Frankie Flood Lecture

Flood's "craft" objects turn tools used for mundane tasks and activities into one of a kind, handmade objects. While working on an assembly line, Flood became interested in the ideas of function and aesthetic. At the beginning of his arts career, Flood focused on jewelry-making, as do most metal smiths in the arts, but he soon became interested in the original uses of metalworking, i.e. toolmaking.

Flood's popularity was founded on his pizza cutters, which are modeled in the likenesses of motorcycles, hot rods and choppers. The pizza cutters, to him, are "objects that speak to culture today."

Oftentimes, people question craft artists, posing questions like "Why are to spending so much time of that?" and "Why don't you just buy a table or a pizza cutter at Target?", but even we photographers realize that there is a certain lure to creating something with your own hands and through your own ideas and concepts. As artists, that lure is almost irresistible, and as consumers, without the innovations of one-off art pieces, we might not have the beautiful and pieces that come off the assembly line.