The profile of contemporary crafts has grown exponentially in recent years, yet the sector has not traditionally had the infrastructure to support this growth.
According to a recent study by the Crafts Council, the production and retailing of crafts among Britains 36,000 makers grew from £400m in 1994 to £826m in 2004 a healthy rate of growth by any standards, and this is not to mention the contribution of craft-making to the wider economy including tourism, the secondary auction market, design for retailers and manufacturers, and the education sector. The key words attributed to the craft sector in the report, Making it in the 21st century, are stability, entrepreneurial spirit, networking, collaborative, portfolio working and lifestyle fulfillment.
Craft agencies and organisations can act as a conduit between makers and the audience, innovating, testing and building strategies for accessible and high-quality participation at all levels. Considering how important developing public appreciation and value for craft is, this role is the preserve of very few people and arises within a rather fragmented, poorly resourced and under-developed infrastructure compared with other artforms.
Vision
For agencies and organisations providing employment, support and development in the wider crafts sector, one of the key issues has been the lack of focused and co-ordinated strategy, long-term vision and goals at national level. In this vacuum, provision across the country has been patchy for makers, organisations and audiences alike. To take crafts forward strategically, there needs to be more cohesion and alignment of shared agendas between key players and potential allies. Since the Crafts Council began receiving support from Arts Council England (ACE) as a regularly funded organisation, the differentiation in the two organisations remits has never been clearly articulated and is indicative of a lack of communication and transparency in their operations.
Clarification of the national role of the Crafts Council is essential and may come out of its recent strategic review and its new strategy, which will be launched in the New Year. There is no crafts specialist at the national ACE office and not all ACE regional offices or local authorities have a dedicated crafts officer. This lack of specialist knowledge and understanding of craft practices and issues weakens the vision and investment that is needed to develop and sustain a thriving crafts sector.
The need to address these problems has been recognised in objectives within the 2002 Scottish Arts Councils Crafts Strategy and in the Draft National Strategy for Crafts currently circulated by ACE. Buy-in and acceptance of the ACE strategy by the sector, who will be ultimately called upon to deliver it, has yet to be tested as there has been minimal consultation and there is not enough detail or action planning at this stage to ascertain what the measures, timescale and priorities are and who the key partners will be. There is scant mention of the role crafts could play in rural regeneration or in supporting the diversity agenda with regard to disability. There is no clear indication that there will be significant amounts of new investment to deliver the strategy in the same way as there was, for example, for the theatre review.
Promotion
The act of making whether for ritual, function or enjoyment belongs to so many cultures, and the language of crafts (through use and manipulation of materials) has a fundamental universality. No wonder then that crafts is so accessible and has the capacity to enable all who engage with it to express and explore a sense of themselves. This point of connection may occur for crafts more than other artforms because of its deeply rooted social and cultural dimensions. This gives it a tremendous currency and relevance when it comes to engaging audiences and promoting diversity. The challenges arise in the limitations in the way it is perceived by public and the media, who have a tendency to associate it only with functionality, lack of intellectual or conceptual rigour and a rural image. This factor may hinder people from developing specialist crafts leadership, curating, audience development and organisational skills. This, in turn, can leave the sector vulnerable when filling recruitment gaps and staffing new initiatives.
The artistic spectrum within which crafts now operates is wide ranging. With the blurring and shifting of artform boundaries, there is no longer any consistency of definition around what constitutes the crafts. The skill of making is still an important factor, although the increasing convergence of visual arts practices, design and architecture presents both an opportunity and a challenge. Opportunities arise from being able to widen the operating environment so that crafts can be made, seen and experienced in a range of settings and by different types of audience. Creating context is all important.
Future
Historically, funding for crafts has been low. This is, in part, due to its lack of status within the visual-arts funding hierarchy, the difficulties for makers in securing business support and creative development funding, and a lack of both venues and accompanying expertise in programming and investing in craft. National crafts centres remain relatively small in scale and there is no ambitious central London venue with an international as well as national programme set against a very visible collection. However, while crafts has an active and strong profile within the touring sector, the challenge is to widen opportunities for innovative programming, develop curatorial expertise and to integrate crafts within non-traditional touring sectors.
We need to map and widen the spectrum of people participating in crafts activities in order to enrich the sector. The idea of co-operative, collective and communal making is very active on the Indian sub-continent and in Africa and has strong economic impetus. In this country, except for one or two examples, we may have somehow lost that sense of community enterprise in crafts production.
The sector needs to offer new types of centres or places for making and learning that arent prescribed and offer freedom to experiment. It is in this type of mutually supportive environment that self-taught disabled people and outsider crafts can potentially flourish and add its own aesthetic to the language of craft. We in the sector need to work harder and more imaginatively to create the conditions for diverse crafts to flourish conditions in which people, makers, disciplines and practices can mix, collaborate and share, all of which will lead to the kind of innovation that will sustain crafts into the next decade.
Deirdre Figueiredo is Director and Andy Horn is Exhibitions Organiser of Craftspace Touring, a crafts development agency working to increase opportunities for makers and to promote contemporary crafts through touring exhibitions, education and consultancy. t: 0121 608 6668; e: info@craftspace-touring.co.uk; w: http://www.craftspace-touring.co.uk