Since curating Smart works: design and the handmade for the Powerhouse Museum in 2007 Grace Cochrane has been invited to discuss her ideas behind the exhibition at a number of national and international conferences. Invitations have included NeoCraft: modernity and the crafts conference held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada in November, 2007 and the Jewellery and Metalsmiths Group of Australia (JMGA) Inside Out conference in Adelaide and Design Island Forum in Tasmania in 2008. Grace summarises the key issues presented at the conferences.

Emus and Kiwis: flightless in cyberspace?

Design and the handmade in Australia and New Zealand

The ideas for this talk have come out of an exhibition on the theme of 'design and the handmade' held at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney last year (2007). The theme has proved to be of interest in many places in Australia and overseas.

This project was to do with people who know how to work with materials and are experienced in making one-off works, but who are also interested in putting them into production, or using production processes, in some way. It was about the options they have and the choices they make. I know also that there are many more amongst you who are also thinking and working in this way.

The crafts have long histories here, across industries, studios, technical colleges and universities, generalist and specialist organisations and their work - like conferences and publications, and all those projects like exhibitions, travel, research and so on that are so familiar to you all. There also remain for us, many links with the UK, Europe and Scandinavia through migration and the marketplace. And of course our location in the southern Asia-Pacific region provides specific regional cultural influences.

But 'the times they are a-changing'. Again. Everything to do with how we live our lives is being challenged: by changes in communication and access to information, and by changes occurring through new materials, processes and technologies. These changes have all sorts of repercussions. What does it mean for those interested in the crafts, in these changing times? It isn't the first time the crafts have been at this kind of turning point, in a changing society, and it's not the first time craftspeople have been close to the heart of changes in values - of materials and processes, and of functions and forms.

What do we think is important now? Can we remain flightless in this new world - or must we grow new wings? Are we already doing it? What are the changes that affect us? And which might also affect you?

Art: the benchmark for value

The crafts have always sat in a changing place between art and industry, expression and necessity, personal and social and this has varied across cultures, and over time.

While we draw on all those histories, in the last fifty years the benchmark for success in what we now call the studio crafts has been primarily in their acceptance as 'art'. We want evidence of the unique hand of the maker and we enjoy emotional attachments with objects made by someone we know, or can identify.

Whatever the crafts represent as a set of values, we have still sought their validation as art. The post-war influence of the celebration of the individual and the self-made person as it translated into the modern art world has also been an important - perhaps pervasive - model, especially as the arts moved out of a technical vocational system and became absorbed into university systems: the crafts became art.

We all know the strong infrastructure that supports this approach to the crafts. And by and large, it works, though the local marketplace for art-craft is comparatively small but supportive. Nonetheless, despite our significant global profile, we are a long way from bigger, and often richer, population centres.

The issue of design

Although for many practitioners, making objects in limited series is very much both part of their history and their work ethic, craftspeople have tended to shun associations with processes that imply the impersonality of designing for industrial manufacture.

And despite the fact that there is a strong history of craftspeople and designers working with industry, especially in Europe and the Nordic countries, the studio crafts marketplace tends not to want to know that its artists might also make production lines or commissioned series as part of their livelihood, or that they might want to involve others in the making process.

But we can't ignore the reality that in the broad audience and consumer groups of which we are all part, there is a strong interest in 'design'. A new hierarchy has developed round the idea of 'design', which has its own infrastructure of brands, promotion and identity, with high profile magazines and promotional events and showrooms, and where designers can be superstars - in a system not dissimilar to that of the art world. It is a big and affluent marketplace.

This is a very attractive profile for many makers, and it can offer a different economic reality. Even for one-off works, the value of new industrial technologies cannot be overlooked. The contemporary world for makers, or craftspeople, is just as much to do with design and industry as it is with art. If we are going to discuss the crafts in the context of one, we have to allow a place in the other.

Manufacture: global shifts

But design implies links with working for a client and manufacturing through industry, and for some time the nature of industry has been changing rapidly. We are all aware that large scale crafts-based manufacturing is closing in the West and rapidly moving to countries where labour is cheaper, often using hand skills. We all notice when well-known industries - textiles, glass, metal, furniture, ceramics - have closed or shifted, and where skills we take for granted, go with them.

There are huge changes in cultural identity both in countries where these losses are taking place, and in those where they are developing. Think of the changes in the Nordic countries, Italy, Germany, the UK - and sometimes your own home town, and what these mean to the people there, and to us.

Style: the look of the handmade

At the same time, within 'design', over the last few years, there has been an identifiable stylistic shift in some aspects of that marketplace towards objects that reflect the values of the handmade: through the way they look and what they represent. Many contemporary designers are interested in texture, showing evidence of process, reference to domestic crafts, often using fabrics and materials worked on by skilled people elsewhere. There are conferences about 'design and emotion'.

In fact crafts skills and material knowledge sits behind much successful design: some brands depend on the skills of generations of craftspeople, in Alessi's case, for example, in the family-based workshops of Italy.

Technologies: global local/local global

Indeed, central to change are the new technologies that are totally transforming access to markets and audiences - as well as designing and manufacturing relationships and cost structures. Digital media makes the global local - and the local global - in more ways than we ever imagined.

We can communicate directly and instantly with people we may never meet about objects we may never actually see: almost every dealer and most practitioners - including many among you - have their own websites.

Our audiences are increasingly used to customising what they want and need, from i-pod music lists to personal web chat-pages. And in terms of making, customisation, once the province of the handmade, is now possible on a large scale through the possibilities for designing and manufacturing on line: 'mass-customisation' is not a contradiction in terms; it is a reality.

Consciousness of sustainability

In developing sustainable businesses (because they are businesses), artists, designers, makers and their consumers are thinking responsibly about the resources they use. Materials, water, energy sources and transport costs are all part of what we now call the carbon footprint, and are increasingly part of the process of making decisions about how and where things are made - and sometimes if we need them at all.

Craftspeople: one-off into production

One of the things I have noticed in recent years is that many craftspeople are looking again at what they do, who they are doing it for and why, and how they go about it.

As well as making one-off works as artists, I am aware that a number of them want to put some of their work into production as designers. They want creative, sustainable livelihoods that grow out of their crafts values and experiences, sometimes outsourcing aspects of the design and manufacturing of what they do to others, both at home and overseas. They also have to look differently at the marketplace. I have considerable respect for this position: the crafts have always, in reality, had a place within and between art and industry.

Smart works: design and the handmade

Until recently I've been working at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney; it sees itself as a design museum, and its collections cross decorative arts, crafts and design, science, technology and industry and social and cultural history. I've been thinking about these questions to do with the crafts for some years, so a few years ago when the Australia Council granted us funds to put towards a crafts project in an international context, we proposed an exhibition that would look at design that was based on a knowledge of the skills and materials associated with the handmade.

Smart works: design and the handmade opened in March 2007 with 41 case studies from Australia and New Zealand, a book and a 3-day symposium. ₁ I thought I would use a few of the stories from this exhibition as an example of what some Australian and New Zealand craftspeople are thinking about. The project focused on the choices each of those people made in deciding how to establish and sustain their practice - when moving to put one-off works into production. While each of the 41 case studies has its own story of ideas and designs, growing out of the handmade, each one addresses the same questions, and every one had different solutions.

These case studies crossed a number of media fields, and looked at solutions that ranged from employing local people to collaborating with industry and contracting aspects of the work to other countries.

Impact and values

So these are the stories of some people and the decisions they are making about how to go about their work. For many in the opening symposium of Smart works, it was the first time they had been in a forum where people working in other media were telling their experiences. Since then many have resolved decisions as a result of the experiences of the people they met.

For me, embedded in this interest, is an acknowledgement and confirmation of a few key points:

There has been considerable interest in this theme - which is why I chose to discuss it here. In recent years a number of initiatives from state crafts and design organisations, funding bodies and universities have resulted in innovative collaborations between education and industry: practical variations on what have become known as the creative industries, that include mentorship programs in almost every state and development initiatives between designing, making and marketing. Examples include Form's Designing Futures program in WA, The Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council's Maker to Manufacturer to Market (MMM) program.

It is interesting that this direction has become a subject for discussion overseas as well: in the Think Tank sessions carried out annually at the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in North Carolina the 2006 report asks what they can learn from countries outside the U.S. to advance the interface of craft and design, saying that countries like Australia are in advance of their thinking. ₂ It was also part of the agenda for the conference in Nova Scotia in November: 'Neocraft: Craft, the Senses and New Technologies.' ₃ The re-launch of the American Craft magazine in its October-November 2007 issue reflects the 'current, rapid convergence of craft, architecture, art, design, and fashion, and the magazine will push these connections to the forefront of cultural conversation.'.

In the Smart works symposium, presenter of BBC4's radio program In Business, Peter Day, provided an extraordinary overview from his vast experience of the changing global business and manufacturing patterns. He finished up by saying:

'And how do rich world businesses survive in this global, cutthroat world ... by moving closer and closer to customers, by listening to them and convincing them that they are being taken seriously ... crafts people are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this. It is after all the world they have come from ... The 21st century is about businesses and organisations that can cope with the complexity of messy individual demand, and I think that is something that craftspeople can never lose sight of. This is probably your century, if you want to take it.' ₄

So I believe that these developments - amongst the many other forms of practice in Australia and New Zealand - are an important, and maybe necessary, response to the changing circumstances of our time, from our part of the globe.

Grace Cochrane,
May 2008

Footnotes

1. Smart works: design and the handmade, for exhibition, symposium (and videos), and publication: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/smartworks/
2. CCD website www.craftcreativitydesign.org (see Research/Retreat reports)
3. Neocraft: the Crafts and Modernity, NASCAD, Halifax, Nova Scotia www.neocraft.ca
4. Peter Day, speaker video, Smart Works website, op cit