Defining Contemporary Arts and Crafts
April DeConick is a scholar of mysticism and a maker of things you can touch and hold. A ceramicist and fiber artist — and a longtime professor of religious studies at Rice University — she moves between two disciplines most people keep separate: the study of how humans make meaning, and the physical work of making meaningful objects.
"Simply spirited" is the phrase that describes the core of her practice. Her approach is rooted in movement — the sweep of the arm, the press of the hand, the rhythm of the body become integral to the finished work. Her gestural ceramics and fiber works preserve this immediacy, holding what she calls the trace of touch: a record of presence and becoming, carrying a depth of feeling that language and technology can't reproduce.
How does the experience of the thing shape and transform who we are? It's the question at the center of April's scholarship — and now, the question her hands answer daily. Her abstractions reflect blooming, flowing, and emergence: art made to express the inexpressible wonder of coming into being.
Rooted in a deep love of natural materials and today's revival of Arts and Crafts values, April's way of making connects her to generations of makers — especially the women who shaped the early Arts and Crafts movement — and to contemporary efforts to imagine more sustainable, humane ways of living.
Across all mediums, she is drawn to the aesthetics of care — what might be called hygge — and to craft traditions long undervalued in the fine art world, reclaiming these materials and methods as vital, contemporary tools for meaning-making beyond language.
April sees her work as part of a broader cultural "progressive nostalgia": a longing not to return to the past, but to carry forward what was most humane within it — integrity, sustainability, and the joy of handmade objects — into a future shaped by new tools, new communities, and new possibilities.
Through her work, April contributes to the ongoing revaluation of craft as a discipline of transformation and a future-shaping practice, rooted in authenticity and regional design, and grounded in her belief that making with our hands is essential to who we are and who we can become. Proof, held in the object itself, that everything we touch, we change, and everything we change, changes us.
