Made in the Middle Contemporary craft from across the Midlands
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission of the publishers. All work Š the artists Exhibition text Š Craftspace Paperback Edition ISBN 978-0-9565121-0-9 First published in 2012 by Craftspace, Unit 208, The Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Digbeth, Birmingham B9 4AA, United Kingdom +44 (0)121 608 6668 www.madeinthemiddle.org www.craftspace.co.uk info@craftspace.co.uk
Foreword As Craftspace approaches its twenty-fifth year, Made in the Middle, as part of a recurring series of open exhibitions, has charted over two decades of professional contemporary craft practice in the West Midlands and now the East. Since the previous Made in the Middle there has been much radical change in the world. The consequences of over consumption and mass production are bringing about shifts in consumer values towards a renewed appreciation of quality, the handmade, the customised and the distinctive. Craft has a currency beyond commodity with a resurgence in making and crafting for pleasure, to acquire new skills and also as a connective social process. Professional artists are making, exhibiting and selling in economically challenging times and if their practice is to be sustainable they must also be increasingly aware of environmental impacts. In terms of future generations of artists, there are concerning changes to further and higher education with the closure of many specialist craft courses. We will need a diverse range of imaginative solutions and partnerships to enable creative agency, learning and career progression. As an independent and self-directed organisation Craftspace has the ability to work organically, take risks and develop partnerships which encourage innovation. We initiate creative projects which stimulate critical thinking, curiosity about and participation in contemporary crafts in the widest social and cultural
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contexts. Craftspace is a producer, repository and sharer of knowledge, expertise and experience. A conduit for signposting, partnerships and forging connections between people and organisations to grow engagement with contemporary craft. Investing in high quality interactions and exchanges between artists, audiences and organisations results in enlarging cultural and social capital across society. As with all our exhibitions the research and development phase of Made in the Middle has been underpinned by a process of enquiry. Apprenticeships in the Making action research project has tested the feasibility of pathways into craft within a sector that largely comprises sole traders. A series of events and a conference will accompany the exhibition as it tours. I would like to thank our funders Arts Council England, the selectors and our venue partners for their active support and the artists for their outstanding and inspirational work. Finally huge thanks are due to cocurators Emma Daker from Craftspace, Craig Ashley from mac birmingham and Liz Cooper from The National Centre for Craft & Design for their shared vision, expertise, boundless energy and commitment. I hope you enjoy the exhibition and find resonance with it. Deirdre Figueiredo, MBE Director of Craftspace
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Imogen Luddy sketchbook
Introduction Welcome to the seventh exhibition in the Made in the Middle series. Previously showcasing contemporary craft from the West Midlands, this year the exhibition has been expanded for the first time to include the East Midlands and celebrate craft practice across the whole region. This exhibition brings together thirty-five makers whose diverse practice reflects the wealth of high quality craft produced across the region and the talent nurtured in the Midlands. In a changing economic climate this Made in the Middle considers Pathways to Craft, drawing out various routes to careers in making. The aim of the exhibition and this accompanying catalogue is to demonstrate alternative ways to making as a career, not only through the exhibitors’ experiences but also through the action research project Apprenticeships in the Making. Made in the Middle also reflects on developments in craft. In recent years the use of digital processes and technologies has grown significantly. A focus on digital work highlights the growing interest in these processes and how makers are pushing technology to create innovative pieces.
Jon Williams their selection has been a catalyst to create new work they’ve had intentions of developing for a while, but have previously lacked sufficient impetus. Despite the difficulty of the current economic situation across the UK, this exhibition demonstrates the innovative ways that makers have found and will continue to find to launch, develop and re-orientate their careers, while always inspiring and delighting audiences and buyers with their skill and imagination. We hope that you will enjoy seeing the exhibition as much as we have enjoyed putting it together. Emma Daker, Craig Ashley and Liz Cooper Made in the Middle is a partnership between Craftspace and mac birmingham in collaboration with The National Centre for Craft & Design. #madeitm
The exhibition has also presented makers with unique opportunities to develop. Anna Collette Hunt, commissioned through Made in the Middle, is expanding her practice by experimenting with the potential of smart phone technology to develop a more interactive way of working. For Karina Thompson and
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Pathways to Craft One of the most striking phenomena over the last decade or so has been the resurgent interest in craft. This has been a quiet insurrection… a slow-burning revolt against a quarter century of feverish consumer-led ‘development’ that inspired a range of new crafters - hobbyists, activists, and professional makers. Together they shared a fundamental impetus to explore an economy of desire based in independent and embodied material production as a means to a less alienated world making and quality of life. As a result, craft making, doing and being, as a form of political economy, has steadily been shifting from the periphery to a position nearer centre stage. The upsurge emphasises craft as social practice as much as artefact production. It cultivates self-help and celebrates a micro-politics of grass-roots DIY, feminist ‘craftivism’ (Stitch ‘n Bitch, yarn bombing), transition and slow movement thinking, the revival in local farmers markets, craft fairs, and regional craft festivals. A critical factor has been the use of on-line tools, such as YouTube DIY videos, sites such as Etsy.com, practitioner and activist micro blogs, Facebook, Twitter. Hitherto, most entry points to craft have typically consisted of more conventional routes through further education (FE) or, more common still, higher education (HE). The issue now, however, is to what extent this can continue. There has been a steadily accelerating trend in craft course closures over the last twenty years, (The Design Commission quotes a Crafts Council figure of at least twelve significant closures since 1993). Universities point to a fall in demand and trace this to a reduction in the creative use of materials in schools, with Art & Design
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and Design & Technology studies becoming increasingly drawn to screen-based work. Furthermore, as the English Baccalaureate and the Government drive Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to top the schools agenda, time for the arts within the curriculum is being further eroded. However, rather than simply blaming schools, a deeper interpretation would return to that unrepeatable pre-crisis quarter century of consumer-led socio-economic restructuring - uncontrolled and unsustainable turbocharged by a massive de-regulated shadow economy of debt and futures finance. In particular, it would note the ‘disappearance’ of making in the UK as an effect of the transfer of production into cheap offshore labour markets; and it would explore the flourishing of a service economy and political-establishment that has consistently underplayed the value of creative (manual) labour. It might also, in passing, record how the twentythree years experiment in school Design & Technology studies runs parallel with these wider societal changes. Either way, the closure trend is likely to increase under the new HE funding system which removes Government support for the arts and humanities. Courses with low recruitment numbers and/or high-cost facilities such as workshops will be especially vulnerable, as will second career starters and those diversifying from a first subject into a new specialty - categories that both tend to be well represented in craft education, as this exhibition suggests. Given crafts applied nature, a possible complementary pathway liess through apprenticeships, with qualifications
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and without. Currently, only a small minority of makers enter this way. Part of the problem rests in the SME profile of many craft businesses and their lack of capacity to employ and mentor. But the issue is not insurmountable, as Made in the Middle illustrates. For its part, the Government states that it intends to expand apprenticeships, particularly higher level schemes. This is desperately needed. Presently, Creative & Cultural Skills, the sector skills council covering craft, has just one (recently launched) apprenticeship scheme in jewellery. Skillset, the body supporting training in media, provides an apprenticeship only for fashion and textiles. In short, the expansion of at-work routes to craft, including Continuing Professional Development (CPD), will be critically important but it will require that successful craft enterprises also step forward to meet the challenge. Uncovering new pathways to craft will also undoubtedly imply a willingness to explore new tools and technologies, not least digital. The craft upsurge was, as noted, quick to utilise the Internet; but, as Made in the Middle signals, makers are now increasingly exploring the integration of digital design and manufacture into traditional craft procedures. The availability of high-quality but cheap and accessible systems is a critical factor; 3-D prototyping and manufacturing systems, once the preserve of university research departments, are beginning to spread across business parks in a manner reminiscent of the early days of the digital print and publishing revolution. Their availability will be an enormous boon to locally rooted craft-leaning enterprises. Looking ahead, 3-D print systems will appear as home-based tools in the not too distant future, adding #madeitm
further impetus to the ‘home’ craft revolution. In many ways then, while the outlook is not encouraging, there are marked possibilities. To succeed however, we need to combat atomisation and ensure all parties are invited into the tent. In this sense the challenge will be not only to proliferate new pathways, but also to link pathways - all pathways - between private, public and voluntary sectors – and between amateur and professional, individual and communitarian, studio artist and activist, commercial and environmental, in-situ material and global immaterial, between all of these and all possible entry points - self-taught, FE, HE and apprenticeship based. The aim must be to bring these configurations into productive conversation, finding common cause in crafts actualisation of individual and collective agency and translating these exchanges into new agendas, practices, audiences and affects. In this way we might actuate the enormous ethicalcommunitarian and productive entrepreneurial energies that craft harbours, to help create a more resilient, more humane, post-crisis society. Malcolm Ferris Malcolm is Research & Academic Development Director at Plymouth College of Art (PAC) where he produces Making Futures, an initiative exploring the crafts in the context of global sustainability agendas. The applied arts at PAC have a long history and enjoy a strong reputation, and the college is investing heavily in new craft workshops incorporating advanced digital design and fabrication laboratories, opening in September 2013.
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Things machines have made… Hack and tinker are words not usually associated with the making of contemporary craft, but they are being redefined, helping to construct a new visual language for makers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Words like these are becoming part of the language of a significant, growing group of makers who are appropriating new digital tools. So laser cutters, CNC milling machines and 3D printers are becoming valuable additions to the craft toolbox. Making is innate, it is hard-wired in our DNA, so it is no wonder that these makers are attracted to the technology, hacking the software by rewriting the code, tinkering with the hardware, and in doing so creating poetic and meaningful objects. Their work often crosses the increasingly porous boundaries between art, craft, design and science and in doing so makes a valuable contribution to the future of craft. Digital technology may appear to be an uncomfortable bedfellow to the plastic arts, computerised tools are more likely to be associated with the workmanship of certainty than the workmanship of risk.1 Nevertheless, makers are inventive, and this is where hacking and tinkering come in. Take 3D printers for example, they are part of a suite of technologies known collectively as Additive Manufacturing, originally developed for engineering purposes. They operate by dividing a virtual CAD model into extremely thin slices, using a binder or laser to build the actual object, layer by layer. It is an expensive and sophisticated process that removes the constraints of design for manufacture, where material qualities and processes have to be taken into account when designing an object. The attractiveness of this 8
way of working has led to the development of relatively inexpensive desktop 3D printers,2 aimed at democratising access to the technology. Allied to this is an open-source movement developing a range of materials including ceramics, cement, wood powder, and glass. They share recipes, fine tuning materials and encouraging experimentation. It is exactly this approach that is demonstrated by a number of Made in the Middle exhibitors who are embracing and helping to develop this new visual language. In doing so they do not reject the past. Traditional tools and processes take their place alongside the new and together they are often used to reinterpret historical objects in a contemporary typology. It is not just digital tools that are being taken into the craft toolbox, it’s also information. The digital revolution has enabled facts and figures to be converted to data and with the appropriate interface they can be made tangible. Not only can objects be created in a virtual world and made real, but the real can be made virtual. Once you have the information, the impossible can become possible. The sceptical might accuse digital makers of succumbing to the same temptations that lead to queues outside Apple stores on the launch of the latest go-faster gizmo, and yes, some are led down the slippery slope to the ‘Media of Attractions’3 by technological enchantment. Fortunately we have makers like Karina Thompson who exemplify the inquiring mind of the twenty-first century maker, subtly integrating the new and old in a way that goes beyond the definition of craft, creating a body of work that uses digital medical imaging to help us understand the #madeitm
diagnosis and treatment of blood disorders or visualise the beating of her heart. Digital makers simply have a larger toolbox and the most successful choose the appropriate tool not only to realise an idea, but to do so in an expressive way. Gareth Neal is well known for his ‘traditionally worn’ series that combine traditional woodworking and CNC milling to create a range that reveal Queen Anne or Louis XV furniture silhouettes inside a modernist envelope. The Victoria Log, part of his Urban Picnic series goes further, integrating the dying art of stringing inlay with digital manufacturing. By bringing together these working methods he succeeds in demonstrating their compatibility and emphasises that the new does not replace the old. Learning to use the new tools can be a challenging experience where previous skills, both tacit and explicit have to be shaped within a technology that is governed by strict, often counterintuitive rules. Some craft practitioners work round this by finding ways to use the tools that are not detailed in the manual, others have invested in understanding and developing their own code. Either way, a lively debate has ensued with makers such as Imogen Aust actively questioning the way in which makers and audiences engage with materials in an increasingly virtual world. There are a small group of makers whose work is going beyond the material by engaging the viewer in a simultaneous actual and virtual experience. Andrew Tanner, in collaboration with Royal Winton and Unanico, has designed tableware whose surface pattern comes to life through augmented reality accessed through a #madeitm
smartphone app. The hedgerow scene comes to life, including a butterfly that ‘flutters through the hawthorn and stitchwort’. Anna Collette Hunt was commissioned to develop an app especially for this exhibition, creating another sublime example of how the physical can be 'liberated' by a virtual experience. Though we are surrounded by computer technology, the digital revolution is still in its infancy and it seems certain that it will become further embedded in our daily activities. Digital code is simply a new language, and those who learn to speak it are at the forefront of a revolution, one that is breaking down outdated perceptions of craft by building on its past triumphs and giving it a new voice. It is one of the roles of makers such as these to question and shape the future of the digital revolution, and use it to give craft a meaningful place in the twenty-first century. Michael Eden 2011 Michael is a ceramicist. He creates objects inspired by historical objects and contemporary themes, through which the viewer may be engaged in a narrative. After 20 years as a studio potter, Eden undertook an MPhil research project at the Royal College of Art. This explored how an interest in digital design and manufacturing could be developed and combined with the craft skills he had acquired during his previous experience. His work further explores the relationship between hand and digital tools, investigating experimental manufacturing technology and materials. Notes: 1.
Pye, David, (1968), The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge University Press, pp.17-29
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For examples see: www.bitsfrombytes.com,www.makerbot.com and www.reprapcentral.com/vmchk.html
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‘Artefacts of digital culture whose appeal is essentially their perceived novelty. They attract less for what they mean than for the fact that they are.’ Lunenfeld, Peter, (2001), Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. p.173
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Stuart Akroyd
The Traditional Path The most common route to a making career, which may be regarded as the conventional path, is from school to university or college to an applied art course. However, this path is now perceived as under threat, with a number of craft courses and departments across the nation closing following the economic downturn. Many within the craft sector are concerned that this offers diminishing opportunities for people to break into making careers. Applied arts courses are a valuable basis for a making career, enabling practitioners to expand into a variety of roles and sectors, and to acquire important and inspirational theory as well as making skills. As demonstrated by these six exhibitors, there are many pathways to follow when the route to practice has been established, including teaching, designing, commercial and private work, or establishing your own studio supporting other makers.
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Stuart Akroyd’s glassmaking career began twenty-five years ago in the North East with a glass and ceramics degree. From there he undertook postgraduate training at the International Glass Centre, in Brierley Hill in the West Midlands, a key location with a rich glass heritage. Following his training Stuart became designer and head glassmaker at Lakeland Crystal, before launching Stuart Akroyd Contemporary Glass. He is recognised nationally and internationally as an accomplished maker, sought after for private and public collections, and in addition he supports emerging makers with work in his studio.
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The Traditional Path Jenny Creasey graduated with a degree in design crafts in 2009 and shortly after became artist in residence for a year at De Montfort University in Leicester. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. In addition to participating in a business support programme, she won the Enterprise Inc 2010 Business Development Award. Jenny also won the 2010 Creative Leicestershire Bursary. Having relocated her studio back to Rutland, Jenny exhibits and sells her work through craft fairs and her membership of Design Factory.
Jenny Creasey
Norman Cherry
Norman Cherry followed a traditional route with a degree in his native Scotland graduating in 1970. After working as an assistant to a practicing jeweller for a year or so, he set up his own practice, in addition to running a gallery for almost a decade. In the late 1970s Norman embarked on a teaching career, initially part-time, but then assuming more senior and demanding roles which drew him into England, eventually to Birmingham where he was Head of the School of Jewellery for twelve years. Professor Cherry is now Pro Vice Chancellor and Head of the College of Arts at the recently established university in Lincoln. Norman continues as a practicing jeweller.
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Acknowledgements Exhibition curation: Emma Daker, Craftspace; Craig Ashley, mac birmingham; Liz Cooper, The National Centre for Craft & Design. Made in the Middle is a partnership between Craftspace and mac birmingham in collaboration with The National Centre for Craft & Design. We would like to thank the staff of all three organisations for their support with the development and tour of this exhibition. These are: Craftspace: Lisa Falaschi, Deirdre Figueiredo, Catherine Maguire, Stuart Shotton, Linda Strain and Emma Syer. mac birmingham: Charli Hill, Ellen Pope, Amy Smart, Daniel Whitehouse, Silas Wood. The National Centre for Craft & Design: Clare Edwards, Helen Fletcher, Laura Mabbutt, Jayne Olney. With special thanks to Lauren Davies. We would also like to thank all the exhibitors for their support and time. In addition we thank the invited makers for their contributions: Norman Cherry, Vanessa Cutler, Yoko Izawa, Kate McBride, Laura McCafferty, Gareth Neal, Andrew Tanner and Gill Wilson. Exhibition selectors: Michael Eden, ceramicist, Teleri Lloyd-Jones, Assistant Editor, Crafts magazine, Craig Ashley Producer, Visual Arts, mac birmingham, Melanie Kidd, former Head of Exhibitions, The National Centre for Craft & Design, Hayley Banks, Project Officer, Design Factory and Heather Rigg Director, Designer Maker West Midlands. Catalogue contributors: Michael Eden and Malcolm Ferris.
For the exhibition: Exhibition design and interpretation by Pottinger and Cole. Exhibition print and catalogue design by Simon Meddings Associates. Catalogue photography by Richard Battye and Andy Kruczek. Stirring the Swarm App designers: Xtremics Ltd. iPad content design: Kuku Apps The Apprentices in the Making project was coordinated by Stuart Shotton supported by Daniel Whitehouse. The project partners were mac birmingham, Fairbridge A Prince’s Trust programme and the School of Jewellery, Birmingham City University. The documentary film was supported by Reel Access. This exhibition has been made possible through a grant from the Grants for the Arts programme, Arts Council England. We are grateful to the following for their support: Media Sponsors: Craft and Design Magazine. Pfaff Sewing Machines, Creative & Cultural Skills, Designer Maker West Midlands, Design Factory. Made in the Middle is a national touring exhibition. For details of the tour and venues see: www.madeinthemiddle.org Craftspace is a crafts development organisation working to push boundaries and perceptions of crafts practice, exhibition presentation and creative learning. We do this through a programme of touring exhibitions, research partnerships and learning and participatory projects. Craftspace receives revenue funding from Arts Council England West Midlands and the Baring Foundation. Craftspace is a non-profit distributing company, limited by guarantee, not having a share capital and registered in England, No 2492368 and is an Educational Charity, No 1001237.
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