warm neutral colour, and another darker mid-shine polyester lining fabric. The triangles had to be paler  and more matt in order to show up against this complexity.

Initial choice of fabric

Thinking about the edges, it was obvious to me that the bottom needed to be frayed in order to allow the movement downward in waves to continue. However, the edges should be clean and square as the general impression of the lines needs to be clean and not at all blurry.

 Colour study

White and gold acrylic paint in different
proportions and collage on black paper

Doing a brief colour study in my sketchbook showed me that it needed something to contrast with the black and silver/grey, and that it needed to be less coarsely textured, so I added some red running stitches to the surface of those.

The background was to be matt black, but when I was trying out the other fabrics against it I saw that in order to give it the organic darkness of the treefern it needed to have some texture. I found a herringbone fabric from a second hand coat, and used that instead.

Shapes study

Collage and pencil

The composition study helped me to see that there needed to be something in two corners to tangle the eye when it was there, or the composition was a little boring. So I decided to make the waves tighter there, increasing the texture and therefore the interest in these areas.

Since the texture was the whole point of this image, and had already come into the thinking about the blue and white striped piece and the 2 studies I had done, it seemed unnecessary to do a separate texture study for this sample.

Sample

Making Up

While making the sample, I found that the loose weave upholstery fabric I had chosen for the triangles was made in two layers - presumably for strength as when I separated out the top layer it fell apart rapidly. Especially when I tried to sew the red running stitch lines into it.

I tried stabilising it with the wondaweb, but this did not solve the problem adequately. In addition I realised that it was in fact too rough a texture, and slightly too brown, for the contrast required, so I changed to using the back portion of the same fabric - a creamier more closely woven fabric which worked well.

In order to intensify the contrast in colour I inserted a piece of spotted black voile between each triangle and the background.

I decided to support the movement around the triangles by allowing the bottoms of these to fray, and leaving strands of the red thread loose below them against the black voile. I secured the frayed edge of the triangles with similar-colour thread by hand.

I think this sample has been successful in that it conveys what I wanted it to convey. I could have made stronger dark/light contrasts. And I could do it using different shades of one colour in future. Or in fact, using fabric to reperesent the negative spaces between the wavy lines perhaps?


What I learned making this sample:

1. You learn something new every time you make something new.
2. Difficulties (like the triangle fabric falling apart) can lead to improvements.
3. Using the 3 studies can make the whole design process easier, but for the composition you have to make the study the same shape as the final piece!
4. Sometimes you just have to go with what feels right even if there's no apparent reason for it eg the spotted voile under the triangles.
5. When the machine is sticking I have to stop sewing immediately to avoid accumulating large amounts of unpicking/resewing.
6. I have a tendency to go for frayed/ unfinished things and that sometimes this means they will be unstable. I have to watch that and work out how to make them look fragile while being strong.
7. Fragile or unfinished vs. neat finished is a good contrast too.

Some artists who use textiles for 3D work

Examples of the way an artist manipulates fabric in 3D

Jennie Rayment 'The Calico Queen'
I went to one of Jennie's workshops at the V&A a few years ago. Her enthusiasm, humour, and freedom to experiment were inspiring and have led me here to this course.

Deepa Panchamia
This is the breathtaking version of folds and pleats...

Detail of folded textile by Deepa Panchamia
on www.textilearts.net

http://www.rowanmersh.com/
These two photos show some of the ways this English artist manipulates fabric, but there are many more, and often less obviously decorative - especially using rings or glass spheres to stretch it over. It's worth checking out the website.

Rowan Mersh Future Landscapes 2007

Rowan Mersh jewellery 2008-9

I've put these images here because seeing them has broadened my idea of what you can do with 3D manipulation of fabric. And again there's such a variety over a relatively short time, and no restriction to textiles in the art works.

Department of Textilesmithing
'Textiles. Not just for fashion any more.
I'm not sure how useful this is, but it's very enthusiastic. There's a funny entry about the effect of various stimulant drugs on the weaving skills of spiders. It makes me think I could do something with weaving like a skider, rather than in squares or rectangles. I'm sure it's been done before - find out.

In fact there's a lot of value in trying it out first, to see what I come up with, rather than just copying other people's stuff. And then looking around to see what other people have come up with.

3d-woven-japanese-textiles-by-hosoo
Here is a link to a fantastic page of designboom which shows relief woven stingrays.
Again, this has made me think about how I could incorporate some kind of modified rug-making into embroidery.



Samira Boon - Dutch textile company
There's something very satisfying to me about these boxes with sides made of yarn, going off into the distance. You'd have to make a loom specially to do such a thing, with depth as well as width and length. I would love to see this hanging from one end and blowing in the air currents. What would that do to the light in and out of these pockets?

Samira Boon

aleksandra gaca
So I think this fabric is designed to absorb sound from all directions. Now that was not anything I thought of when I was compiling a list of uses of textiles under Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In fact, I stopped looking  because there were just TOO MANY uses, especially in the top two or 3 sections of the pyramid.

Anyway, I like the regular lines + iinsect egg 3D shapes + square texture in different scales.
Perhaps I could try doing that - 3 contrasting shapes in different scales.

Acoustic fabric designed by Aleksandra Gaca for Casalis

Project 6 Applique

The next part of this project was to sew some of these combinations of fabrics together. 

I chose to use a machine for this, really because it was quicker.

The first photo shows the two layers of applique I made for the water design.

The grey fabric is stretch rayon, so was difficult to keep flat, even with a walking foot. 

I found my machining skills were a bit rusty after all this work on paper.

 

For the water design, I didn't have anything blue or watery.
I chose to try it out in varieties of grey and black
because I wanted to try out these combinations of fabrics,
not because I thought it would particularly work with this design.

This is the two combined, superimposed on the design
that it comes from. Not sure how well it would work if it were
in the right sort of calm colours,
but it was good practice for machine applique.

This one started with the combination of fabrics I wanted for the postbox picture. I sewed round in ovals because that's the shape in the photo, and then followed my instincts and ended up with this.
I think it would look good with gold instead of the heavy woven beige as pupil and interstices.

I started this one by putting loose crumpled pieces of organdie
under a voile, because I thought they would look more like the surface
of the fruit not sewn down. I'm not sure that's true now!.
Then I tried out some other rows of beads. I like the way the
black spot in the middle of the glass beads reflects
the black printed pattern on the fabric,
and how the glass itself distorts the pattern.
Then I folded the voile once and twice to see the effect.
I think it would have more effect on a stronger background.

This is me trying Tyvek paper.
I cut it into one of the fish oil photo shapes,
painted the ends rusty orange with gouache, and then
heated it.  This is an interesting effect and I can see
myself using it for all sorts of organic things.

This was my take on the tree fern pictures, using muslin stiffened and glued with bondaweb. Very useful stuff.

The machining took me a while to get the speed right for the curves!

I made the triangles out of two layers of a different striped fabric with a rougher texture, and you can't see here but I cut through the top layer so as to fray it a bit, but it didn't want to fray.

I left the ends of the lower threads on them to add to the waviness.

I think the pale blue and white looks very pretty together, although it isn't anything like the mood of the original drawings. The white isn't quite strong enough to hold its own, so if I did it again I might use a less transparent fabric, or a couple more layers of muslin. In fact, thinking about it, a few layers of wavy lines might make it a better reflection of the messy look of the original design.

I want to try it with dark colours of fabric, perhaps with some shiny and some matt, to try to give the mysterious earthy look.


















I found this exercise inspiring, and I want to do more!
I liked the way the layering took me off in other directions, not just sticking to the designs I had already done (see the red piece). And that this happened just by using the 'wrong' colour combinations for two of the designs.
I also wanted to do some more 3D/ relief things, but held off until the next exercise.

Project 6 Stage 2 continued

The next part of this project involved playing with layers of fabric, to see what works together, and relate it to the designs in the earlier stage.

I found this stage a little difficult to get started on, probably because it was so open to interpretation I didn't know where to start. Of course, like previous exercises, once I started it had its own momentum because of the feeling of the fabrics and the interesting combinations and effects they made together. None of them particularly beautiful at this stage, but most of them with potential.

The fish oil design was all about the texture
and its being confined to the geometric shapes.
I'm not sure it works as eye candy, but the textures I got from pulling
threads out of polyester voile was interesting and quite good for this one.

This one relates to a drawing of a gingko fruit in my sketchbook.
I thought of it as soon as I saw what a rectangle of organdie
looks like a little crumpled up. I think the soft surface of the new neon fabric
is a good contrast to it. The texture to the right is the netting from my Christmas tree.

This was me exploring striped fabrics. I like the way the run in the tights
material looks when its overlaid on the string vest fabric on the shiny black.

A few more explorations.
The one on the left is different heavy woven fabrics in strips, relating to the curl of stripped paint.
Top right - I pulled only black threads out of the woven black and white fabric to make it darker on the bottom. And folded the chiffon to do the same on the right. Bottom right I pulled some threads out of the green to let the bright red of the shapes to show through, but it's not quite as visible as I'd hoped.