The writer Italo Calvino suggests that ‘the imagination is an instrument of knowledge… a repertory of what is potential.’ (1)

Making the Future was planned as a day’s exploration of the crafting of the imagination, by focussing on the embodied practices of making, exhibition making and material knowledge and the ways in which they intersect to create

a craft-centred view of reality.   By bringing different perspectives into the room, the Lab aimed to reach what Peter Senge describes as a ‘generative dialogue’ (2) about a subject, its objects, specialist thinkers and makers, in order to consider in greater depth how we both think about and make things in everyday life in the 21st century. 

Government sponsored reports, such as the 2012 Craft in an Age of Change, led by Dr. Karen Yair with BOP Consulting, have attempted to document a state of practice, about making things in a field institutionally defined as craft, in contemporary life.  However, too often the traditional methods of social policy data gathering – a generic questionnaire sent, unsolicited, to pre-selected individuals – fail to create a good environment for listening to, seeing and understanding, the texture, depth, range and complexity of contemporary making. The constant re-definition of material language that is the foundation of critical object making, every day, in small studios, is rarely captured, or its value explored, by this process of reporting.

The day evolved as a discussion about the landscape, or living edges of craft, – a field of practice so diverse, and so complex that it continually troubles productive articulation in formal cultural structures in the UK, with the attendant risk that it becomes invisible as a generative form of knowledge.  The provocation, at the opening of the day, was that curators, makers and writers need to collaborate better to move beyond what Richard Sennett has described as the ‘dead denotation’ (3)  increasingly embedded in formal language associated with objects and their art.  and find new ways of exploring and representing them, in words, images and exhibitions.  One direct route is to listen and look more closely at the different forms of  language that are being made, every day, in independent studios throughout the UK.

The design for the lab was simple.   We invited 20 active thinkers, from  designing, making, curating and writing backgrounds – the four principal ways that objects are made and knowledge about them evaluated and disseminated – to come together in a cultural space, Contemporary Applied Arts, which for 65 years has been creating a physical space for those activities in London. 

Specific invitations were sent to five makers, Jim Partridge, Janice Tchalenko, Deirdre Nelson, James Rigler and Grant McCaig to give short presentations on their work, or recent projects, complemented by an introductory presentation by artist filmmaker Matt Hulse, who subsequently filmed and photographed the sessions throughout the day.   A final reflection on the day was provided by distinguished choreographer Siobhan Davies.  

One aspect of embodied practice was highlighted by the material qualities of the venue itself.   So often discussions about creative practice take place in the least imaginative of settings: grey box lecture halls or cramped, badly designed seminar rooms with no material presence.

 

In contrast the eloquent context  of the new Southwark home for Contemporary Applied Arts (www.caa.org): an 1870s former printworks, sensitively converted by architects Allies and Morrison  into the new exhibition and display space for CAA  allowed lively material thinking to infuse the day. Both the objects on show in the exhibition Craft into Industry and also  the brick , wood and steel structure of the space itself offered precise, and stimulating demonstration of the possibilities of an attentive relationship to our material environment.   

 

The qualities of the spaces that we inhabit, and the ways in which these influence our sense of alertness, curiosity, and reflective connection are the subject of much research at the moment; the Cities for People campaign, for example, disseminating the work and practice of distinguished Danish architect Jan Gehl (www.gehlcitiesforpeople.dk) or texts such as ‘The Thinking Hand’ by the Finnish architect Juhanni Pallasmaa focussing  on material sensibility as a crucial element in sensory perception.  What this research, and much more besides from fields such as anthropology (Tim Ingold Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description) ; urbanism (Jane Jacobs classic 1960s text The Life and Death of American Cities) healthcare and cultural history (Constance Classen The Book of Touch) makes clear is that our relationship to the material world is of critical significance to our ability to make sense of our relationship not only to our inhabiting of that world, but also of our relationship to one another, and to the forging of our own imaginative lives.    The following quotation from the late potter Emmanuel Cooper, writing in ‘The Maker’s Eye’ exhibition catalogue in 1981 encapsulates this well:

 

If the crafts are about anything they are about the way we, as individuals, with different skills, abilities, and desires, can shape the way we live.  Though our society appears to stress the importance of each of us, we are offered very little ‘choice’ and every pressure to conform.  Some of us are lucky enough to be able to practise a craft through which we can influence, even build,  our environment, and this affects us all. 

 

This shaping of the lived world is a complex, and thoughtful process which, requires a build up of material knowledge through time and, as Cooper suggests above, can influence and affect us all – not just those directly involved in making things.   Tanya Harrod suggests in a recent Think Tank essay (4) that ‘part of the power that resides in objects of art and craft lies in their complexity – a complexity that creates relationships’.   She draws on the work of anthropologist, Alfred Gell, to describe how complex works can create these relationships by ‘slowing perception down … ‘ creating a sense of ‘unfinished business’ an open endedness which anthropologists recognise as underpinning long term productive social relations (5).  

 

Artist filmmaker, Matt Hulse, who works with moving image, music, sound, performance and community has developed a growing interest in a field of craft as part of his open exploration of what art can be; what kind of depth of enjoyment it can bring into, and out of, different forms of human experience.   He opened the day with a visual reflection on different ways of thinking about craft, its materials and people - drawing on some of the work he did with IC/Dovecot in Edinburgh in 2010 – showing a carefully spliced collection of film clips and images emphasising the social spaces generated by makers and their objects: something which was beautifully explored in his 2013 feature film Dummy Jim (www.dummyjim.com).

 

Short presentations from each maker seeded the day’s thinking about different approaches to craft, moving us between a Sexy Peat project on Skye (http://dstitch.blogspot.co.uk/) ; designing and producing ceramic tableware in China and UK (http://www.dartingtonpottery.co.uk/htdocs/potteryfiles/janicetchalenko) ; teaching metalwork in Bogota (www.grantmccaig.co.uk) building bridges in Jersey (www.jplw.co.uk) and walking around the hidden spaces of the V & A (www.jamesrigler.co.uk) .  

 

These very different voices reminded us of the vast web of connections that an interest in, and an aptitude for, making things can build up.  Jim Partridge, who opened the session reflected on the integrative nature of his and his partner Liz Walmsley’s working lives, finding ‘a landscape where, on a good day, art and design, production and consumption, function and meaning can flow together.’ Their deceptively simple carved and constructed oak seating, vessels and site specific shelters and bridges grace locations as distinct as the V & A Furniture Gallery; Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford and Mountstuart Gardens on the Isle of Bute.  In each case the material presence of the object sets up a series of shifting dialogues with people and place – perhaps most memorably encapsulated by the black altar and cross in Oxford which won an Art and Architecture Award in 2003. 

 

The ways in which a critical relationship to making things, and material knowledge, can open up fruitful contact with different geographical places and cultures was a theme that re-emerged with each maker’s talk.. Janice Tchalenko, whose knowledge of glaze and pattern honed through her own studio work with high fired, richly coloured stoneware vessels (themselves a significant challenge in the 1970s to the authority of the brown pot in studio ceramics), has created relationships on shop floors from Stoke-on-Trent to China.  This in turn has created a small, but successful , resistance to an ‘industry which hates diversity’ and replaced it – particularly in the batch production work at Dartington – with affordable tableware which adds spirit and quality to everyday life as well as enabling the designer to forge a self supporting portfolio career.  

 

Perhaps the maker who most eloquently demonstrated the role that craft knowledge can have in creating a community, globally, of productive relationships was Deirdre Nelson.    Her knowledge of many different forms of textile practice – in particular stitching and knitting – has been the catalyst for a growing number of international invitations to participate in residencies in locations as diverse as South Australia; Skye; Shetland; New Zealand and India.  

 

She talked about the importance of understanding the history of a place, its material history, when moving to work in a new community.   All her work draws on this material sense of  place.  Recent projects such as Bird Yarns, a Cape Farewell, An Tobar project, in 2012 saw her working closely with local Mull knitting groups to create a warmly inclusive, and witty bird knitting project, which simultaneously explored serious concerns such as local community divisions (the blow ins versus the locals) and the impact of climate change on bird life, in ways both illuminating and constructive.    She shared a set of words evolved as a critical part of her residency toolkit: resourcefulness; flexibility; humour; empathy; resilience and sustainability.   They make a useful list for most lived lives.  

 

Nelson also makes exceptional use of social media tools to evolve her working life – tweeting and blogging as a way of making low cost, but high impact connections that link one residency and community to another and one project to the next.   

 

Grant McCaig, in his beautifully wrought reflection ‘Habla Metal?’, described receiving an email from an art college in Bogota, who had seen his website,  inviting him to teach a metal class – something which highlighted the role of connectivity to a flourishing practice.   However, his talk focussed on the challenges of arriving in a radically different environment:  no common language, few tools, significantly different life experiences.  His curiosity about and knowledge of, making was critical and enabled him to evolve productive relationships to his students, drawn from an extreme mix of Colombian street kids and wealthy tutors, through first making tools then creating works which explored naming and language.   His experience demonstrates the value of what Gaston Bachelard termed the material imagination – works that ‘stem directly from matter…the eye assigns them names, but only the hand truly knows them.’  (6) The intimate experience of making created a connection between people that transcended, yet celebrated, cultural difference.

 

The conversations that were stimulated by, and woven around, these presentations focussed on the ways in which all this rich thinking, and its objects, could be presented in exhibitions. Each participant was encouraged to reflect on their physical experience of exhibitions, from any branch of the arts, either as curators or audience.    Critical responses highlighted the connections, and tensions, between the material experience of a show and the ‘mystery, movement and drama’ of the more intangible theatre of exhibition making.   Most seem to agree that the editorial eye of a knowledgeable curator could help avoid ‘an excess of teapots’ and create magical moments that allowed us to both be aware of, and reflect on, objects in the space of an exhibition.   As Stephanie Moser, Professor of Archaeology at Southampton University points out, ‘there is often a lack of reflection upon the importance of (of the role of) exhibitions in contributing to intellectual developments (rather than reflecting it)…displays create new worlds for objects to inhabit. (7)

 

There was a lively sense that curatorial responsibility, following the etymological root of the word, implies a duty of care to the whole environment in which art and design making happens, as well as to the individual artists or designers and subjects that are represented in a given exhibition.   Several people mentioned The Light Show, a recent presentation at the Hayward Gallery, which was thoughtfully constructed to demonstrate the embodied experience of the physics of light.  High quality artistic presntations were matced by an entirely interactive role for the viewer.  The viewer’s imagination was stimulated through the movement into, and through, the lightworks and the ways in which such active movement shifted perception.

 

Curating as a way of forming, and exploring, emotional connection through and to our material world, a way of turning space, into place, became the subject for many ongoing conversations, through the day.   One participant commented on the value of ‘awkward edges’ the ways in which exhibitions, as opposed to government reports,  can amplify the complex relations and ambiguities which are, together with actual substances, the materials of art – and the realities of most lived lives.    The importance of failures, and the generosity to risk them, was felt to be common to both art making and exhibition making.  The intimate, embodied experience of building statements of meaning through crafting objects, exhibitions and experiences is honed through a respectful, yet critical dialogue with materials, people and place, through time.  Some felt a field of craft was sometimes not sufficiently self-critical in its exhibition making: others that the institutional critque of craft had become very stifling to more open approaches – large blockbuster exhibitions such as the Power of Making, had little impact, some felt, on the creative and economic activities of small studios. 

 

Siobhan Davies reflected on the importance of redefining the relationships between words and actions as a way of refreshing understanding of a field of practice.   She doesn’t call any of her collaborators ‘dancers’, for example, to avoid over predictive responses to her choreography and movement work.  In her closing words, she talked about a feeling of ‘having had her creativity brushed up’ by hearing the stories, and sensing the spaces, of makers and their objects during the day.   Her own work at Siobhan Davies Studios (www.siobhandavies.com) in a beautifully upcycled physical space in South London, designed by Sarah Wigglesorth Architects, has demonstrated a constant commitment to imaginative space, across different forms of expression, a space, which the poet Thomas A Clark describes as:

 

 not the cul-de-sac of daydreams…. not a temptation but a practice. The issue is not transcendence or escape but to realise that we do not confront an objective and final reality, that the means are available, that in any situation there may be intelligence, movement, sufficient light. (www.cairneditions.co.uk). 

 

This imaginative space is made more possible, through the crafting of material space.  The final presentation, by emerging maker, James Rigler who has recently completed a ceramic residency at the V & A in London reflected on the influence of the material space of the Museum, as much as the collections, to his thinking and he drew our attention to texts such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in which a place, a city,

 

‘does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

 

These living traces of our embodied relationship to materials, contained in spaces and objects, can be decoded by makers in a very particular way.      Projects orchestrated by the Crafts Council, such as Museumaker in 2011, were a valuable recognition of this tacit knowledge exchange that can happen in a museum between maker and curator.  The greater challenge is to consider how to release the imaginative possibilities of that valuable exchange into the messy, complex reality of everyday lives, via exhibitions,  and to avoid, as one participant wryly commented, the twin reefs of ‘the ego and the wallet’ as the only way of shaping experience of culture.  

 

In sum ‘Making the Future’ was made possible through the generous gift of time by all participants, by the funding of Arts Council of England, by the particular knowledge of gifted makers and artists, by the creative patterns and lnks being forged and supported by Roanne Dods and Pallabs and by the extremely hospitable environment of CAA – its people and spaces.   The podcasts, images and film that sit alongside these words will, I hope, give at least a glimpse of the rich human potential that craft practice actually contains, rather than its faint shadow flitting across government reports or formal cultural structures.  

 

Makers, I have observed through 30 plus years of making exhibitions in both commercial and cultural contexts, have a habit of ‘moving the curve’ of lived experience into deeper and more expressive realms: the realms of the imagination.  We would do well to listen closer to their experience and to develop ways of making exhibitions which craft the imagination with the same precision, and embodied material awareness that small studios demonstrate daily.   Through this process,  we may then be able to both imagine, and thus make, a future which possesses the intimate, intricate and material qualities that will allow us all to thrive.  

 

NOTES

• Italo Calvino ‘Six Memoes for the the Millenium’

• Peter Senge ‘The Necessary Revolution’

• Richard Sennett ‘The Craftsman’

• Tanya Harrod ‘The Gift: a starting point or a discussion of craft’ from Gift – papers and exhibition www.thinktank04.eu

• Ibi

• Gaston Bachelard ‘Water and Dreams’

• The devil is in the detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge, Stepanie Moser