THE JOURNAL
unfashionable. Suddenly that all changed. But how? Perhaps slightly curiously, it starts with a book:
Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman published in 2008. It’s impossible to underestimate its import. It argued that we were surrounded by craft and that skill was something innate in all of us, from the Linux programmer hunched over a computer to the hospital nurse dealing with another winter crisis. Instantly, it gave craft a fresh intellectual underpinning. By accident or design, The Craftsman presaged an
extraordinary decade or so for making. Other books followed in its wake. Shortly after I took over editing Crafts magazine in 2007, I found myself in a central London branch of Costa Coffee with potter and writer Edmund de Waal. As we parted, I asked him what he was up to next and he told me he was heading up to the Lake District to finish a book he’d been writing about his family’s collection of tiny Japanese carved figures, or netsuke. Apparently they had a bit of a history. I thought it sounded an intriguing idea but hardly something that would prove popular with the public, which just goes to show how wrong you can be. In 2011, The Hare with Amber Eyes won the Costa biography prize.
Then there was Matthew Crawford’s The Case for
Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us, in which the American academic-turned-mechanic created a manifesto arguing that manual work was more satisfying that climbing the corporate ladder. Thanks in part to Crawford’s treatise, for a brief moment
making even entered the political lexicon. In 2010, John Hayes, then-minister of state for business, innovation & skills delivered a genuinely eye-opening lecture at London’s RSA entitled: The Craft So Long to Lerne: Skills and their Place in Modern Britain, in which he opined: “People speak of the intellectual beauty of a mathematical theorem. But there is beauty, too, in the economy and certainty of movement of a master craftsman.” More famously, the former chancellor, George Osborne, closed his 2011 budget by describing his vision of a nation “carried aloft by the march of the makers.” Major international brands got in on the act.
Upmarket bag manufacturer Loewe, for example, launched a new craft prize in 2016 where the winner picked up a cool 50,000 euros. On our televisions, shows like the The Great British Bake Off, The Repair Shop and The Great British Sewing Bee became mainstream staples.
ABOVE: At Artefact, the Design Avenue featured craft made by emerging and established makers from all over the world. Vessel Gallery brought along works in glass by Bethany Wood and Baldwin & Guggisberg, among many others
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