Ingrid Järvi has always thought tradition and language to be fascinatingly nuanced in that a single word, phrase, or technique can hold hundreds of years of knowledge.

Take Kalevipoeg, Estonia’s folk hero, and a giant no less: legend says that when he waded through Lake Saadjärv, the water rose no higher than the laces of his pastlad, handcrafted leather shoes worn as a part of Estonian traditional dress. These shoes are drafted from a single piece of leather which gather around the shape of the individual foot. In rediscovering the techniques and histories of this endangered handcraft, Ingrid hopes to share a small part of a cultural treasure with those who honor craft and its story, all in the spirit of revitalizing tradition.

Ingrid learned the technique in Pärnu, the seaside town where her grandmother was born, and where she has returned for her summers since childhood. There, she apprenticed under Signe Taremaa, at the Pärnu Guildi Maja, absorbing a vocabulary as old as the technique itself, especially loving the natural, human way of calling lacing loops “ears (kõrvad),” the part of the toe the “nose, (nina)” Language, Ingrid has come to believe, is like entering a room where a generation of elders wait to pass the baton.

Language can also look like technique, of storytelling, of a translator, and of a friend. Traditionally, no two households made these shoes, quite the same way. For Ingrid, creating footwear that honors centuries-old Estonian shoemaking traditions while adding her own interpretation to them for a contemporary audience is an exciting way to preserve these techniques nearly lost to industrialization.

This is why sharing pastlad and traditional leatherwork is an opportunity for Ingrid Järvi to honor something special: Culture, handcraft, and the language of an older world. Culture can become lost, obsolete, buried. But through the curiosity of what came before and opportunities like RISD CRAFT, the past gets the chance to live again as the present and the future to come.