The crafts should perhaps be thought of as the work of “citizen artisans” who manipulate clay, metal, thread, or glass with consummate skill to create exceptional objects out of common materials. The hard-worn distinction between fine-art elitism and craft’s populism is still taken for granted, but these terms are becoming confounded as crafts edge toward fine arts either out of strategy or desire. While artists pluck techniques from the crafts as necessary, craft practitioners have begun to interleave content from outside their normal purview, sometimes with beguiling results, as in the work

In her installation Quarry (all works 2007), Helen Mirra uses her laconic touch to map a phenomenal expedition across time. Her means are modest: Handsome chunks of breccia, amphibolite, and serpentine rocks, collected above the Arctic Circle, nest on the artist’s own folded clothing. Dotting the gallery floor, like a sparse archipelago, the stones—mottled with living moss and lichens—seemed like an extemporized display of some naturalist’s homemade collection. Regarding past work such as the floor sculpture Sky-Wreck, 2001, critics have mentioned that Mirra owes a debt to Minimalism; perhaps,