Craft as community
Simon Moreton
If we can expand these ideas about what underpins practices of making, and what situates them in given settings, we can better engage with the processes by which communities might be forged. This next section attempts to draw together some literature from inside and outside the craft canon to think about the multiple ways we can understand craft communities.
Communities of practice/interest literature
The literature on communities of practice provides a useful take on how we understand the way communities/groups form to produce ideas, goods, services and discourses. In particular, there is a focus on knowledge, creativity and innovation. How can this literature speak to questions of craft? According to Amin and Roberts (2008) the communities of practice literature emerged as a challenge to the orthodoxy of how economic practice explained creativity and innovation. They suggest now, however, that communities of practice theory threatens to become a new orthodoxy and establish alternative ways of understanding the spatiality of situated knowledges. Of interest here are their comments on the local/global question and communities in knowledge production, and specifically their comments on the nature of proximity and spatial terminology. They argue for “an approach that takes space and spatial boundaries to be traced by the geometries of situated practice rather than expecting such practice to conform to pre-given spatial formations – offices, regions, corporate structures, virtual architectures – imbued with distinctive properties. (p. 365)
This theorising is a useful reading of the debate because it enables to map how spaces emerge from community practices, and not the other way around. Craft, then, in its emotional/affective/online/offline auspices creates new spatialities into which knowledges (about experience, techniques, sustainability etc.) can be situated and from their flow out in different ways to other people in the network.
Connecting together aspects of emotional labour and knowledge production are the concerns expressed by Niedderer and Townsend in an unpublished conference paper (2010):
“This paper investigates how research and craft can join in the enterprise of craft research to advance craft as a discipline that makes a contribution to future living. The rationale for the paper is that craft research – that is research into, for and through craft practice – is still relatively new, and that craft is traditionally associated with the creation of artefacts as a source of experience and emotion while research is devoted to the production of knowledge” (p. 1)
Craft specifics are again lacking. However, I think it is possible to consider the practice of making craft knowledge; how we talk about it, how we understand its potential, how we promote it, indeed, how we reify craft as an ‘it’, is all established within a community of practice, in which we are actively implicating and constructing those knowledges.
Online/offline community making
There is some literature that investigates the relationship between communities and use of ICT, but very little that specifically engages with how craft and practices of making can shape/interrupt community making practices. Quite useful as a starting point is Haythornthwaite and Kendall (2010). This work, an introduction to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist, engages with the limits to/possibilities for online and offline communities. In particular, it raises questions about what happens when online communities become material or ‘actual’ and vice versa. The special issue itself deals with the role of the internet as it intersects with access to technology and place making (Mesch and Talmud, 2010) glocalisation and class divides (Hampton, 2010), the nature of mobile communities (Ling and Stald, 2010), geography and community (Erickson, 2010), and the role of media and virtual communities in displaced Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip (Lev-On, 2010). These are all worth exploring for their engagement with different formations of communities, community networks and understanding of geographical processes of space/place-making. They do not engage, however, directly with practices of making (see also: (Oulasvirta et al., 2010))
Some explorations of making and creative practice are theoretically uncritical but present useful accounts of practices of crafting. Rosner and Ryokai (2009) explore creative processes of knitters, but do so in relation to the use of a tool called Spyn “—a system that associates digital messages with physical locations on knit fabric. Using Spyn, knitters can store and retrieve information in relation to when and where the information was recorded while crafting.” (p. 195). The aim of the paper is to “show the creative and complex ways people used digital tools to connect to friends and loved ones while knitting handmade objects” (p. 203). See also: (Johnson and Hawley, 2004).
Online intersections also relate to practices of making (Bratich, 2011). Bratich (2011) argues for understanding crafting, community practices like sewing groups and knitting circles, as instances of immaterial labour (Lazzarato, 1996). He suggests that in the process of making and being associated with these practices, craft emerges as something that we need to rethink (in his case, through autonomist Marxist theory). Drawing on Hardt (1999) and his assertion that “affective labour “is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities”(Hardt 1999p. 89), Bratich argues that thinking about “Craft-work as affective production allows us to think about value differently. Untied from capitalist valorization, craft-work produces communities and subjectivity laterally and contains an autonomous circuit of meaning and relationships.” (p 309). He suggests that:
From the perspective of crafting, tools, patterns, weavers, and products are connected in the transmission of skills, tips, history, family knowledge, cultural rituals, and other immaterial/material practices. It is capitalism that cuts into this fabric to split subjects from objects in order to professionalize and commodify them. (Bratich 2011 p. 315)
What online practices can we see in making craft? Etsy and online commerce sites, with attachments to blogs, discussion fora, and other social media platforms are a site of engagement for crafters wishing to share skills and sell (Bonanni and Parkes, 2010) and even long discussions about ideology and practice (Williams, 2011). It is a site that provides for, and constitutes its markets and its contributors. There is also a website dedicated to gathering and encouraging backlash against Etsy’s ideals. Subtitled “DIY to WTF”, Regretsy lampoons some of the materials available. It states
“Etsy bills itself as The online market place for all things handmade. Everything on the site is supposed to be handmade or vintage. Unfortunately, a lot of people post things that are factory made, not vintage and basically shit you’d find at a yard sale. “ (http://www.regretsy.com/faq/)
This reflexive process of ‘policing’ making is in itself an interesting dimension to the online community debate: how do communities of dissent sprig up? How do they challenge, undermine, or galvanise makers?
How are knowledges being made about crafting? Williams (2011) emphasises the use of familiar online tools as a resource for collectivising crafters into a movement. Doesn’t critically consider how this happens. Problematically uses Wikipedia as a source of information for projects, politics and self-definitions. Wikipedia is a site of production of knowledge in this instance, acting as a site/field in which the connections that Newmeyer (2008) suggest are missing are being made (an example, the use of quilting to hide messages relating to the whereabouts of the Underground Railway is cited in both papers). In other words, craftivist practices are being actively constituted on the internet, and adopting specific histories and examples to appropriate a specific history for themselves. There is thus a complex set of practices that make online knowledges and online communities (Dawkins, 2011).
There is also some work that examines the intersection between digital tools and practices of making. One indicative example of this is Johnson and Hawley (2004):
This study of Internet-based quilting groups offers insight into the use of technology by those who choose to quilt, who value patience, connectedness, and expression, and who have integrated technology into their lives, rather than submitting to it.
This paper explores the relationship between digital technologies and the way things are made by groups who associate through the Internet. Conference papers, such as Torrey et al. (2009), explore the complexities of learning material practices learned in online settings. They recognise the bodily and embodied elements of craft making, and the immateriality of knowledges and position this within debates about how we learn, seek and use information through ICT. Wallace and Press (2004) explore how digital of tools are used to explore aesthetic debates. Their paper, “draws on practice centred research combining craft practice and digital technology to illuminate the role of beauty in facilitating the engagement with digital complexity.” (Wallace and Press, 2004 p. 42).
There is more work to be done here to define a) what sorts of community are present and b) what the limits to them are. Work also is lacking on theoretical questions such as a) how does the affective process of making intersect with process of community production? and b) how do objects circulate in online worlds?
Craft labour as community practice in creative economies
Craft labour and its role in the creative industries has been note recently, for example by Banks (2010) and Hughes (2011). Banks (2010) argues that craft labour, which “can be defined as a form of skilled labour that is quality-driven, materially specific and motivated by internal, as well as external, rewards” (p. 308), has been marginalised in contemporary creative labour discussions. This is because the forms of low-paid, contingent labour that deliver some of these outputs have been marginalised in favour of models of individualised creativity that values the ‘arts’ and not the ‘crafts’ as the apogee of creative work. Hughes (2011) largely concurs, but also reinserts with greater clarity an intervention around the concept of gender: Hughes warns of the danger of seeing the historical representation of the craftsperson as a masculine pre-industrialist hero and instead draws attention to the highly gendered nature of work in the creative industries.
Craft, and its associated political contexts – valorisation of objects and skills, types of labour, gender of labour force etc. – is on the agenda. The highly individualising accounts of contemporary British creative policy still privilege individual practice as being central to creative work. This moves beyond the socially informed understanding of creative practices that were described in policy during the first half of Labour’s tenure in office in the late 1990s (Neelands and Choe, 2011). However, with increased scrutiny on questions of self-exploitation, precarious labour, and the notion of solitary creative pursuits, examples of collective practice in creative labour became marginalised.
Although self-exploitation in creative labour is in many ways a highly-individualised practice (McRobbie, 2002, Gill and Pratt, 2008, Gill, 2002), it is also collectivising: the idea of self-exploitation and also, importantly, self-fulfilling labour that encourages and supports the growth of craft communities in a bid to support themselves and others to make, share, and benefit from work (Dawkins, 2011). Thus communities of makers support one another and facilitate, either by assistance in kind or actual, the self-exploitation of creative labour. These aren’t necessarily new arguments in terms of collective practice in the field of arts and crafts. Communities coming together to remake and recreate their own economies of craft are thus also of note here, as the offer an alternative to the straw-person of ‘the creative economy’. This speaks to theoretical debates about the deconstruction of capitalism as put forward by Gibson-Graham (2006, 1996) (a connection also made by (Bratich, 2011).
The Craft Council (CraftsCouncil, 2009, Hunt et al., 2010) has attempted to quantify the contribution made by the craft sector to the UK economy. According to the Crafts Council (CraftsCouncil, 2009), there are at least 88,250 creative practitioners working in the craft sector across the UK. These craft practices include glass-blowing, jewellery making, embroidery, knitting, weaving, stonemasonry, woodworking, basket making, book-binding and pottery. Many craft practitioners are concerned with the quality of their skills and craftsmanship and will spend years perfecting their methods. These business, many of them sole-traders or small enterprises, contribute around £3 billion GVA to the economy each year. The Craft Council also recognise that craft practices have potential to connect people together, whether in person or virtually. Through learning to make, we can share in communities of knowledge, skills and interest. We can communicate through shared memories and values, such as a mutual commitment to activism or sustainable living, a need to establish alternative ways of working, or simply the desire to decorate, repair or improve the quality of our lives.
We find craft uniquely offers the opportunity for people to work with materials, making objects with meaning and permanence that they own, while engaging in conversations that build individual worth and community value. (Hunt et al., 2010 p. 59)
There is a coherent attempt to both qualify and quantify these different benefits, linking together community and economic value in much the same way as has been done with the visual arts more broadly (Merli, 2002, Belifiore, 2004, Belifiore and Bennett, 2007). This is problematic notably because of a) the diversity of crafts practices b) the mundane and the everyday nature of much craft making c) the intersection between fine art and crafts (see Banks 2010 for crit) and d) the variety of pursuits labelled as craft by the DCMS (1998, 2007, 2008). There are perhaps also limits depending on the types of practice that can be supported this way: those crafting practices that are associated with higher overheads and more specialist skills are perhaps less able to create communities of production and sale in the same way as smaller scale practices, such as embroidery, jewellery making and felting.
The Crafts Council have recently released a report that examines some of the facets of the relationship between new technologies, practices of collaboration, and craft (CraftsCouncil, 2011). This document recognises the complex relationship between craft and collaborative practices outside of the crafts:
Craft makers today work in a far greater range of contexts than is widely realised, collaborating – like other creative people – with scientists, technologists and engineers. [In this document] we highlight five innovations – in biotechnology, engineering, materials science, manufacturing and digital & communications technology - that demonstrate the distinctive value added to these collaborations, by makers. (p. 4 )
This an explicit recognition of the contribution craft can make to science/technology/design interventions, but that in order to flourish, a number of criteria need to be met. These are listed on page 7 of the document.
What is needed is research that reinforces and differentiates a) large scale, more ‘artisan’ based craft practices, over ‘everyday’ craft pursuits b) establishes the community context in which those artisan practices are formed.
Communities of craft and wellbeing
Contemporary crafts in the home, within community groups or other sites of engagement, are also politicised in their uses as tools to promote well-being.
Many researchers recognise that using craft in this way is related to convictions about the importance of making, of shared experience and to the relative accessibility of certain craft practices (textiles particularly due to their affordability and accessibility). Work is varied, focusing on creativity more generally (Anderson and Gold, 1998), quilt making (Burt and Atkinson, forthcoming, Grace et al., 2009) detailed engagements with specific elements of the crafting process, e.g. (Reynolds, 2004). A great deal of these appear to be rather ‘thin’ analyses, describing practices and re-inscribing established discourses about the value of making. There is a tendency not to critically engage with concepts such as ‘making’ or ‘creativity’ or the constructs of ‘wellbeing’ that inform their case studies.
It is also important to recognise that the policy context is also distinctive, and that the concept of ‘wellbeing’ is in itself a shifting term. Depending on the different political and historical moments at which projects intersect with notions of wellbeing, will determine the reception, parameters, shape and form of engagement. Sointu (2005), maps these changes, in an article that “relates the shifting meanings of wellbeing to understandings and experiences of personhood in contemporary British society. It analyses the ways in which the use of the notion of wellbeing has been changing during the past two decades through different theories of subjectivity.” (Sointu 2005 p. 256).
Discussions in the workshops pointed towards a need for a more closely evidenced argument for promoting the links between craft and wellbeing. This a challenge proposition not least because the immaterial benefits of making and affective importance of engaging with arts are often assessable only by narrative accounts or by assessment of material outputs e.g. artefacts. Overviews: (Madden and Bloom, 2004, Putland, 2008)
More work that establishes the different ways in which creativity and craft has become established within, in opposition to, or in dialogue with different conceptions of ‘wellness’ is needed.
Sustainable Communities/resilient communities
Sustainability and resilience are important buzzwords. They relate in differing ways to the abilities for populations, communities, groups and individuals to manage risk and uncertainty. This can be done by adopting practices that empower community groups to withstand threats to energy security, to recycle and reuse, to build or construct objects from reclaimed materials, or to create communities that can sustain themselves by providing local resources for basic social needs, like food and education (Egan, 2004). Resilience on the other hand, refers to a slightly different construct. Resilience emerges from a series of uncertainties not delimited to access to resources or green/environmental changes. It encompasses post 9/11 security politics amongst associated attempts to move citizens from being passive to ‘active’ in their engagements with social life (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008). Resilient communities are explored by Chaskin (2007) and this field of work will be fruitful for further study.
These two related-but-different constructs of handling risk and change in contemporary society are useful to frame debates about craft. What role does craft play in these processes of becoming sustainable/resilient? Are questions of re-skilling through craft engaged in resilience discourse? Are the futures that different crafting communities imagine different to those of resilience?
Craft practices readily engage with (re)making and recycling: Craftivisim, in its rejection of mass-produced goods and reclamation of the power of making, is an example of this. Popular literature promotes less wasteful ways of working and recycling (Wasinger, 2009). As suggested at the outset, the politics of arts and crafts movements can be related to contemporary struggles for sustainable practices (Miller, 2011). The Green movement, for example, has been argued to be a central element of the craftivist movement (Williams, 2011). However, what about a) everyday crafts b) crafts inherent upon more complex production methods c) resilience?
Sustainable economies, a discourse based in both financially resilient, ethically guided consumption and production practices and small-scale, innovative business models, also offer a way of framing craft practices. The change in nomenclature should, however, be treated with a critical eye: are these new configurations of practice? Are they new ways of doing economy? Are they in practice nothing more than hailing an existing strategy for ‘making a living’ as ‘novel’ while still maintaining the structures that generate the precarious/low-income/low support contexts in which crafts operate?
If we can expand these ideas about what underpins practices of making, and what situates them in given settings, we can better engage with the processes by which communities might be forged. This next section attempts to draw together some literature from inside and outside the craft canon to think about the multiple ways we can understand craft communities.
Communities of practice/interest literature
The literature on communities of practice provides a useful take on how we understand the way communities/groups form to produce ideas, goods, services and discourses. In particular, there is a focus on knowledge, creativity and innovation. How can this literature speak to questions of craft? According to Amin and Roberts (2008) the communities of practice literature emerged as a challenge to the orthodoxy of how economic practice explained creativity and innovation. They suggest now, however, that communities of practice theory threatens to become a new orthodoxy and establish alternative ways of understanding the spatiality of situated knowledges. Of interest here are their comments on the local/global question and communities in knowledge production, and specifically their comments on the nature of proximity and spatial terminology. They argue for “an approach that takes space and spatial boundaries to be traced by the geometries of situated practice rather than expecting such practice to conform to pre-given spatial formations – offices, regions, corporate structures, virtual architectures – imbued with distinctive properties. (p. 365)
This theorising is a useful reading of the debate because it enables to map how spaces emerge from community practices, and not the other way around. Craft, then, in its emotional/affective/online/offline auspices creates new spatialities into which knowledges (about experience, techniques, sustainability etc.) can be situated and from their flow out in different ways to other people in the network.
Connecting together aspects of emotional labour and knowledge production are the concerns expressed by Niedderer and Townsend in an unpublished conference paper (2010):
“This paper investigates how research and craft can join in the enterprise of craft research to advance craft as a discipline that makes a contribution to future living. The rationale for the paper is that craft research – that is research into, for and through craft practice – is still relatively new, and that craft is traditionally associated with the creation of artefacts as a source of experience and emotion while research is devoted to the production of knowledge” (p. 1)
Craft specifics are again lacking. However, I think it is possible to consider the practice of making craft knowledge; how we talk about it, how we understand its potential, how we promote it, indeed, how we reify craft as an ‘it’, is all established within a community of practice, in which we are actively implicating and constructing those knowledges.
Online/offline community making
There is some literature that investigates the relationship between communities and use of ICT, but very little that specifically engages with how craft and practices of making can shape/interrupt community making practices. Quite useful as a starting point is Haythornthwaite and Kendall (2010). This work, an introduction to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist, engages with the limits to/possibilities for online and offline communities. In particular, it raises questions about what happens when online communities become material or ‘actual’ and vice versa. The special issue itself deals with the role of the internet as it intersects with access to technology and place making (Mesch and Talmud, 2010) glocalisation and class divides (Hampton, 2010), the nature of mobile communities (Ling and Stald, 2010), geography and community (Erickson, 2010), and the role of media and virtual communities in displaced Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip (Lev-On, 2010). These are all worth exploring for their engagement with different formations of communities, community networks and understanding of geographical processes of space/place-making. They do not engage, however, directly with practices of making (see also: (Oulasvirta et al., 2010))
Some explorations of making and creative practice are theoretically uncritical but present useful accounts of practices of crafting. Rosner and Ryokai (2009) explore creative processes of knitters, but do so in relation to the use of a tool called Spyn “—a system that associates digital messages with physical locations on knit fabric. Using Spyn, knitters can store and retrieve information in relation to when and where the information was recorded while crafting.” (p. 195). The aim of the paper is to “show the creative and complex ways people used digital tools to connect to friends and loved ones while knitting handmade objects” (p. 203). See also: (Johnson and Hawley, 2004).
Online intersections also relate to practices of making (Bratich, 2011). Bratich (2011) argues for understanding crafting, community practices like sewing groups and knitting circles, as instances of immaterial labour (Lazzarato, 1996). He suggests that in the process of making and being associated with these practices, craft emerges as something that we need to rethink (in his case, through autonomist Marxist theory). Drawing on Hardt (1999) and his assertion that “affective labour “is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities”(Hardt 1999p. 89), Bratich argues that thinking about “Craft-work as affective production allows us to think about value differently. Untied from capitalist valorization, craft-work produces communities and subjectivity laterally and contains an autonomous circuit of meaning and relationships.” (p 309). He suggests that:
From the perspective of crafting, tools, patterns, weavers, and products are connected in the transmission of skills, tips, history, family knowledge, cultural rituals, and other immaterial/material practices. It is capitalism that cuts into this fabric to split subjects from objects in order to professionalize and commodify them. (Bratich 2011 p. 315)
What online practices can we see in making craft? Etsy and online commerce sites, with attachments to blogs, discussion fora, and other social media platforms are a site of engagement for crafters wishing to share skills and sell (Bonanni and Parkes, 2010) and even long discussions about ideology and practice (Williams, 2011). It is a site that provides for, and constitutes its markets and its contributors. There is also a website dedicated to gathering and encouraging backlash against Etsy’s ideals. Subtitled “DIY to WTF”, Regretsy lampoons some of the materials available. It states
“Etsy bills itself as The online market place for all things handmade. Everything on the site is supposed to be handmade or vintage. Unfortunately, a lot of people post things that are factory made, not vintage and basically shit you’d find at a yard sale. “ (http://www.regretsy.com/faq/)
This reflexive process of ‘policing’ making is in itself an interesting dimension to the online community debate: how do communities of dissent sprig up? How do they challenge, undermine, or galvanise makers?
How are knowledges being made about crafting? Williams (2011) emphasises the use of familiar online tools as a resource for collectivising crafters into a movement. Doesn’t critically consider how this happens. Problematically uses Wikipedia as a source of information for projects, politics and self-definitions. Wikipedia is a site of production of knowledge in this instance, acting as a site/field in which the connections that Newmeyer (2008) suggest are missing are being made (an example, the use of quilting to hide messages relating to the whereabouts of the Underground Railway is cited in both papers). In other words, craftivist practices are being actively constituted on the internet, and adopting specific histories and examples to appropriate a specific history for themselves. There is thus a complex set of practices that make online knowledges and online communities (Dawkins, 2011).
There is also some work that examines the intersection between digital tools and practices of making. One indicative example of this is Johnson and Hawley (2004):
This study of Internet-based quilting groups offers insight into the use of technology by those who choose to quilt, who value patience, connectedness, and expression, and who have integrated technology into their lives, rather than submitting to it.
This paper explores the relationship between digital technologies and the way things are made by groups who associate through the Internet. Conference papers, such as Torrey et al. (2009), explore the complexities of learning material practices learned in online settings. They recognise the bodily and embodied elements of craft making, and the immateriality of knowledges and position this within debates about how we learn, seek and use information through ICT. Wallace and Press (2004) explore how digital of tools are used to explore aesthetic debates. Their paper, “draws on practice centred research combining craft practice and digital technology to illuminate the role of beauty in facilitating the engagement with digital complexity.” (Wallace and Press, 2004 p. 42).
There is more work to be done here to define a) what sorts of community are present and b) what the limits to them are. Work also is lacking on theoretical questions such as a) how does the affective process of making intersect with process of community production? and b) how do objects circulate in online worlds?
Craft labour as community practice in creative economies
Craft labour and its role in the creative industries has been note recently, for example by Banks (2010) and Hughes (2011). Banks (2010) argues that craft labour, which “can be defined as a form of skilled labour that is quality-driven, materially specific and motivated by internal, as well as external, rewards” (p. 308), has been marginalised in contemporary creative labour discussions. This is because the forms of low-paid, contingent labour that deliver some of these outputs have been marginalised in favour of models of individualised creativity that values the ‘arts’ and not the ‘crafts’ as the apogee of creative work. Hughes (2011) largely concurs, but also reinserts with greater clarity an intervention around the concept of gender: Hughes warns of the danger of seeing the historical representation of the craftsperson as a masculine pre-industrialist hero and instead draws attention to the highly gendered nature of work in the creative industries.
Craft, and its associated political contexts – valorisation of objects and skills, types of labour, gender of labour force etc. – is on the agenda. The highly individualising accounts of contemporary British creative policy still privilege individual practice as being central to creative work. This moves beyond the socially informed understanding of creative practices that were described in policy during the first half of Labour’s tenure in office in the late 1990s (Neelands and Choe, 2011). However, with increased scrutiny on questions of self-exploitation, precarious labour, and the notion of solitary creative pursuits, examples of collective practice in creative labour became marginalised.
Although self-exploitation in creative labour is in many ways a highly-individualised practice (McRobbie, 2002, Gill and Pratt, 2008, Gill, 2002), it is also collectivising: the idea of self-exploitation and also, importantly, self-fulfilling labour that encourages and supports the growth of craft communities in a bid to support themselves and others to make, share, and benefit from work (Dawkins, 2011). Thus communities of makers support one another and facilitate, either by assistance in kind or actual, the self-exploitation of creative labour. These aren’t necessarily new arguments in terms of collective practice in the field of arts and crafts. Communities coming together to remake and recreate their own economies of craft are thus also of note here, as the offer an alternative to the straw-person of ‘the creative economy’. This speaks to theoretical debates about the deconstruction of capitalism as put forward by Gibson-Graham (2006, 1996) (a connection also made by (Bratich, 2011).
The Craft Council (CraftsCouncil, 2009, Hunt et al., 2010) has attempted to quantify the contribution made by the craft sector to the UK economy. According to the Crafts Council (CraftsCouncil, 2009), there are at least 88,250 creative practitioners working in the craft sector across the UK. These craft practices include glass-blowing, jewellery making, embroidery, knitting, weaving, stonemasonry, woodworking, basket making, book-binding and pottery. Many craft practitioners are concerned with the quality of their skills and craftsmanship and will spend years perfecting their methods. These business, many of them sole-traders or small enterprises, contribute around £3 billion GVA to the economy each year. The Craft Council also recognise that craft practices have potential to connect people together, whether in person or virtually. Through learning to make, we can share in communities of knowledge, skills and interest. We can communicate through shared memories and values, such as a mutual commitment to activism or sustainable living, a need to establish alternative ways of working, or simply the desire to decorate, repair or improve the quality of our lives.
We find craft uniquely offers the opportunity for people to work with materials, making objects with meaning and permanence that they own, while engaging in conversations that build individual worth and community value. (Hunt et al., 2010 p. 59)
There is a coherent attempt to both qualify and quantify these different benefits, linking together community and economic value in much the same way as has been done with the visual arts more broadly (Merli, 2002, Belifiore, 2004, Belifiore and Bennett, 2007). This is problematic notably because of a) the diversity of crafts practices b) the mundane and the everyday nature of much craft making c) the intersection between fine art and crafts (see Banks 2010 for crit) and d) the variety of pursuits labelled as craft by the DCMS (1998, 2007, 2008). There are perhaps also limits depending on the types of practice that can be supported this way: those crafting practices that are associated with higher overheads and more specialist skills are perhaps less able to create communities of production and sale in the same way as smaller scale practices, such as embroidery, jewellery making and felting.
The Crafts Council have recently released a report that examines some of the facets of the relationship between new technologies, practices of collaboration, and craft (CraftsCouncil, 2011). This document recognises the complex relationship between craft and collaborative practices outside of the crafts:
Craft makers today work in a far greater range of contexts than is widely realised, collaborating – like other creative people – with scientists, technologists and engineers. [In this document] we highlight five innovations – in biotechnology, engineering, materials science, manufacturing and digital & communications technology - that demonstrate the distinctive value added to these collaborations, by makers. (p. 4 )
This an explicit recognition of the contribution craft can make to science/technology/design interventions, but that in order to flourish, a number of criteria need to be met. These are listed on page 7 of the document.
What is needed is research that reinforces and differentiates a) large scale, more ‘artisan’ based craft practices, over ‘everyday’ craft pursuits b) establishes the community context in which those artisan practices are formed.
Communities of craft and wellbeing
Contemporary crafts in the home, within community groups or other sites of engagement, are also politicised in their uses as tools to promote well-being.
Many researchers recognise that using craft in this way is related to convictions about the importance of making, of shared experience and to the relative accessibility of certain craft practices (textiles particularly due to their affordability and accessibility). Work is varied, focusing on creativity more generally (Anderson and Gold, 1998), quilt making (Burt and Atkinson, forthcoming, Grace et al., 2009) detailed engagements with specific elements of the crafting process, e.g. (Reynolds, 2004). A great deal of these appear to be rather ‘thin’ analyses, describing practices and re-inscribing established discourses about the value of making. There is a tendency not to critically engage with concepts such as ‘making’ or ‘creativity’ or the constructs of ‘wellbeing’ that inform their case studies.
It is also important to recognise that the policy context is also distinctive, and that the concept of ‘wellbeing’ is in itself a shifting term. Depending on the different political and historical moments at which projects intersect with notions of wellbeing, will determine the reception, parameters, shape and form of engagement. Sointu (2005), maps these changes, in an article that “relates the shifting meanings of wellbeing to understandings and experiences of personhood in contemporary British society. It analyses the ways in which the use of the notion of wellbeing has been changing during the past two decades through different theories of subjectivity.” (Sointu 2005 p. 256).
Discussions in the workshops pointed towards a need for a more closely evidenced argument for promoting the links between craft and wellbeing. This a challenge proposition not least because the immaterial benefits of making and affective importance of engaging with arts are often assessable only by narrative accounts or by assessment of material outputs e.g. artefacts. Overviews: (Madden and Bloom, 2004, Putland, 2008)
More work that establishes the different ways in which creativity and craft has become established within, in opposition to, or in dialogue with different conceptions of ‘wellness’ is needed.
Sustainable Communities/resilient communities
Sustainability and resilience are important buzzwords. They relate in differing ways to the abilities for populations, communities, groups and individuals to manage risk and uncertainty. This can be done by adopting practices that empower community groups to withstand threats to energy security, to recycle and reuse, to build or construct objects from reclaimed materials, or to create communities that can sustain themselves by providing local resources for basic social needs, like food and education (Egan, 2004). Resilience on the other hand, refers to a slightly different construct. Resilience emerges from a series of uncertainties not delimited to access to resources or green/environmental changes. It encompasses post 9/11 security politics amongst associated attempts to move citizens from being passive to ‘active’ in their engagements with social life (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008). Resilient communities are explored by Chaskin (2007) and this field of work will be fruitful for further study.
These two related-but-different constructs of handling risk and change in contemporary society are useful to frame debates about craft. What role does craft play in these processes of becoming sustainable/resilient? Are questions of re-skilling through craft engaged in resilience discourse? Are the futures that different crafting communities imagine different to those of resilience?
Craft practices readily engage with (re)making and recycling: Craftivisim, in its rejection of mass-produced goods and reclamation of the power of making, is an example of this. Popular literature promotes less wasteful ways of working and recycling (Wasinger, 2009). As suggested at the outset, the politics of arts and crafts movements can be related to contemporary struggles for sustainable practices (Miller, 2011). The Green movement, for example, has been argued to be a central element of the craftivist movement (Williams, 2011). However, what about a) everyday crafts b) crafts inherent upon more complex production methods c) resilience?
Sustainable economies, a discourse based in both financially resilient, ethically guided consumption and production practices and small-scale, innovative business models, also offer a way of framing craft practices. The change in nomenclature should, however, be treated with a critical eye: are these new configurations of practice? Are they new ways of doing economy? Are they in practice nothing more than hailing an existing strategy for ‘making a living’ as ‘novel’ while still maintaining the structures that generate the precarious/low-income/low support contexts in which crafts operate?
