Experimenting Without Digital Part 1

This was making just judging a craft knife to create a stencil. The point of this was to see what is was like to step away from digital and try and make something comepletly by hand. Usually when working with printed crafts like screen printing, the designs would usually be digital based. So this was something new for me, I found it takes a lot more planning and time (this was my 4th attemp...) and how i take the undo button on photoshop for granted.

It may has failed as a stencil, as the card was too thin. But over all I am pleased with how it turned out. With digital I can be a bit of a perfectionist and wouldn't accept any errors. However with this I understand the aura of the handcrafted, the flaws don't seem to bother me and just add to the charm of crafted objects. 

What is the role and value of crafts today?

What is the role and value of crafts today?

With Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman opening in two months, the British Museum has asked contributors from the craft world to share their thoughts on the importance of craft today.

First up is Teleri Lloyd-Jones, Assistant Editor of Crafts Magazine. There will also be a rescheduled live Twitter Q&A at 13.00 BST on Thursday 18 August 2011 – join the conversation using #craftdebate

£1 billion a year. That’s the simple answer, the total annual turnover of contemporary craftspeople in this country. Now that’s a big number, but of course craft is a lot more valuable than that.

Understanding how something is made, why it’s made that way, is more vital to modern life than ever. Craft is a language of material, provenance and making. It is learning the value of things. Sure, handmade, well-made things aren’t cheap but their value isn’t solely monetary. It’s political and social – to know how and where something came into being makes us more invested in it, so much so we become more responsible consumers. The handmade has unique aesthetic pleasures in itself but has also become intertwined with a whole bundle of different values, be they anti-consumerist, ‘localist’, green, or even just plain-old fashionable.

As soon as we widen our gaze beyond the shop or the gallery, we see craft appearing in the most unanticipated places. Take for example the recent trachea transplant, a world first. It was made possible not only by the dexterity of the hands of a surgeon but also the glass artist Matt Durran who made the mould on which to grow the transplant scaffold. Last year, an orthopaedic surgeon from the Royal Glamorgan Hospital placed his junior as a carpenter’s apprentice recognising the similarities in their practices: the tooling, teamworking and problem-solving. These skills are cross-disciplinary, neither art nor science, but always hard-won and always valuable.

So perhaps part of craft’s value is locked up in its confusion, the discussions to be had at its fuzzy edges. A surgeon may have similar needle-and-thread skills at their fingertips to a hobbyist and yet their contexts couldn’t be more different. We can all agree that a potter sat at a wheel has craft skills but what about a hairdresser, or a lab technician? In fact, is it possible to have a craftsperson who doesn’t use their hands at all to make things? Is burgeoning digital technology, like 3d printing, just another tool in the toolbox or is it a game-changer?

What a country makes is part of its fabric, its identity. Such importance has recently been recognised politically by the government’s launch of ‘Made by Britain’ a celebration of domestic manufacturing and ingenuity. And a quick flick back to George Osborne’s last budget and we can read about his ‘Britain held aloft by the march of the makers’. Even though the vast majority of our economy is not built on making things, still the cultural drive to make has intense political currency, it tugs at our heartstrings. What’s important here is nurturing and educating those who think with their hands, ensuring young people can discover their own talents and retain skills for a new generation.

As the skills and material knowledge central to craft continue to have great value it is the role itself that changes. Technologies advance at break-neck speeds and the public’s desire for authenticity grows making the role of the crafts crucial for modern life. Whether traditional or innovative, art or science, on show in a gallery window or hidden away in unexpected places, making has the power to deeply satisfy. And all it needs from us is a little patience and appreciation.

WHY MACHINES ARE NOT THE ENEMY

Designer and curator Chris Eckersley explains the ideas behind his new exhibition Real Craft

It’s a popular myth that old skills are dying out. You only have to look around to see high levels of craft skill still practised in everyday making and manufacturing – but much goes unrecognised, thanks to the bad press machines are sometimes given as an aid to manufacture. This is a mindset which insists anything made in a ‘factory’ – as opposed to a ‘workshop’ – cannot be ‘crafted’. Even a workshop can be suspect; since Bernard Leach told potters they were artists, the craft preference has been for ‘studio’ production. Easily portrayed as inhuman (think of Chaplin’s Modern Times) and the enemy of hand-production, in truth the machine is, as everyone knows, simply a useful tool.

SILK SCARF ON LOOM, SARAH BEADSMOORE

Eventually many of these prejudices can be traced back to William Morris. Before Morris, Henry Cole and the Design Reform movement had been critical of the goods produced by British manufacturers, crusading against what he saw as bad taste; but Cole had no problem with the use of improved manufacturing processes. Morris, however, blamed the machine for the decline in standards, and sought to return production methods to a pre-mechanised age, as described in his utopian 1890 view of a post-mechanised future, News From Nowhere. Although a devout socialist, it is obvious that Morris’s early Nimbyism was quite reactionary. The message: is ‘No factories in England’s green and pleasant land’ – which is easy to say if you’re high up on the Victorian rich list.

Gordon Russell is a much more interesting character. Growing up in the Cotswolds in the early 1900s, an area then heavily under the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement, he set up a furniture workshop in the village of Broadway. But by the mid-20s he recognised hand and machine as complementary, installing bandsaws, planers, dimension saws and the like, to gear up for batch production. ‘The most urgent job of all was to teach the machine manners,’ he said later. So he’s a key figure, the direct link between the Arts and Crafts and the Modern Movements.

These days the notion of craft skill aided by labour-saving machinery is common in all sorts of specialised trades. This is part of what I call ‘real craft’: real in the sense that it’s undertaken by highly skilled people in many fields in the everyday world; not in a fine art studio, nor at a heritage site, nor as a hobby or pastime. Sometimes their input is recognised; sometimes they are anonymous. They don’t necessarily identify themselves as artists, or as ‘special’ – but still they have pride in their work and a satisfying job.

INKHEAD ESPRESSO CUP DESIGNED BY FLORIAN HUTTER FOR THE NEW ENGLISH

Besides, carpenters, plasterers, tailors, forged-metal workers, musical instrument-makers and others still work in ‘real’ ways, recognisable from centuries ago. In his 1948 book Mechanization Takes Command, Siegfried Giedion talks about the transition in modes of production from the Mediaeval to the mechanised eras: ‘A remarkable symbiosis occurs. Handicraft lives on side by side, or intermingled with, industrial production, for the Gothic roots did not perish altogether. A token of this was the obligation to pass through the traditional stages from apprentice to journeyman and master. Even the factory mechanic was trained in a similar way.’ Over 60 years on this is still relevant.

My exhibition therefore pulls together examples from a diverse group of craftspeople to illustrate an idea of ‘real craft’. Some are well known in their own right; some work behind the scenes in bigger organisations. The common thread is that everything is made with care, with love, and with a very high level of craft skill.

http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/articles/why-machines-are-not-the-enemy/

What is Craft?

Cinderella Table, Jeroen Verhoeven, 2005. Museum no. W.1-2006

To celebrate a partnership between the V&A and the Crafts Council, we asked leading figures in the craft world to tell us what the term craft means to them. 

Mark Jones

Director, Victoria & Albert Museum (2001 - 2011)

Craft is remembering that art is seen, felt and heard as well as understood, knowing that not all ideas start with words, thinking with hands as well as head.

Rosy Greenlees

Director, Crafts Council

'Contemporary craft is about making things.  It is an intellectual and physical activity where the maker explores the infinite possibilities of materials and processes to produce unique objects. To see craft is to enter a world of wonderful things which can be challenging, beautiful, sometimes useful, tactile, extraordinary; and to understand and enjoy the energy and care which has gone into their making.'

Laurie Britton-Newell

Curator, ‘Out of the ordinary’ exhibition, V&A,  November 2007

'I use the word craft as an umbrella term, not as the definition of a separate discipline. I find craft difficult when it has an ‘s’ on the end; the crafts implies something clear cut, but it isn’t. When craft is involved with the making of something, be it a pot or a piece of writing, it usually means that the process of how and why it has been put together has been well considered, and generally I prefer it.  Instead of using "that’s cool" people could start saying "that’s craft"!'

Caroline Broadhead

Practitioner

'What craft means to me is the making part, the how you make, and this is an exchange with materials - what you give to a material, and what it gives back. This exchange can be awkward, it can be a struggle, or one party can dominate, but if it is a productive exchange, then that's when it's worth looking at. But ultimately, it is the extra something that makes it special.'

Christopher Frayling

Rector, Royal College of Art

'If you look up the word 'craft' in dictionaries of phrase and fable, the entry will say "see freemasonry".  That's craft as secret knowledge, locked away in some secret place known only to master-craftspeople. Although there's a strong element of tacit knowledge - as distinct from formal knowledge - in all craft activity, this is in fact far from a secret form of knowledge, just a very difficult one to pin down. Making close contact with materials, technical skills plus imagination, tangible results in the form of things, sometimes pushing at the outer limits of function, taking the material for a walk. The American Customs & Excise definition of 'a work of art' is that the owner must be able to prove it is completely useless. Craft work is something else, though it can produce objects for contemplation as well as objects for use.'

Amanda Game

Director, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

'Craft is the knowledge of a language and its expressive possibilities. Shakespeare’s sonnets; Thonet’s bentwood chairs; Shostakovitch quartets: all can be described in terms of craft. Human imagination can use craft to invent freely in the world of ideas, materials and forms. Thus are the worlds of design, art, engineering, science and architecture all born of craft.'

Paul Greenhalgh

Director, Corcoran Museum, Washington DC, and editor of ‘The Persistence of Craft’

'Craft has changed its meaning fundamentally at least three times in the last two centuries, and it means fundamentally different things from nation to nation even in the Western world. So there can be no one-liner that identifies larger single meanings, as it doesn't have one. If it is of use in the current context, it is to recognize the significance of genre-based practice in the arts. It should also be a useful category in a global cultural environment. It might even have meaning as a signifier of a socio-political outlook. But it should have nothing to do with aesthetics, and less to do with negative approaches to technology.'

David Revere McFadden

Chief curator and vice president, Museum of Arts & Design, New York

'Craft, art, and design are words heavily laden with cultural baggage. For me, they all connote the profound engagement with materials and process that is central to creativity. Through this engagement form, function, and meaning are made tangible. It is time to move beyond the limitations of terminologies that fragment and separate our appreciation of creative actions, and consider the "behaviors of making" that practitioners share.'

Professor Simon Olding

Director, Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, Surrey

'An expression of human endeavour creatively realised on the borders of utility, design, architecture, sculpture and art. Craft is specific, recognizable and broad enough to carry loaded meaning with good cheer. It means little without its association to the individual maker and the organisations that give it life and value.'

Caroline Roux

Acting editor, Crafts magazine

'Craft has never been more important than now, as an antidote to mass production and as a practice in which the very time is takes to produce an object becomes part of its value in a world that often moves too fast.'

Edmund de Waal

Practitioner

'Craft is a starting place, a set of possibilities.
It avoids absolutes, certainties, over-robust definitions, solace.
It offers places, interstices, where objects and people meet.
It is unstable, contingent.
It is about experience. It is about desire.
It can be beautiful.'

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/w/what-is-craft/