Category: Competitions

Question for the A&S Office: ” Can Laurels enter Crown’s A&S Championships?”

The short answer is YES. However, in other ways this can be a complicated question that can be approached from a few different angles. I’ve included two quotes below summarizing the questions I have heard people ask about this topic, along with a response to each question.


“I’ve heard that Laurels are not supposed to enter because they already received accolades in their art and now it’s time to let others shine.”

Crown’s A&S Championships (like all Kingdom champions events), is a “high-level competition where the focus is on picking the kingdom arts and sciences champions.” So, to answer this question, I want to first make a comparison. Knights and MoDs compete in their kingdom championship events. So why shouldn’t Laurels compete in Crowns A&S?


First, a Companion of the Order of the Laurel is presumed to have “attained the standard of excellence” in their artistic field, just like martial peers are expected to have attained excellence in their fields, so not having Laurels enter Crowns A&S would mean that our artisans may not be competing against the best in the kingdom. The East has some of the best artisans in the Known World, and our A&S Championship deserves to be a competition among the best of the best. Going further, as in martial activities, competing against a peer who as attained that standard of excellence gives artisans an opportunity to show off their skill and acomplishments.


Now, It is true that it is a Laurel’s job to look out for other artisans, to promote them and help them shine, but our Laurels are also still artisans in their own right and may benefit from the external motivation and pressures that a competition presents. Perhaps a Laurel has never competed in a Crowns A&S Competition before, and wants to try something new. It is important for every artisan to find new ways to keep challenging themselves as they grown in experience with their craft.
Going further along this line, just because someone has been elevated to the Laurel, does not mean that they posess the skills to do well in a competition like Crowns A&S. The qualities that are looked for in a Companion of the order of the Laurel are different (if overlaping) from that required of a high level competition entran. Also, a new project may often be just as hard for a laurel as for someone who is not a laurel,especially if they are experimenting with a new art, so the playing field is not as uneven as it may seem.
Finally, entering a competition would mean that other artisans would have the opportunity to see this Laurel’s work and talk to them about it, a process which enriches and teaches everyone.


“I’ve heard that Laurels are not supposed to enter because they are needed to judge the competition.”

It is not currently an expectation that all Laurels will help judge the Crowns A&S competition.


Judging competitions is hard, and not everyone may be suited for the job. Some Laurels may also have had bad experiences judging competitions in the past (just like some artisans may have had negative experiences entering), and this would naturally further increase their reluctance to judge. While the MoAS office is trying to help train judges and provide structures to make the process easier, some Laurels may not want to give judging another try. And that is ok.
Furthermore, the potential judging pool for Crowns A&S champions is currently much wider than just members of the Order of the Laurel. Because we have undertaken to provide training materials for judges and create a more standardized rubric for the kingdom competition, we can now much more easily have some judges that are not “experts in their field” help with the judging process. This means that you do not have to have a specific A&S award to judge or shadow judge. The MoAS office will work with artisans on an individual basis to help determine their level of familiarity with the rubric and judging process. It is important to remember that the skills that makes a good judge may not necessarily be the same skills that make a great Laurel. Judging is very much a learned skill, and while the qualities of a good judge sometimes overlap with those of a Laurel, they don’t overlap all the time.


Now, this does not mean that we don’t need any expert judges, we very much do. Once registration ends, the MoAS office will be reaching out to relevant experts for their assistance. Its just that every judge doesn’t need to be a specialist to do a reasonable job.
If you are interested in helping to judge the Crowns A&S Competition more information and a form to fill out can be found at this link: https://moas.eastkingdom.org/…/crow…/judge-registration/

Also, as a reminder, registration to display or enter Crown’s A&S is due by Dec. 13th. More information can be found here: https://moas.eastkingdom.org/display…/crowns-as-champions/

Thank you,-Lissamoas@eastkingdom.org

A Short Treatise on Process

by Signora Fiore Leonetta Bardi, Crowns A&S Champion, May 2020.

When one has a desired goal, a thing to be accomplished, it can be tempting — perhaps even expedient — to figure out how to achieve the goal most quickly. I have been so very guilty of this. I once infamously learned a devilishly hard song for a concert in a couple of days. Of course, I no longer remember it or why it was so important to learn in the first place. And like most of you, I have burned the midnight oil to get to a place where I could finish sewing on the drive to an event. Where I was, of course, wearing/entering/donating said garment. I have learned something by mastering expedience — that it is rarely, if ever, truly satisfying. These days I take the most pleasure in the process itself and I am writing this treatise in an attempt to seduce you into this calling.

Working backward from a goal — determining what happens last and then, what happens before that. And, before that. Until you come to the beginning of your project — is a revelation. As is, beginning with a list of all of the steps before you, and the steps within those steps. Looking at patterns and portraits, or reading other findings. Using these as a basis for your own questions. Allowing yourself to treat each discovered answer as a reward. Treating the unanswerable as a playground for your thought and experimentation. Letting questions lead to other questions. Letting this inquiry and experiment fail and reflecting on the lessons therein.

Embracing failure. Letting the frustration of those missteps bow to the lessons within them. Catching yourself in your repetitive mistakes and your self-limiting beliefs. Accepting that what we know as fact can shift with new findings, better scholarship, and clearer understanding.  

All of this is Process. And as you come to know Process, beginning to respect, and understand your process.

I sew, almost exclusively, by hand. I do not do so because of the virtue in historical accuracy (although I suppose I am glad of it), but because of my specific history. My mother worked in sweatshops as I was growing up and took in piece work to make ends meet. The hum of her Singer sewing machine was a constant feature of my evenings and a soundscape in my dreams. Simply put, I hate that sound. So, I sew by hand and my process is informed by this. My process might never serve you because your process is informed by your reality. These differences sometimes make people feel that they can’t “do” process when not only can they, they would better enjoy their work if they did.

Another example of my process. Hard deadlines are both important and potentially destructive for me. That is to say, that certain projects take me the amount of time they take and a deadline in violation of that time, is disastrous. You may thrive under a deadline so my process in this instance, cannot serve you. 

My point is this, your growth as an Artisan does not have to look a certain way, especially as you begin. But that growth should have a methodology. You could try to emulate the process of someone you admire but before you launch in, make certain to adjust for how you like to learn and do things. Try something one way, keep a record whether written or recorded, document how effective (or not) it was. Iterate and reiterate — make ALL the mistakes and then document them so that you can avoid them in the future. Better still tell others, so that they can learn from you and avoid those pitfalls altogether.

Process — having a goal, stating a plan of action, charting the steps, acquiring knowledge and resources for each step, and keeping a record as you execute each step — leads to something very specific. Process leads to Craft. It leads to Artistry and it leads to more Process because as I mentioned before, Process is seductive. Once you give in to it, you will not want to let it go.

Using Rubrics for Personal Growth in A&S

By: Agnes Marie de Calais

When I started in the SCA I was a fencer. I loved the thrill of the fight, training, sore muscles and how it felt to take the field. However, after I aged in ways that made this activity not medically an option, I didn’t know where to go or where I fit in the SCA. Some life events happened at around the same time, and took a break for a bit to take care of family and health concerns. Time passed and eventually, I came back to a regular level of SCA activity.

When I returned, I want to know where I fit if I could not fight or engage in martial activities. Better understanding Art & Science became a personal journey for me and helped me to find my passion. I tried many things and found that it was writing, research and sharing knowledge with others that was my A&S path. I had not previously known this was a possibility. I remember early on wanting to know if I was “doing A&S right.” When I fenced and I lost a bout, I could easily go over my form, talk to my opponent and see what needed to improve. The path to growth and improvement was not as clear in the Arts & Sciences.

Seeking to improve, and being a former fencer, I turned to the most obvious way that I knew to determine progress, growth, and prowess- a competition. At the competition, I asked for feedback and left a blank book for people to write in. I will admit that some of the written feedback was not positive or constructive. However, in other ways, it was inspiring because of the tokens I received. So, still wanting to improve, I used my fighter brain and went and trained harder by working on my paper some more. I used the constructive advice I was given, and I wrote a better paper, but, I still didn’t “win.” 

Confused, frustrated and still trying to figure out what was wanted, I went to an Art & Science Consultation table. I brought my work and my fraying patience and calmly asked “what am I missing?” That was the moment my focus on what being an Art & Science community member was for me changed. The consultant explained that just doing my art was a win, sharing it was a win, and that if competing was not helping my art thrive that I did not have to do so to progress on the Arts & Sciences path. However, she said that if I wanted to continue to compete, that reviewing the kingdom rubric could help me to fairly evaluate and critique my own work and measure my personal progress

I use rubrics daily as an educator, not just to evaluate my students but help them think about what they want to express in their own work. To me they are used as a personal metric to help set goals and measure growth. Yes, I use rubrics on myself. The Kingdom rubrics were daunting at first. I had concerns, questions and doubts about the ability of my work to live up to a “good” score. I shared these concerns with others honestly and even took training to understand the rubric better. I also engaged in shadow judging to see it in action. The rubric allowed very different types of Art & Sciences projects, all entered into a designated and chosen high stakes competition, to have a single metric that addressed their art (calligraphy, weaving, metalwork etc.), but within a scoring system that would allow for the comparison of numerical scores in an effort to be more equitable.  For me, it helped me sent personal benchmarks, think analytically and critically about what I had done and think of ways I could improve my work further. If anything it became less of a competitive tool and more of a personal one.

A rubric is a tool to evaluate oneself or, with consent and caring, to evaluate the work of others. Like with all tools practice is imperative, and like with all the tools, the one wielding the tool may use it in a way that it was not meant to be used. However, it is a tool we can choose to not use. We are free to create and share our art in the forums we chose. Some may find rubrics helpful outside of competition as a way to expand and grow their work.  For others, they provide a common language to be able to reference when giving compassionate and helpful feedback. And yes, they help decide Arts and Sciences tournaments or competitions. In either case, it can be used to help growth when an artisan chooses to do so. In short, while competition is indeed a familiar use of a rubric, it can be used in other positive non-competitive ways.

Lady Agnes lives in the Shire of Quintavia and enjoys various A&S pursuits, such as researching and writing about Medici and renaissance porcelain as well as performing Bardic Arts.  Ask her about researching and she will excitedly tell you why it can be fun! Mundanely Agnes has been a middle school educator for over thirteen years in the public school system.

Upcoming MoAS Office Classes & Consultation Tables

View our Event Calendar

Upcomming Class

Displaying Your Project (Online Class) January 15, 2020 @ 8:00 PM – 9:30 PM Join Master Philip White (Craig Shupeé) for an online discussion about presenting your work for Arts & Sciences displays or competitions. The session will cover best practices for the physical set up of your display in addition to verbal presentation considerations. Instructor: Master Philip White Link: https://meet.google.com/epm-svou-gxe

Birka: Consent in A&S: Giving & Receiving Feedback January 25, 2020 @ 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM , Dartmouth Room

St. Eligius, 11/16

Floating Consultation Table, Master Galefridus Peregrinus & Master Onora ingheainn Ui Rauric. (A signup sheet will be available at the registration desk the day of the event and consultants will meet entrants at their display tables.)

EK Rubric Class, Mistress Elena Hylton, Time TBD

Online Class, 11/21 (Thursday), 7:00-8:30pm

East Kingdom A&S Rubric, Mistress Elena Hylton & Mistress Lissa Underhill. (A web link will be sent out prior to the online event.)

EK University in Runtallan, 11/30, 10:00-11:00am

A&S Panel, Mistress Alisay de Falaise. Led by the MoAS deputy for Tir Mara, Mistress Alisay welcomes all who have questions about A&S in the Society and Kingdom. If you can not attend the panel at this time, Mistress Alisay invites you to approach her with your questions/concerns at other times during the event.

Bhakail Yule, 12/14

Consultation Table, 11:30-1:30 (Library), Mistress Lissa Underhill & Mistress Margaretha La Fauvelle

EK Rubric Class, 12:30-1:30 (Library), THL Mariette de Bretagne & Mistress Lissa Underhill

On referencing items dated later than 1600 CE

Greetings-

With the new year upon us, the MOAS office has a Q&A post regarding dates for A&S projects that it wishes to share with everyone. Thank you for reading, and have a happy new year!

Question for the MoAS Office: “I found a great example of a “thing” that I want to try to recreate, but it is dated to a bit after 1600. Can I still use this example as a source of inspiration in the context of A&S?“

This is a good question, but one with more layers than artisans might, at first, realize.

To start, please remember that it is no one’s job to police the art you make and the research that you do outside of A&S displays, competitions, and conversations around award recommendations, which usually have at least some rules or guidelines that ask artisans to focus on “SCA period” work. So- right away- we are limiting this question to one that is dealing with a very specific subset of A&S activity in the society.

Now, according to the current SCA mission statement, members are “devoted to researching and recreating…pre-17th century skills, art, combat, [and] culture.” While it might seem clear on the surface that this means that anything dated to after 1600 is verboten, in practice, the idea of pre-17th-century culture can be an astoundingly nuanced concept with no single definition or defined cutoff date.

Just because an item was created a few years past 1600, does not mean that it does not map to historical methods that can be dated and documented to pre-1600 society. Indeed, in many parts of the world, artists still engage in work whose methods map directly earlier practices. Archeologists, for example, have made connections between modern glass bead makers from Turkey and medieval bead making practices. If we were to say that 1600 (an arbitrary date based on our liking for nice round numbers and powers of 10), is a hard cutoff date, we would be denying artisans the ability to fully explore the historic and cultural influences that existed towards the end of our period. Ultimately, it is up to the artisan to make the connection to pre-1600 practice.

Now, making this connection will not work for everything. Just because an item is dated to just after 1600, doesn’t mean it would have existed prior. We have no evidence, for example, of polychrome embroideries before 1600 (or so I have been told). Also, the historical context of an object may totally change after the SCA period. For example, take Scottish clan tartans. These are popular and important pieces of history with which many artisans connect. However, their identity as “clan tartans” specifically is very post-period – the patterns existed, but the context of use did not. As you can see, it’s nuanced!

In sum, the best advice we can give to artisans with this question is that, if you limit yourself to material published in 1600 or earlier, you are definitely within the SCA definition of what is “period.” The further you get away from that date, the harder this connection can be to make, as people’s practices, attitudes and culture shift over time. Later material could be “SCA period”, but you have to build the argument and show your work (a task which can be evidence of very sophisticated research). The key, as always in A&S, is to show your art’s place and connection to the flow of history.

However, please also be aware that you can find people who are more firm about staying within SCA period than I have articulated in this post above. If they find you are portraying arts post-1600 they may try to correct you. Know that someone who advocates for a strict 1600’s cutoff date is doing so to follow their interpretation of the mission statement, just as this post is proposing an alternative, more nuanced interpretation.

As a reminder, aggressively policing other’s interpretations of what is historically appropriate for the SCA is expressly problematic. I’ll refer everyone back to our posts about how all parties should have the opportunity to consent to both give and receive feedback. Allow people to be responsible for their own pursuits. It is not anyone’s job to tell others how to enjoy the arts and sciences without them specifically asking for feedback. But, as an artisan, please also be aware that your artistic choices have consequences if you wish to present your work formally in an A&S display, competition, or if you wish to promote yourself for an A&S award. You may have to do extra work to fit your project securely into the SCA’s time period.

However, even if you want to stay strictly pre-17th century, know that it is absolutely valuable for artisans to research and understand what comes after. By examining things that are post period, one can learn more about what is period. Your work will also benefit from knowing how your art or science evolved, and what it turned into.

-Written with the help of lærifaðir Magnus hvalmagi & Master Philip White
Lissa

NOTE: additional discussion occurred when this question was posted to facebook that may be of additional help to artisans. Some excerpts are included below.

Polychrome embroidery is usually dated by museums with a “window” of about 1575-1625, but others are dated 1600-1650, for example. We do have portraits of Elizabeth wearing what would be considered polychrome, but yes, it’s a grey area from a strict date point of view  It’s obviously a very late for our purposes object, and as a late-period embroidery Laurel, I would want someone to acknowledge that fact, and discuss more specifics- how does the object relate to other items of Elizabethan embroidery in materials and techniques, etc? These items are solidly “rooted” in the 16th century- the aesthetics and techniques are regularly found in earlier pieces. –Mistress Amy Webbe

It should also be noted that it can be very difficult to date some items. Embroidered book bindings are often “dated” by the publication date of the book they are covering – the embroidery could have been done years, or even decades, later. On the other hand, we have bindings that we know were made by Queen Elizabeth as a child, so we have a work that definitively demonstrates that these items were made pre-1600. Dating items that fall within a decade or so of the “cutoff year” of 1600 can be quite tricky. — THL Amalia von Hohensee

Dating A&S can be challenging for other historical reasons. Research into Elizabethan royal patents, which gave one person control over nearly all printed and published English music for 20 years, can help explain why so much of Elizabethan lute music was published post 1600. William Byrd effectively prevented the publication of lute music in book form from 1577 to 1596. There was a backlog of music that couldn’t be set on a printing press (since Byrd owned the only musical press in England) until others acquired the royal patents in 1597. — Lord Drake Oranwood

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑