Crafting a niche

Craft is a lively, entrepreneurial, independent element of the nation’s commercial, artistic, academic and creative life. It engenders creativity and encourages innovation. It is a strong, and sometimes feisty, member of the creative industries. It provides many people with great enjoyment in making, seeing and collecting craft in a variety of contexts. There are, however, challenges. Perceptions and media representations of craft tend to make assumptions that belie its real characteristics. Low aspiration and low confidence can hold the sector back from fulfilling its potential.
 

At Origin, the London Craft Fair, over 300 individual craft makers this year made sales worth over £1.6m to 20,000 visitors, successfully challenging the assumption that you can’t sell art during a recession. Over the course of two weeks, this Crafts Council event, in partnership with Somerset House Trust, enabled visitors to see – and buy – a full range of contemporary craft, and to meet the makers who created it. Visitors took part in Alinah Azedah’s ongoing, time-based participative project, ‘Crafting Space’, and late night events featuring Amy Lamé’s ‘Pom-Poms for Peace’ and the ‘Dip and Grow Craft Lab’ designed by Flour (Fabiane Perella and Karen Richmond). A curated series of interventions displayed in the Origin Pavilion and Somerset House further challenged perceptions of making.
Looking to the future
For all Origin’s success, we are yet to see the longer term impact of the current economic downturn. Yet there is plenty to be positive about. Craft practice has changed fundamentally over the past decade. Makers today are working in new ways: using new materials and technologies, identifying and engaging with new markets, and developing forms of practice which are innovative and pluralistic, with creativity and entrepreneurship at their core. They are looking beyond individual practice, applying their skills and knowledge within industry to design for manufacture and in digital environments. They are extending the potential for new technologies, such as laser cutting and rapid prototyping, and bringing new ideas to play alongside traditional processes and materials. Makers are even at the forefront of the sustainability debate, reinventing existing materials whilst promoting a user-centred approach to the production of objects which endure.
Partners and collaborators
Within this rich, pluralistic crafts practice, makers are also contributing to regeneration agendas in the public realm and through community art programmes, making a difference on an individual level as teacher-practitioners and art therapists. They are working within academia, furthering their practice through teaching as well as through engagement with collaborative research networks. And they are pursuing their personal professional practice within the changing context of markets which are globalising yet fragmenting, and where the direct selling, so typical of the sector, has started to go digital. These changes are creating a ripple effect which extends beyond the craft sector, and has led to a resurgence of interest in crafts knowledge within fashion, architecture, fine art and design practice. Ken Shuttleworth’s architecture practice is called The Make, the London Design Festival this year heavily featured craft, and you only have to look at the Chapman Brothers obsessive making or the commissioning of goldsmiths by Marc Quinn to make his Kate Moss sculpture to see the extent to which crafts knowledge or technique is embedded in many cultural practices. The DCMS/Arts Council England research ‘Taking Part in the Arts’ shows participation in craft as a very popular activity. Craft shows such as Crafts at Bovey Tracey, Lustre, Made, the Hereford Contemporary Craft Fair and Brilliantly Birmingham are all well established. Other initiatives – such as Galvanise in Sheffield – are developing to reflect the heritage of a city or area. A range of cultural organisations including Craftspace, the Craft Study Centre, the Devon Guild of Craftsmen and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art constantly develop innovative ways to engage the public with craft.
Cool craft
Craft has developed a new resonance for the young whilst retaining its appeal to older generations. The notion of craft as a social and community activity is returning, with groups emerging around the country keen to knit or sew together and feel the ‘flow’ of engaging hand, mind and eye as one. As the growing blog culture around the ever-growing ‘indie craft’ community shows, crafting can be counter-culture, counter-consumerist and distinctively cool. Giving children and young people the opportunity to engage in craft practice is crucial for the future – a future in which social and cultural development sit alongside innovation and economic growth. Craft practice has learning outcomes that have wider implications. It encourages touch-related and motor skills essential to the design, manipulation and construction of objects and environments. We still need to understand what materials and forms do under stress and in different conditions, in spite of digital technology. For consumers, the tactile, idiosyncratic qualities of the designed object are, if anything, heightened in an era of mass production and digitisation. There are social benefits too: craft practice can be particularly attractive to those young people who find the mainstream theory-based curriculum off-putting, and who think and progress best through experiential learning.
Future value
The challenge of understanding and responding to these trends is felt keenly by everyone working to support craft, whether directly or in shaping policy. We need to think about how current support helps new and emerging practitioners to maximise their potential and how craft could make an even more profound impact. The Crafts Council has a strong commitment to this agenda, and in particular to driving the change needed to meet the needs of an evolving sector, enabling makers to fulfil their potential in the environment in which they now work. We are promoting contemporary craft to reflect this broader practice. We aim to increase the public’s perception of the economic, social and cultural value of craft and to continue to develop new ways of working: promoting the authenticity of craft, encouraging makers to question their practice and develop their own originality and voice in their work, creating provocative exhibitions that challenge and push perceptions of contemporary craft and supporting interdisciplinary work. With the rest of the craft sector, we are determined to demonstrate the key role that craft practice has to play in developing Britain’s creative economy in the face of increasing global competition, and to develop ways of working and living which harness the value of crafts for social, cultural and economic well-being.