Showing posts with label Crafts Council. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crafts Council. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 July 2012

Collect 2012




I have reviewed Collect twice in its illustrious history – ok, once, (2008) and a brief comment at the end of another post, (2009). I then forgot about it until last year when a kind soul reserved complimentary tickets for me and I managed to be away the entire weekend.  I have been inattentive, to say the least.

My first visit to Collect was also its first outing. It was at the V&A and still had the feel of ‘tarted –up’ clutter. It was too crowded – with stuff I mean - and the standard was inconsistent. After another year at the V&A, it moved to the Saatchi gallery near Sloane Square. It was a bold and, in spite of my acerbic comments in 2009, an inspired move. By all accounts it has improved steadily since and, while I cannot comment on any of previous shows, 2012 was a triumph.

The Saatchi gallery is a beautiful, elegantly proportioned space, graced with high ceilings, magnificent wooden floors and plenty of natural light. It is the perfect venue for the display of beautiful objects. The exhibiting galleries all had plenty of room so the work displayed had room to breathe and the audience had enough space to walk around it. In practice, this means that the viewer moves much more slowly around the exhibition than is the case in more crowded venues. It allows one time to think and reflect of the work.

Collect is a serious selling show. That is its primary purpose. It is also a showcase but makes no pretence to being either representative or a survey show. The galleries select their highest quality work and the organisers, by bringing in collectors and media, facilitate the bringing of ‘museum quality’ craft to its potential buyers. In doing so, they are starting solve one of the most persistent and seemingly intractable problems of craft: how to bring the goods to market.

In the process, every aspect of craft exhibiting and selling, from display to the attitude of the gallerists, has become palpably more professional. Collect is also truly international now. It is probably the only high-end, international applied arts fair in Europe. The Scandanavian galleries and artists are particularly well represented and are also a breath of fresh air. There is a strong focus on the ‘upcycled’ work, where ‘trash’ or discarded ceramics, in particular, are remade, reinvented and become entirely new works. In most cases this is the only chance Londoners have to see this kind of work. Craft in London is otherwise parochial, poorly exhibited, (with one or two notable exceptions,) and largely very conservative.

La Ceramica Gallery was a welcome new addition, bringing the work of internationally acclaimed Nicaraguan potters to London for the first time, and Hanart TZ was the first Chinese gallery to show at Collect, bringing ceramics and laquer work  - the latter is a particularly exciting development since, as far as I know, we have not seen contemporary laquer work in this country before. If I were handing out prizes, it would go to the Japanese gallery, Yufuku. All of the work on this stand was breathtaking. Every piece shone with the sheer strength and conviction of its own presence. Graceful, classical, poised - even when entirely un-classical – it was all work you wanted to come back to again and again, just to make sure you really had seen such a thing. The ceramic works of Nakamura Takuo were unforgettable. The colour and patterning was reminiscent of early 17th Century Japanese silks, glistening, strong colour but subtle – mostly tertiary colours -  and faultlessly composed with a painterly vision. How anyone brings together soft ripe pinks, sombre but glowing maroons, lime-ish greens edged in something darker, and bright ultramarine, is beyond me. I could gaze on this work for the rest of my life and, as soon as I have any money at all, I’m going to make sure I can.

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

Origin, The London Craft Fair, 2009



























































I didn’t expect to be assailed by the scent of lavender when I got to Origin, but I was – well it is a craft show after all - and a nice lady called Maxine Sutton has very obligingly, understood what craft is really about and made lavender bags and tea cosies, handsomely printed and sewn up like children’s sewing kits. They really are the business and the best bit is that the lavender bags have biologically in/accurate hearts printed on them. The heart design is the sort that shows valves and arteries but the shapes are traced in leaves in flowers. Brilliant!!

So Origin begins with a hint of the village flower show while being, unmistakably, a glitzy urban trade fair – a bit kitsch, a bit snazzy, a bit – well very naff at times – but proud. This is what works so well with this year’s selection, it seems much more certain of its own identity, much more confident than it has in the past. Industry is present but not dominant, it’s part of the process in conversation with the handmade or individually designed. This year’s ‘interventions’ use the ancient uber-craft discipline of basket weaving, - but this is post-modern basket-weaving, forget physiotherapy. I’ll write more about them next week, once they’ve had time to develop. Gone are the dark recesses containing ‘art’ as though it was something mildly unpleasant deposited under a lamp post. Origin, in short, has ‘come out.’

Jewellery, textiles of various sorts and ceramics dominate. There is a strong flavour of pink, lacy, girly feminine, - it’s a bit in yer face at times, splendidly tasteless, but a VERY welcome relief from the tedious thudding masculinity of ‘pure’ studio craft. Origin is altogether more promiscuous than it was: round the corner from the lavender you know there’ll be a bit of expensive cheap perfume. Someone made jewellery that looked like chocolates and presented then in pink sponge like fairy cakes. Ludicrous but very very effective.

Consistent with the extravagant cavorting of ceramics the other side of London, (in the Temple of the Applied Arts,) Sevres porcelain was a strong flavour in this year’s ceramics selection. Excessive, absurd, I’m not sure I really want to see it again, but it was fab just this once. See Kate McBride, Timea Sido,(second picture from top), and Jo Davies, for instance. At the extreme end of this is Jasmine Rowlandson – the Donatella Versace of UK ceramics. It looked tailor made for the Dubai market to me, but should do well here is she can reach the various diasporas to whom it will undoubtedly appeal.

This is not to say that ‘old fashioned’ studio ceramics has turned tail and fled. All of the above is ‘old fashioned studio ceramics.’ But somehow there’s more ceramic and less studio – its less noble peasant and bit more whorish – halleluja. A nice bit of anagama firing or similar would have provided a good contrast, but that kind of approach to making was conspicuous by its absence. It’s a relief not to see grizzly stoneware, but the swathes of pink gold and frills will pall very soon if its not balanced out with something a wee bit calmer. You cant live on marshmallows alone.

Chris Keenan, The Guardian Angel of Celadon Coated Tableware was there, representing ‘proper pottery,’ and also proving that celadon can still be tableware, it doesn’t have to be deconstructed to be desirable. Sue Nemeth’s Middle-European, folk-pottery inspired mould-cast porcelain, (picture top), brought all the strands together - very proper pottery, while also very pretty, feminine without being fetishistic, graceful, and very much her own vision.

Week one was seething with visitors within the first few hours of opening. That morning, Deborah Carre of Carreducker had received a Selvedge award. Now the presence of these shoemakers is something of a triumph. It’s a been a long time coming, The crafts Council, for decades, would have nothing to do with them. Not ‘pure’ enough apparently. But they, the CC, have now embraced design and collaborations with industry, so, with a bit persuasion from various people no doubt, shoemakers are at last allowed in. Carre’s stall looked magnificent. She had a case showing the tools of the trade as well as collections of beautiful hand made shoes. It was the proof positive of the confident, trade fair approach, a convincing exposition of craft as an industry in itself.

Sunday, 2 November 2008

Ending International Feminist Futures? (??????)

Say, what? ---

I was puzzled by the title too but, undaunted, high-tailed it off to Aberdeen, gorgeous, graceful, granite-grey city, glistening sea-side, stately trees and rushing, shining river, bright winter sun and magnificent (eat yer heart out Cambridge and Oxford), magnificent university campus, and had a whale of a time at the conference above named.

What's in the Name?

First things first, why Ending? It’s all in the question mark, of course. It seems that some feminist academics are engaged in one of those quasi-apocalyptic moments, a bit like the art world gets into about every ten years or so, when a bunch of people produce manifestos or articles or similar saying ‘the end of art?’(craft/global capitalism/ celebrity/ religion/ life/ the universe – delete as applicable), and organise endless conferences, seminars, happenings, etc to discuss the matter and generally create much carbon emission.

'Hell No!'

So, I added my carbon footprint to everyone else’s and went and said, ‘hell no,’ along with all the other speakers and everyone there who said, ‘hell no’ too. This was in fact the last of four conferences, which, I now suspect, were convened chiefly to say a monumental collective, ‘hell no’ very loudly. And we did. There certainly wasn’t any sign of feminism ending, quite the contrary; there were a great many new beginnings, much growing of small, feminist bean sprouts. Oh and some splendid making of cheese cakes.

'So then what happened?'

The genesis of the four workshops/conferences was something to do with International Relations, although this conference was hosted by Marysia Zalewski and the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Gender Studies and School of Social Science. There was an IR tinge to most of the papers, but not all. It was admirably varied, quite a bit of cultural studies, some media studies, a very cool genomics meets eco feminism via science fiction joint paper, a study of how women were pictured by Communist Poland and then by the Solidarity movement ‘women tractor drivers to Solidarity women’, I talked about Shattered. Actually, I talked about Traffic, which is one the pots in Shattered, (see website), and there were several papers which were either about trafficking or touched on it somewhere. A Dutch woman talked about feminist Egyptian (documentary) Cinema, (that one was really fascinating,) a Turkish woman, talked about the construction of Turkish masculinity through compulsory military service, also fascinating. Cynthia Enloe talked about post-war Iraq and post-wars going back to the First World War and how feminists need to intervene in these situations and in how the stories are told. She produced the quote of the conference in my estimation: ‘Widows make people very nervous.’ Too bloody right they do, you should see what they’re doing in Iran.

'And What Else?'

Some papers were very esoteric, exploring much chewy, involved, quite abstract theory, others were more like discussions of a much bigger research project. It provided an immensely diverse overview of feminism at work in the academy and of feminists, in every imaginable discipline, bringing their feminism to scrutinise and - in the case of IR in particular – almost reinvent it. One of the most imaginative and highly successful strands to this event was the part played by artists and some students from Gray’s School of Art, who curated a show of their work. An artist called Merlyn Riggs was doing participatory work. We all had to bring something which was indicative of us and she photographed the things for 'The Museum of Me'. She introduced the work saying, 'My work is about 'Me, Meals, and Menopause,' -(she was responsible for the cheescake recipes). She's also been working with women in a drop in centre and with women in the Sottish Parliament. Alex Brew, another of the artists, has been working with images of men,'Why don't women objectify men?' she asked. She's written an excellent piece for The F Word which is linked to her website, here.

Mixing It Up
It would be truly revolutionary to see planets art, craft and, especially, ceramics, following suit. Unfortunately ‘interdisciplinary’ on planet craft just means including different media, for example textile art mixing with digital media, which you might think was part of how textile/fibre art was developing in digital times anyway, but apparently this counts as interdisciplinary. Not in my book it doesn’t. That’s just visual art behaving as it should. The Crafts Council is consulting on good practice in the crafts, fostering ambition, that sort of thing. I’d suggest this was an excellent example of good practice I’d like to see imported into craft practices.

'Now What?'
Conferences are an extraordinary opportunity to listen to things we don’t normally listen to and meet people we wouldn’t normally meet, this one particularly so because of its interdisciplinary element. Academic departments are often entirely separate from one another, even within a single university, which limits the spread of knowledge because people can’t easily learn from each other. A truly interdisciplinary event such as this can capitalise on the broad dissemination of research which results from the mix and make a real contribution to the building and sustaining of knowledge in that it brings new ways of understanding the issues that arise within our own disciplines. I want to encourage the visual arts and craft institutions that I’m involved with to be much more interdisciplinary in their approach particularly to the dissemination of our work and research. Neither academia nor the art/craft world are particularly well disposed to this kind of interdisciplinary high-jinks, and this conference was an object lesson in how to do it.

Sunday, 20 April 2008

Interview with Rosy Greenlees, Director of the Crafts Council, Part 1

‘So, c’mon,’ says Sophie, drawing herself up to her full height at the head of the table where she’s waxing some pots in readiness for their next layer of slip, ‘what ARE they going to do for Crafts people?’ ‘They’ in this instance, were the Crafts Council.
I’d been to see Rosy Greenlees, Director of the Crafts Council, to ask that very question. What follows is an account of the interview and my reflections on the whole.

‘What is the Crafts Council for?’
Greenlees supplies a well-rehearsed answer: ‘it’s-a-national-agency-which-represents craft-across-all-disciplines-and-across-all-nations-of-the-UK.’ She rattles off the opening volley of words with fluency and a touch of force. There’s much talk of relationships, partnerships, craft in the wider agenda and so on. It’s government speak and turbo-charged. ‘The sector needs an advocate,’ she declares, almost with a flourish… ‘Sector’. This means we’re constituted politically, we’ve become part of political discourse which suggests we need to become active within that discourse. Not to everyone’s taste, I know, but I’ll come back to that.

Translating government-speak
An example of ‘advocacy’ in this context was the Crafts Council’s involvement in drafting a government document, ‘Creative Britain’, about creative industries in the UK. You can download and read – all 81 pages – here.
It’s compulsory reading for anyone concerned with funding – especially what gets funded and why. The point is that the Craft Council was involved in drafting this beast, which is in effect a policy doc from the Dept. of Culture Media and Sport, and means that concerns of ‘the sector’, that’s us remember, what we need to function, be creative and THRIVE, are represented in the document
The partnerships amount to the various Crafts Council projects, funding and support schemes. Most of these can be found on the website under ‘learning and support' here, but those with the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Architecture Centre Network are easy to miss: go to ‘about us’ then go to ‘partnerships and initiatives.’ The focus of the EFF projects is on ‘development of a business plan; workshops and craft fellowships for mid-career makers; research and creation of a market development strategy and other initiatives.’ So far they’re based in the North East, South West and West Midlands. Hidden Art, in Cornwall, was also one of these projects. It has a fantastic website with much information about going digital and various training and development schemes in partnership with University College Falmouth which has an excellent research cluster related to all matters digital.


Funding Schemes and Projects
It is now the task of the Arts Council to fund craft. The CC has some specific projects, such as those outlined above; it still has the ‘Setting up Grant’, now ‘the Development Grant’, for people setting up full time in their own studio space. It has other projects such as ‘Next Move’, also aimed at new makers but concentrating on residencies and it has ‘Spark Plug’, which is for curatorial projects and which might include makers, but must involve at least one experienced curator. Projects tailored specifically at mid career makers are few: there are two fellowships, one at the V&A, one in the South West, and they are VERY specific, and intending to showcase the CCs idea of ‘the gold standard.’ I’ll return to this ‘gold standard’ business later. All the information you need about the schemes, meanwhile, is on the website.

Shop, Gallery, Building, Magazine, Website.

The new, and vastly improved, Crafts Council website is part of their strategy to be a resource and information centre. It aims to be ‘about the sector, not just the Crafts Council’. This is a significant difference. I would suggest that some degree of interactivity would help to keep communication channels open with makers and other members of ‘the sector’.
The Crafts Council building in London is still there but has no gallery or shop. For the exhibitions programmes, for example, the aim is to make connections with galleries and museums nationally and curate shows with them, with an emphasis on touring. The purpose is to spread funding, resources and overall visibility for craft outwards from London to ‘the regions’. The London gallery space is, to some extent, replaced by working and producing shows with the V&A. Out of the Ordinary is said to have had audience figures of over 100,000 at the V&A alone and is now touring. Although there will undoubtedly be fewer shows, they will have, according to Greenlees, a far greater impact. So the exhibition programme becomes national, and to some extent international. The website and Crafts Magazine are also part of this get-it-away-from-a-single-building-in-London strategy. However, ‘impact’ is a notoriously difficult thing to measure, it also presupposes we know what it is we are measuring in the first place.

Education
Craft in education seems to be an important part of the Crafts Council’s strategy. They’ve been talking to OFSTED, the schools inspectorate; NSEAD, which promotes art, craft and design in schools and CHEAD, which represents art and design in higher education. There is a plan to extend apprenticeship schemes to include postgraduates. This would certainly help to ameliorate some the problems of skills-loss which will come from the reduction of dedicated ceramics courses for example. The results of all this talking and partnership-ing remains to be seen, but at least there’s someone trying to ensure a presence for craft skills and processes at all levels of education. I asked for a comment on the situation in Scotland, which now has no ceramics course at degree level, and will shortly be losing the glass course in Edinburgh, by all accounts. Greenlees was sympathetic, but was concerned not to ‘appear as though we’re living in the past.’ Craft is ‘dynamic, innovative, and moves,’ she said, while acknowledging that a rationale that claims that this can’t include ceramics would, necessarily, be flawed.


The Public Face of Craft
‘So, five years from now, what do you want the Crafts Council to have achieved?’
‘I want people to “get” craft.’
It’s a big ambition, but there are some outstanding questions. How is craft to be mediated? Along with the exhibitions programme, Origin and Collect are the mainstays. These are Crafts’ public face.
How does the Crafts Council define craft?
‘We don’t,’ but ‘innovative use of materials and processes’ was a much repeated phrase. ‘Innovative’ is probably the main buzz word I’m encountering at the moment. It’s endlessly repeated in Creative Britain, also in Seona Reid’s paper, ‘Unleashing the Potential of the Scottish Creative Sector,’ (Reid is head of Glasgow School of Art where the last ceramics degree course is closing), in Greenlees’s commentary and almost to the point of self parody in NESTA’s latest policy statement but as with ‘gold standard’ there is no indication of how this is defined or by whom. ‘Innovative’ is particularly tricky, because it has such a strong speculative element to it anyway. How do you measure innovation?
I remarked that, in my travels in Tottenham, I had encountered a group of Kurdish women from Turkey who are exemplary sewers, knitters, embroiderers and makers of many wondrous fine things in fabric and fibre. They make to sell. They need the money. Would the Crafts Council support them, for example? Pause…..mmmmm, not sure. Bla Bla innovative. Well maybe they could demonstrate appropriate signs of innovation but, somehow, I had a feeling that my Kurdish ladies were not what the Ministry of Craft were looking for. One has to ask why not, they are part of ‘the sector’, surely?
The Jerwood prize for the applied arts appears to have departed for the time being. Greenlees said it would continue but only with the Jerwood, not in conjunction with the Crafts Council. It provided some much needed, if not very good quality, media coverage, so how is it to be replaced or expanded? The Jerwood website is not very revealing at the moment.
By constituting craft as primarily about skills and process, and locating it squarely in education, training, and professional development and support, the Crafts Council ensures a presence and a plausible way of craft being ‘got’. Whether it’s craft as you know it or want it, and quite who is included and who is not, is another matter entirely. The C Word will deal with that question, ‘the gold standard’, ‘innovation’ and other matters in part 2.

Interview with Rosy Greenlees, Part 2: The C Word’s comments

The Gold Standard
‘All the big names have been recipients of those grants,’ asserts Greenlees, defending the good name of development grants. She appears certain that the brightest and best are nurtured by through Crafts Council selection procedures. I don’t share her optimism. I can’t speak for other craft disciplines, but on Planet Ceramics, ‘the best’ has not been nurtured, only the safest. You only have to look at the pillars of the ceramics establishment, Barrett Marsden and Galerie Besson, and to a lesser extent, the CAA and you’ll see what I mean. Meretricious Modernism meets Kitchen Sink, and most of it, in the case of the first two anyway, stupefyingly dull. We can hardly be surprised that those in receipt of all the financial and practical support at the Crafts Council’s disposal, to say nothing of the networking among social peers, have had relatively unobstructed career paths. This has nothing whatever to do with quality or interest inherent in the work. It has, however, had a devastatingly negative effect on the development of the discipline. You could argue that this is more about ceramics’ own persistent and destructive hegemonic practices than it is about the Crafts Council; the relevant question here perhaps is: how do you influence the way these ‘standards’ are constituted?

Dispersal and Dilution
It’s entirely possible that the Crafts Council’s ‘dispersal programme’, if we can call it that, will in fact make its influence on the lives of makers much more dilute and this may turn out to be a great relief. Do we really want to have our creative lives dominated by what, at worst, could turn out to be the propaganda machines of the Ministry of Craft, our very own Politburo? If their assessments of the ‘gold standard’ and ‘innovation’ turn out to be as suffocatingly tedious and reactionary as they have been in the past, then dispersal and dilution would amount to no great loss.

And finally….
Geting involved in Spark Plug is undoubtedly the best way to influence craft discourses in the wider exhibitions world and is an important part of how craft is mediated, and ‘got’, not least by curators who, in the main, don’t ‘get’ craft at all. For all makers, mid or early career, if your practice isn’t recognised as ‘gold’ or ‘innovative’, or if it’s just too experimental or interdisciplinary, the Arts Council, your local authority (if you’re very lucky indeed), sundry other obscure charities, foundations and trusts that can be persuaded to fund individuals, and possibly academia, if you can inveigle your way into it somehow, are the sources of funding and support we need to turn to.
The new Crafts Council feels different from the old, but I don’t know that it has really changed its attitudes. And I have a horrible feeling it may not have done, not least because those who curate and select grant recipients and so forth are likely to be the same old dinosaurs. I still have some reservations about the endless parade demands and exclusion-clauses which infest the Development Grant application procedure. It looks like a mine field to me and must put a great many people off applying. It is inescapable that if you close down your entry pool so much at such an early stage, you will end up with a compromised final selection simply because the process has filtered out some of the best applicants who didn’t conform precisely to all the demands.
With Greenlees at the helm, I am pretty confident that goals with be achieved. The problem for makers to solve is whether or not those goals are really what we want. When there’s a ministry, one needs a union, or similar. That’ll be the Craft Potters Association then! No seriously, we do need to organise, a little bit, if we are going to ensure those goals aren’t just ministerial flatulence trying to imitate the ‘white heat of technology’, which is what relentless thud of government-approved‘innovation’ sounds like sometimes.