Craft as a Creative Industry (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries) [1 ed.] 1032294663, 9781032294667

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Craft as a Creative Industry

Craft is resurgent. More people are buying craft; more money is being spent on craft products than ever before. This book centres craft as a creative industry, illuminating the experiences of those working in and around craft, particularly people from marginalised groups. Shining a light on inequalities around craft work, the author examines the lived experiences of women makers of colour in the professional craft sector. Experiences of racism and microaggressions at all stages of their craft career are analysed. The author draws on innovative empirical research carried out in the UK and Australia, two countries where the resurgence in craft is apparent, yet professional craft practice is dominated by the white and relatively privileged. In interrogating hierarchies of expertise and cultural value in craft, the author employs case studies from community crafts and social enterprises. The result is a book of interest to scholars at the intersections of the creative and cultural industries, the creative economy and inequalities at work. Karen Patel is a research fellow at Birmingham City University, UK.

Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries Series Editor: Ruth Rentschler

This series brings together book-length original research in cultural and creative industries from a range of perspectives. Charting developments in contemporary cultural and creative industries thinking around the world, the series aims to shape the research agenda to reflect the expanding significance of the creative sector in a globalised world. Diversity and Inclusion: Are We Nearly There Yet? Target Setting in the Screen Industries Doris Ruth Eikhof Creative Work Conditions, Contexts and Practices Edited by Erika Andersson Cederholm, Katja Lindqvist, Ida de Wit Sandström and Philip Warkander Data-Driven Innovation in the Creative Industries Edited by Melissa Terras, Vikki Jones, Nicola Osborne and Chris Speed The Economics of Libraries Marco Ferdinando Martorana and Ilde Rizzo NFTs, Creativity and the Law Within and Beyond Copyright Edited by Enrico Bonadio and Caterina Sganga Craft as a Creative Industry Karen Patel

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-the-Creative-and-Cultural-Industries/book-series/RRCCI

Craft as a Creative Industry Karen Patel

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Karen Patel The right of Karen Patel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032294667 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032294674 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003301714 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003301714 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface 1

Introduction

vii ix 1

Craft as a creative industry 9 Inequalities in the creative industries and craft 13 2

UK professional craft: elitism and change

23

The context of UK professional craft: guilds, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Commonwealth Institute 23 Craft guilds 23 The British Arts and Crafts movement 25 Craft in the Commonwealth Institute 28 Inequality, expertise and cultural value in UK craft 30 Racism and microaggressions in UK professional craft 32 Judgement and cultural value 35 UK socially engaged craft: case studies 39 CraftA, London 41 Flourish Jewellery Project, Edinburgh 42 Path Carvers, Birmingham 43 Socially engaged craft in the UK: change, challenge and growth 45 3

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn Craft in Australia: a background 52 Creative industries and cultural policy in Australia 56 Aboriginal art centres 58

51

vi Contents Socially engaged craft in Australia: case studies 62 The JamFactory, Adelaide 63 The Social Studio, Melbourne 65 Craft social enterprises in Australia: enterprise and flexibility 66 4

Making changes in craft

71

Change what is judged and how: craft expertise and the craft object 72 Change who judges and how: community evaluation 76 Change the approach: care in craft 77 Change the system: parity of participation and contributive justice 82 5

Conclusion

89

Craft as a creative industry 90 Making changes in craft 92 Index

99

Acknowledgements

The research for this book was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Innovation Fellowships scheme, for the project “Supporting Diversity and Expertise Development in the Contemporary Craft Economy” phases 1 and 2 (funder references: AH/S004343/1 phase 1 and AH/V010026/1 phase 2). The short name for the project, which I will be using throughout this book, is Craft Expertise. I want to thank the European Journal of Cultural Studies for allowing me to publish part of my article, “ ‘I want to be judged on my work, I don’t want to be judged as a person’: Inequality, expertise and cultural value in UK craft” from volume 25 issue 6, in Chapter 2 of this book. Much of the research for this book took place during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. It was a very difficult time for me for many reasons, and I have a lot of people to thank for their part in the project and the writing of this book. First, to all the makers I have spoken to and worked with over the course of this research, thank you for your time, energy and generosity, and for sharing your stories with me. Without you all, none of this would be possible. I would also like to thank the people from the case study organisations in this book, for welcoming me and taking the time to speak to me about your work. Thanks to the Crafts Council for being my collaborator for the past 5 years, in particular Julia Bennett. It’s been a pleasure working with you; your expert guidance and insight have been so important throughout this research. I would also like to thank other Crafts Council colleagues, including Rafaela, Nicky, Natalie, Amelia and Leah, who have helped me at various points throughout the project. I must extend a sincere thanks to Rose Sinclair and Lorna HamiltonBrown, who attended the very first workshop I held as part of my project in London, and I’ve been fortunate enough to collaborate with them both and stay in touch ever since. You are both incredible women, powerhouses of craft and a constant inspiration to me. I’m so glad you came to that workshop in 2018. Speaking of powerhouses in craft, I also owe a huge thanks to Deirdre Figueiredo. Thank you so much for your time and generosity over the past few years.

viii Acknowledgements Thanks to my colleagues at Birmingham City University, particularly in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media. First, my project mentor Rajinder Dudrah for your advice, mentorship and generosity. Thanks to Annette Naudin for your advice and friendship throughout, and for being the second half of #karenette(!). Also, thanks to the rest of my colleagues in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, particularly Gemma Commane, Oliver Carter, Nick Webber, Simon Barber and Kirsten Forkert, who have all been there for me for some advice or a chat when I’ve needed it. Thanks to Faculty and University colleagues for their help at various points during the research, particularly Nicholas Gebhardt, Yanyan Wang, Yvette Burn and Paul Whitehead, and STEAMhouse colleagues Alexa Hartwell, Patrick Bek and Sophia Tarr for helping me with the workshops. A special thanks to Susan Luckman, for your hospitality when I visited Adelaide, for taking the time to read through and offer comments on a chapter of this book, and for generally being such a generous and amazing colleague. Thanks to Saskia Warren for your thoughtful comments on my book and for being great company in Melbourne. Thanks also to Paul Long, Dan Ashton, Anamik Saha, Jilly Kay, Radhika Gajjala, Lauren England, Fiona Hackney and Carol Tulloch for your advice, interesting chats and help at various points of this work. Finally, thanks to my family and friends, and especially Nic. I wouldn’t have done this without you.

Preface

On 25 May 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the USA. The entire incident was captured on video and shared widely on social media. At the same time, most of the world was in lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was claiming thousands of lives by the day. As one of my interviewees for this research said when talking about George Floyd, “you couldn’t look away, everyone was forced to see this”. People saw the reality of police brutality, when many people had more time than ever on their hands. Just over 2 months before that, on 13 March 2020, Breonna Taylor was murdered by police when they raided her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. However, Breonna’s death did not receive as much attention until after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, which took place around the world during May and June 2020. The hashtag campaign #SayHerName emerged on Twitter and Instagram during the time of the protests, in reference to the lack of attention paid to Taylor’s murder. Although these incidents happened in the USA, the effects were felt around the world and sparked a wave of anti-racism protests and action. At the same time, I was nearing the end of the first year of the Craft Expertise project. I was writing up the first report for my project partner Crafts Council. The report consisted of quotes from the first batch of interviews I had carried out with racially minoritised women working in craft. The interviews revealed the extent of racism and microaggressions in professional craft spaces. Although my direct contacts with the Crafts Council were invested in my work and were very supportive, and they were doing some work on equality and diversity in craft, it wasn’t communicated as widely as I felt it could be. My work was featured in policy briefs but never on the Crafts Council homepage. The links to my work became broken or outdated with the website revamp. All that somewhat changed when the “black square” trend emerged on Instagram on 1 June 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd and in support of the Black Lives Matter protests. The campaign originated from the music industry, whereby artists and producers posted black squares on Instagram in protest against police brutality

x Preface and racism. The black square trend quickly spread, and the Crafts Council got on board, posting a black square on Instagram. Within the black square, it said: “It is our responsibility to tackle racism and inequality of access within the craft sector” with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter (Crafts Council, 2020a). The post described the Crafts Council’s commitments to tackle racism and inequality in craft, and that they are open to honest conversations about their privilege as an organisation. This post was met with a backlash from makers, particularly black makers, who pointed out how the Crafts Council has not supported black craftspeople or championed their work. In response, the Crafts Council organised an online event, which would be an open forum for racially minoritised makers to speak openly about their experiences (Crafts Council, 2020b). I was invited to present my interim findings from the Craft Expertise project. Dr Rose Sinclair from Goldsmiths, University of London and Jay Blades, presenter of the BBC TV craft show The Repair Shop, spoke about their experiences as black people in the craft sector. Many of the makers in attendance described how tired they were by these circumstances and that organisations such as the Crafts Council should be doing more to tackle racism in craft, instead of asking people of colour to devote their energy and emotional labour to the same issues that were directly affecting them. After the event, there was a series of conversations between the Crafts Council and people who attended, which led to the establishment of the Global Majority Action Group, which later became the Equity Advisory Council (Crafts Council, 2023). I was one of the founding members of this group and witnessed first-hand a lot of the difficulties that the makers faced in dealing with large organisations and trying to make change. I recognised the parallels with my own experience as lead of an equality and diversity group in my higher education institution: excessive bureaucracy, lack of communication and competing priorities. It piles the pressure on minoritised people to put the work in, when the onus should be on everyone collectively to help change the culture and make these organisations safe so that everyone can thrive. I am writing this preface in 2023, 3 years after the initial wave of awareness in the UK craft sector, which was prompted by the murder of George Floyd. While I was writing this introduction, I received an email from a maker of Indian heritage who I had previously interviewed. She expressed her disappointment at how little the sector has changed since our previous conversation in 2020: The subject of diversity continues to concern me deeply. I’m at a point where I’m hesitant to apply for exhibitions, as I’m aware that I may not be selected. During one exhibition, someone expressed their pleasure in seeing me represent minorities, as I was the only exhibitor of colour. However, this doesn’t prevent me from creating and producing my work.

Preface xi Despite improvements in representation of black and brown makers in craft exhibitions, fairs and so on, there remain concerns about whether meaningful change has actually occurred in craft and the wider creative industries. The pandemic and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter presented a chance for the creative industries to reset (Banks & O’Connor, 2021; de Peuter et al., 2023), but it is not yet clear the extent to which positive changes have been made. In this book, I provide some insight into both the pre- and post-lockdown situation in craft in the UK and Australia, focusing particularly on inequality, and the wider context of craft as a creative industry.

References Banks, M., & O’Connor, J. (2021). “A plague upon your howling”: Art and culture in the viral emergency. Cultural Trends, 30(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09548963.2020.1827931 Crafts Council. (2020a). #BLACKLIVESMATTER. Following the death of George Floyd in police custody, the Crafts Council shares the anger and outrage felt by . . . | Instagram. www.instagram.com/p/CA5b8IOh5-v/ Crafts Council. (2020b). What the Crafts Council is doing to erase racism and inequality in the craft sector. www.craftscouncil.org.uk/stories/ tackling-racism-and-inequality-craft-sector Crafts Council. (2023). Equity Advisory Council. www.craftscouncil.org.uk/ diversity-inclusion/equity-advisory-council de Peuter, G., Oakley, K., & Trusolino, M. (2023). The pandemic politics of cultural work: Collective responses to the COVID-19 crisis. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 29(3), 377–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10286632.2022.2064459

1

Introduction

We never get invited to the top table. So, we’re just going to build our own table. – Lorna Hamilton-Brown

This quote was by academic and knitter Lorna Hamilton-Brown at the Craft Economies and Inequalities conference in Birmingham in December 2019, a conference I organised as part of the Craft Expertise project. As part of a panel on inequalities in UK professional craft, Lorna described her experiences as a knitter and academic, particularly her struggles to be recognised by large organisations in the sector such as the Crafts Council, the partner organisation in my project. The metaphor of the table struck me, as a table is something that can be made by hand, requiring skill and mastery. But a “top table”, in Lorna’s description, is also a place of privilege and implies there is a hierarchy. Building your own table, then, could be seen as an act of resistance, or an alternative. Inequalities, hierarchies, privilege and resistance – this book is about all of those things in the context of craft as a creative industry. This book is the first to devote significant attention to issues of inequalities in professional craft within the contemporary creative industries paradigm. It draws on ethnographic research carried out in the UK and Australia, two countries with significant and diverse craft traditions, but where professional craft remains marked by whiteness in terms of both the workforce and aesthetics of craft products which are most visible (Luckman & Andrew, 2020, p. 18; Patel, 2022). Bringing together theoretical work from cultural studies, sociology, anthropology and art history, I then set out a two-part framework for conceptualising a more equitable idea of the craft sector, moving beyond only stating that inequalities are there (Banks, 2023a), but offering a way forward for further research, action and discussion. This research emerged from a recognition of the lack of critical work on craft as a creative industry, particularly in relation to inequalities. There are well-established journals, such as Craft Research and the Journal of Modern Craft, and important books, such as Glenn Adamson’s The Craft Reader DOI: 10.4324/9781003301714-1

2 Introduction (2010) and Thinking Through Craft (2007), that provide histories of craft, seek to highlight the value and diversity of craft practices, and argue for the relevance of craft in a contemporary world. Such work predominantly celebrates craft practices and tends to overlook the critical aspects of craft. The edited volume Critical Craft (Wilkinson-Weber & DeNicola, 2020), situated in anthropology, is an intervention in this regard, as it attempts to move past ideas of craft as a “revival”, DIY or even resistance to capitalism, to focus on individual ethnographies and understandings of craft. Much of the work mentioned makes little reference to the body of scholarship on the creative and cultural industries, and the sub-strand of work concerned with the experience of cultural work, otherwise known as “creative labour” (Hesmondhalgh, 2018, p. 71). This is where this book is situated because it is concerned with people’s experiences of craft work and craft production, within the context of the “creative industries”. As Jakob and Thomas (2017) highlight: While craft has routinely engaged over many decades with economic development, cultural and more recently creative industries and education policy, there is very limited academic discussions that locate crafts within the creative industries, creative industries policies and creative economies frameworks. Jakob and Thomas (2017, p. 500) Only relatively recently has work emerged, which explicitly connects craft with the creative industries, particularly the work of Susan Luckman (2015), which I will discuss shortly. Also of note is the work of Thomas ThurnellRead (2014), who highlights craft labour in microbreweries, and Richard Ocejo’s Masters of Craft (2017) focusing on artisan practices in service industries such as hairdressing and meat butchers. The work of Thurnell-Read and Ocejo presents different understandings of “craft”, especially as craft drinks and food have become increasingly commercially popular in Western democracies. Because of the potentially broad application of the word “craft”, it is worth defining what I mean by craft in this book. For this, I refer to the Crafts Council’s definition: Any object that has been made by hand by a craft maker, including basketry, ceramics, furniture, glass, jewellery, metalwork, paper, textiles, wood. Disciplines can range from furniture to jewellery, encompass standalone unique pieces of work and may include the use of more unusual materials. (Crafts Council, 2020) I appreciate this is a relatively narrow definition of craft, especially given the increasing presence of “craft” in different spheres of everyday life. However,

Introduction 3 with this book being situated within creative industries and creative labour, I am concerned with craft as a form of symbolic production, of producing objects of symbolic meaning and aesthetic value. Therefore, the Crafts Council’s definition is most appropriate for this book, especially as everyone I interviewed for the research worked within the sorts of disciplines mentioned in this definition. This book is about craft as a “creative industry”, and it is worth defining that term here. Its origins and associated debates have been discussed at length, and it is summarised well by David Hesmondhalgh (2018). In short, the term “creative industries” was first used by the UK government during the late 1990s as part of a policy construct to group together industries such as the arts, marketing, gaming, computer software, music, TV and film, among others, under the “creative industries” umbrella. The aim was to position the creative industries as a key area of economic development (Garnham, 2005). The “creative industries” as defined by the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) encompass “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 2001, p. 5). This definition makes explicit the link between creative work and its potential contribution to economic growth. This focus on economic growth, and the concept of the creative industries as a bundling together of disparate industries such as the arts and craft, with IT and telecoms, is problematic because it valorises the idea of the individual, talented and enterprising artist. Notions of “talent” and “excellence” have only served to exacerbate existing inequalities in the sector (Garnham, 2005; Hesmondhalgh, 2018) as demonstrated in the proliferation of work on inequalities in the creative industries since (e.g., Banks, 2017; Brook et al., 2020; Saha, 2018). The problematic concept of creative industries and the broad remit of industries that fall under it means many scholars prefer to use the term “cultural industries”, which usually refers to “those institutions that are most directly involved in the production of social meaning” (Hesmondhalgh, 2018, p. 14). However, this understanding of the cultural industries relates to what Hesmondhalgh characterises as “core” cultural industries, which include television and radio, film, music, publishing, computer games, advertising, marketing and public relations, and web design (2018, p. 15). Hesmondhalgh acknowledges that fashion and design are somewhat linked to the cultural industries but not “craft” as a category. This is because craft traditionally has less of an explicit link to the “industry” element of cultural industries, that is, any industry that involves symbolic production, commercial production and reaching of mass audiences. So, for the purposes of this book, I will primarily use the term creative industries because it encompasses craft, and it also acknowledges the policy context for craft which this book is concerned with. As part of this series, the purpose of this book is to discuss craft’s position as a creative industry, but it also primarily deals with issues of inequality and

4 Introduction diversity in craft. This book will examine these issues in the UK craft context, drawing on qualitative research from a variety of sources including interviews, observations and case studies. It highlights the challenges and barriers that minoritised1 people face in UK professional craft. It draws on case studies from both the UK and Australia of socially engaged craft organisations, which inform a conceptual framework for rethinking hierarchies of value in craft and what a more inclusive craft sector might look like. The research for this book focuses primarily on Western craft, which is a limitation given that a key issue within the creative industries, and in academia more generally, is the centring of Western narratives. The focus on Australia extends the scope of the research beyond the UK and Europe, but it is important to acknowledge that this book presents only one collection of perspectives and that more research needs to be done to bring together perspectives from makers around the world. There has been some recent work of note carried out on contemporary craft globally, for example, craft in China (Gu, 2022); weavers in Sumba, Indonesia (Gajjala et al., 2022; Untari et al., 2020); craft intermediaries in South Africa (Comunian & England, 2022) and the work of women handloom weavers in India (Mamidipudi, 2019). This book is intended to complement this work, focusing in particular on inequalities and hierarchies of value in contemporary craft, through an intersectional lens, and considering the role of socially engaged craft organisations in the craft ecology. I use the term “craft ecology” throughout this book as it encompasses all activities of craft across the “amateur” to “professional” spectrum (Luckman, 2015) as well as other agents and organisations involved in craft, such as charities, suppliers, health and social care groups, and community centres, following John Holden’s (2015) “ecology of culture” concept. In this way, the entirety of craft practice is considered, including the interdependencies between different agents in the ecology, and “a wide range of non-monetary values” (Holden, 2015, p. 2) which is pertinent to discussions of the value of craft to people and the communities, as well as craft’s value as a creative industry. The remainder of this chapter provides the context for craft as a creative industry, discussing previous work in this area, and the origination of the “creative industries” policy by the UK’s New Labour government in the late 1990s. I also discuss existing literature on inequalities in the creative industries in both the UK and Australian contexts. The first part of Chapter 2 provides some historical context to UK professional craft, including the role of guilds, and later the Arts and Crafts movement, in embedding hierarchies and exclusion in professional craft. I then discuss the contemporary context, drawing on interviews with women of colour in craft in the UK, which took place between 2018 and 2021. The interviews reveal the racism and microaggressions they face working in the craft industry at all stages of their career – from craft education, to studios, fairs and when working with suppliers. I discuss how their work is judged and valued by others through the lens of their

Introduction 5 intersectional identities as women of colour. These judgements are framed by the hierarchical and exclusionary history of professional craft, whereby the aesthetic criteria and standards for judgement were created and determined by predominantly white men, within a capitalist system that is undergirded by racism (Virdee, 2019). The system of “racialised capitalism”, as described by Virdee, reproduces racialised hierarchies of value, whereby makers feel that their craft work is judged on the basis of their identity (Skeggs, 2019) rather than the craft work itself and its qualities. The experiences of the makers interviewed suggest that many parts of the professionalised craft sector in the UK are exclusionary. As part of this research, I explored socially engaged craft enterprises and projects in the UK, looking at how they foster alternative pathways into craft, how such organisations bring people together and how they adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic. I discuss three case studies – the Flourish Jewellery Project in Edinburgh, Path Carvers in Birmingham and CraftA in London. All three organisations were ultimately driven by the passion and enthusiasm of their founders, with care and empathy at the core of what they do. However, there are issues with the sustainability of socially engaged craft, with the constant need to apply for funding, and the demands of sharing craft knowledge and practice, but also working with people who have complex circumstances. The case studies highlight the “moral failure of cultural policy” when it comes to socially engaged creative practice (Belfiore, 2022) because of the lack of state and structural support for these organisations which play a crucial role in the wider craft ecology. They use craft to empower people, help them develop skills and alleviate loneliness. Their value to communities was apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when all three organisations saw increased demand as a parallel mental health crisis emerged alongside the pandemic, when the effects of lockdown became apparent. However, the reliance on piecemeal funding means that their existence is precarious and reliant on the dedication of the people running them. In Chapter 3, I discuss craft in Australia. There is a focus on Australia in this book because of its own craft traditions, particularly First Nations2 and Aboriginal arts and crafts, which during the end of the 20th century crossed into the fine art market. Parallel to this is Australia’s commercial craft sector, which shares many similarities with the UK in terms of its issues with lack of diversity, in both the workforce and aesthetics of what is made and sold in the marketplace (Luckman & Andrew, 2020). Similar to the situation in the UK, Australian craft has a tenuous status as a creative industry (Luckman, 2015), possibly even more so because of the cutting back of state support for the craft sector which began during the 1990s and 2000s. Support for craft in Australia is fragmented and tends to be devolved to state level, and in some cases, it is subsumed into larger organisations supporting visual arts. Thus, there is a strong emphasis on entrepreneurialism, which has been aided by online marketplaces such as Etsy (Luckman, 2015). There remain issues with the

6 Introduction representation of First Nations artists and craftspeople in commercial craft. The success of First Nations art in the fine art market, aided by the development of art centres located in remote regions, has not helped alleviate ongoing social exclusion and poverty among First Nations people. Organisations such as the JamFactory in Adelaide work with art centres to provide pathways to market for First Nations craftspeople. The JamFactory benefits from state support in that its building is subsidised by the state government, which helps it to be sustainable and work on both its community work and expanding its income streams. I also focus on the Social Studio in Melbourne, which has support from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology to deliver an accredited course in textile manufacturing for refugee and new migrant communities in Melbourne. Both case studies demonstrate the value of long-term structural support for socially engaged craft. The interviews carried out with makers for this research demonstrate the prevalence of inequalities in the contemporary craft sector. These inequalities are in-built to the structure of the craft industry, which emerged out of hierarchical, patriarchal arrangements such as guilds, and the division and eventual overlap between “fine art” and craft. The case studies of socially engaged craft in the UK and Australia provide examples of how a sense of belonging and inclusivity can be fostered. The socially engaged organisations featured also primarily work with minoritised groups, offering people a chance to engage with craft. However, these organisations need more support to avoid the piecemeal short-term existence of constantly applying for project funding, particularly in the UK context. This is largely because of the cultural policy context, whereby state support for craft has reduced, despite, or maybe because of, its widespread popularity and relatively low barriers to access. If seemingly anyone can make something and sell it on Etsy, for example, why would the sector need further support? The interviews and case studies in this book highlight why policy support is needed across the entire craft ecology: to ensure as many people as possible can engage with craft, however they want to. Craftspeople of all abilities should be able to feel a sense of safety and belonging wherever they go, whether it be selling work at a craft fair, exhibiting in a gallery or participating in a community centre class. With that idea in mind, in Chapter 4 I bring together a two-part framework for addressing issues of inequalities in craft, considering the micro, meso and macro levels of the craft ecology. First, at the micro and meso levels, I discuss “changing what is judged and how”. I draw on the concept of expertise (Patel, 2020) in relation to craft, to unpick how judgements about cultural value should be made on the basis of the cultural objects themselves – their qualities and how craft expertise is manifest in the object (Born, 2010). Expertise is understood here as “a knowledge of aesthetic codes and classifications, and skill in mastering the tools and techniques to produce a work of aesthetic value that is recognized and legitimated as such” (Patel, 2020, p. 2). This is not aesthetic expertise in the

Introduction 7 judgement or appraisal of art work; instead, it is expertise in creation of a cultural object. I argue that judgements about craft work, which in Western democracies often focus on aesthetic classifications which are Eurocentric and narrow, should focus on the craft object and its qualities. This is in response to interview data which suggest that for makers from minoritised groups, some felt that judgements about their work, by customers, fellow makers and decision makers, can be shaped by their identity and presence as women of colour, in a professional craft sector that is dominated by white makers. As one of my interviewees said, “I want to be judged on my work, I don’t want to be judged as a person”. I appreciate that the idea of craft expertise as a knowledge of aesthetic codes and classifications in this context is somewhat contradictory – how can inequalities be addressed if we ask makers to develop their craft expertise in the dominant aesthetic codes and classifications which are white and Eurocentric? This is where I suggest changing how judgements are made at the meso level, in order to address existing hierarchies of cultural value. Rather than decisions about craft expertise and value being made by a relatively narrow pool of gatekeepers in professional craft, I suggest that judgements of craft value should instead take place within the context of communities and carried out reflexively, as part of a process of “community evaluation” (Wolff, 2006). This approach of “changing who judges and how” requires more democratic and community-based forms of evaluation, involving people from across the ecology of craft, to challenge existing mechanisms and criteria of judgement. The aim of the first part of the framework, drawing on the theoretical concepts put forth by Born and Woolf, is to expand who and what is valued and judged in craft. The second part of the framework discusses the macro level of the craft ecology, or “changing the approach”. For this, first I draw on recent scholarship on caring practices in creative work (Alacovska, 2020; Langevang et al., 2022) and the case studies of socially engaged craft in the UK and Australia to highlight the importance of socially engaged creative practice to the wider craft ecology and to foster a sense of inclusion and belonging. However, for this to be sustainable, there needs to be increased support for socially engaged craft and particularly for people who have double roles as practitioner and social care worker, as the mental and emotional labour of this work is not considered enough by policymakers (Belfiore, 2022). The way in which socially engaged craft organisations care for and engage people is instructive for the wider sector, in that they help enhance people’s capabilities (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 1999) and sense of well-being as flourishing (Sayer, 2011). These concepts have been used by cultural labour scholars discussing equity and social justice in the creative industries (see Banks, 2017; Hesmondhalgh, 2017). The capabilities approach, attributed to theorist Amartya Sen (1999), is based on the idea that the expansion of human capabilities is key to freedom within societies and key to economic development. It means that people should be allowed “to lead the kind of lives they value – and have

8 Introduction reason to value” (Sen, 1999, p. 18). Scholars such as David Hesmondhalgh (2017) have built on the capabilities approach to consider the creative industries and the function of media and culture under capitalism. For Hesmondhalgh, a solid normative foundation is required for critique of the media and cultural industries under capitalism, drawing on the capabilities approach and well-being as flourishing. Andrew Sayer (2011) argued that the concept of well-being as flourishing can help explain and evaluate human social life and our relation to the world. For Sayer, a sense of well-being relates to material conditions such as one’s job, recreational activities and how others are treating us. Inequalities – whether they be racial, gender, class or intersectional – also affect people’s sense of well-being and how people value themselves in relation to others. As I will show, craft makers from minoritised groups are directly affected by these inequalities, manifest in interpersonal experiences of racism and microaggressions, which can affect their sense of belonging in a space. These experiences are a result of malrecognition (Fraser, 2013) as described by Nancy Fraser. Fraser describes malrecognition primarily in relation to gender inequality, but it is applicable to intersectional inequalities, whereby people from certain groups are not recognised as peers because of their identity. Fraser proposes a normative conception of justice known as parity of participation. According to the principle of parity of participation, “justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers” (p. 178). This conception of social justice informs the more recent work by Mark Banks (2023) in which he suggests removing judgement and competition. Banks suggests that cultural work should be subject to a “greater social sharing” that disregards the existing criteria of selection. Instead, access to culture and the ability to contribute to culture should be free and accessible for all, removing the damaging effects of competition (Banks, 2023, p. 10). Such an idea would have implications for professional craft, which is struggling following funding cuts in the UK and in Australia (Luckman & Tower, 2023). At the same time, the system as it is does not work – it is hierarchical and harmful for people from minoritised groups. Flattening the hierarchy in the way Banks describes would need to take place across the entire craft ecology and beyond for the potential negative consequences on aspects of the craft sector to be avoided. It would require a fundamental reorganisation of the creative industries as we know it. In Chapter 5, I bring together the conceptual framework to suggest some ways forward both for craft as a creative industry and for research in this area. The framework is an indicative collection of ideas for thinking through, at different levels, how existing hierarchies in craft could be challenged. This book is intended to be a starting point for much-needed further research on craft as a creative industry, the inequalities within the sector and global perspectives. In the section to follow, I begin by discussing craft’s status as a creative industry.

Introduction 9

Craft as a creative industry The popularity of craft as both a hobby and potential career has experienced a resurgence in recent years, particularly in Western democracies such as the UK, the USA and Australia (Luckman, 2015; Mascia-Lees, 2016). Susan Luckman describes how the contemporary “craft renaissance” has been enabled by online marketplaces such as Etsy, which allow almost anyone to make and sell items around the world. Forms of craft that were once thought of as unfashionable, such as knitting and crochet, became fashionable again (Luckman, 2015, p. 2) as the “aura of the analogue” grew for consumers, in resistance to cheap, mass production. The slow fashion movement, in response to “fast fashion” amid concerns about the environment (Bain, 2016), has also contributed to the popularity of handmade textiles. Knitting and crochet have played a key role in forms of feminist activism, with a prominent example being the “pussy hats” that feminist activists knitted in protest against the misogynistic comments made by the then US President Donald Trump (Gökarıksel & Smith, 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns during 2020 saw the popularity of craft grow further. For example, it was reported in the UK that craft retailer Hobbycraft experienced a 200% surge in sales in the first few months of the pandemic (Brignall, 2020). Some people stitched masks and scrubs for healthcare and frontline workers (Murray, 2020). The pandemic saw increased interest in craft television shows, with Blown Away (Netflix), All That Glitters (BBC) and The Prince’s Master Crafters (Sky) all debuting around the time of the global pandemic. Practices of making can be a way of “looking to the home and family as a site where one remains needed, in an employment marketplace notable for its lack of permanence, loyalty and, all too often, absence of care for the individual” (Luckman, 2015, p. 44). While Luckman’s quote refers to the employment situation in craft, it is also pertinent to the situation during the pandemic, where the only place many people (but not all) may have had some semblance of comfort and control was the home. The popularity of craft during the pandemic is distinct from the impact felt by professional and established makers, with many struggling to generate an income during the crisis. This was not necessarily because they couldn’t reach a market but because of caring and other commitments preventing people from making. This disproportionately affected women and minoritised groups and potentially exacerbated existing inequalities in the sector (Comunian & England, 2020). As I will highlight throughout this book, there are inequalities in professional craft, even though craft arguably has lower barriers to participation than many other forms of creative practice. This is because of the relatively low cost of materials, and, according to Richard Sennett, “The innate abilities on which craftsmanship is based are not exceptional; they are shared in common by the large majority of human beings and in roughly equal measure”

10 Introduction (Sennett, 2010, p. 277). For Sennett, “nearly anyone can become a good craftsman” (p. 268), but to become a craft expert requires a great deal of time, patience and dedication. As I will show in this book, not everyone has equal access to the resources and time needed to develop craft expertise, and the very structure of the professional craft sector makes it difficult for minoritised people to gain recognition as craft experts. Richard Sennett has advocated for the value of craft work in contemporary capitalist societies. In The Corrosion of Character (1998), Sennett highlights how contemporary capitalism “radiates indifference” towards people, whereby in contemporary institutions “people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others” (Sennett, 1998, p. 146). For Sennett, craft can help develop that sense of “mattering”, of developing skills and expertise, allowing for mistakes and taking time to do something well. Because the nature of craft involves taking time and care, it sits uneasily within the system of contemporary capitalism, which is characterised by short-term transactions and constantly shifting tasks (Sennett, 2010, p. 105). Craft has often been described as a potential counter to capitalism, a form of resistance, but in fact it is caught up in contemporary capitalism, especially during the recent resurgence of craft and the general growth of the craft economy in the past 20 years or so. Even so, the status of craft as a part of the creative industries continues to be debated. Susan Luckman suggests that craft’s tenuous position as a creative industry is in part linked to the predominance of women in craft. She suggests that craft is impacted by legacies of gendered exclusion from mainstream creative industries activity, as well as the exclusion of women from fine art (see also Adamson, 2007). Luckman also notes how fibre crafts, which are often practised in the home, are traditionally devalued, and the labour and skill of fibre crafts is obfuscated or categorised in the same manner as other domestic activities such as cooking and cleaning (2015, p. 48). Because of these legacies of craft practice, certain types of craft are routinely dismissed as “amateur”. Thus, the “amateur v professional” debate has often been at the centre of arguments about craft’s status as a creative industry (ibid.). Luckman suggests that rather than an unhelpful amateur v professional binary, craft practice is better understood as operating along an amateur to professional continuum, which is more appropriate given the rise in craft micro-enterprises facilitated by social media and craft seller sites such as Etsy. The “post-Etsy” handmade economy as characterised by Luckman demonstrates the growth of craft micro-enterprises in the past 20 years, coincidentally since craft was first introduced as one of the 13 original categories in the UK’s creative industries policy of the late 1990s (DCMS, 2001). In the original section on craft in the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) Creative Industries Mapping Document, the Crafts Council’s definition of craft is used to define the remit, which includes “textiles,

Introduction 11 ceramics, wood, metal, jewellery, glass, leather, toys, musical instruments, and the graphic crafts” (DCMS, 2001, p. 31). The economic contribution of craft is the first highlight in the document, estimating that the “craft industries turn over around £400m annually”, but “Because of the nature of the sector, comprising a myriad of small businesses and individuals, a precise assessment of its contribution to the economy is impossible” (DCMS, 2001, p. 32). The document also states that women outnumber men in the profession by a ratio of 57:43, but the average turnover for a male craftsperson is more than double that of a woman (£37,729 for men, £17,680 for women). The document identifies the craft sector as having great potential for growth, but the “British public needs to be educated to appreciate the true value of craftwork and be prepared to pay to own it” (p. 33). The key issues of focus for the craft sector align with the remit of the Crafts Council – providing business training and support, space, advocating for the value of craft work and reaching markets in the UK and internationally. However, during the early 2000s, it was the UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) that became central to craft policy discussions. Jakob and Thomas (2017) argue that it was this alignment to BIS that contributed to the suggestion of removing craft as one of the creative industries categories in 2013. The DCMS released a consultation paper suggesting that because most craft businesses are sole-traders and thus “too small to identify in business survey data” (DCMS, 2013, p. 14), that data on the sector should not be collected. The Crafts Council responded strongly to this consultation, with head of research and policy Julia Bennett writing in The Guardian newspaper about the potential knock-on effects for the craft sector. Bennett stated that to omit craft as a category of the creative industries “denies makers, craft agencies and organisations and the government itself robust and commonly agreed data that evidences craft’s importance. Without data, the sector understandably has concerns that it is less visible than other parts of the creative industries, on the principle that ‘what doesn’t get counted, doesn’t count’” (Bennett, 2013). The Crafts Council was successful in its lobbying, and as of 2023, craft remains a recognised creative industry in the UK. In Australia, the national organisation for craft, Craft Australia, was defunded in 2011 after 40 years. Funding for Craft Australia had been gradually reduced during the 2000s despite craft being the most popular creative activity in Australia during that time (Eltham, 2012). Craft activity in Australia now falls primarily under the remit of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) and the World Crafts Council in Australia. I am mentioning the Australian context only briefly here because there is much more detail on the Australian craft and cultural policy context in Chapter 3. It is worth acknowledging at this point that since 2011, Australian craft has received relatively little policy support at a national level. However, in 2023 the Labour government introduced the Revive policy (Commonwealth of Australia, 2023), which promises a significant investment in Australia’s cultural sector, including First Nations arts and craft.

12 Introduction Because of craft’s tenuous status as a creative industry, it has received relatively little attention in creative industries and cultural policy literature, in comparison to other sectors such as film and TV. This is likely because of the fragmented and small-scale nature of craft work and difficulty in collecting accurate data on the sector, as well as its associations with domestic and feminised creative production (Luckman, 2015; Naudin & Patel, 2020). In the past two decades, following the work of Sennett, some scholars have noted the value of craft to the creative industries. For example, Mark Banks (2010) called for greater academic and policy attention on craft labour in the creative industries. Banks highlights the importance of craft skills within the creative production process, and how artists and craftspeople work together to create, such as set designers, engineers, songwriters, costume designers and makeup artists. These craft skills go unnoticed in accounts of the creative industries, and Banks argues that more needs to be done to understand the conditions of this work and the experiences of craftspeople across all creative industries. In Australia, Grodach et al. (2017) argue for cultural and urban policy to be redirected more towards material cultural production and manufacturing, to open opportunities for groups that have been marginalised by policies that have led to gentrification and exacerbated inequalities. They state, “Opportunities abound to pursue urban economic development strategies that build upon, rather than eschew, industrial, migrant and working-class skills and legacies” (2017, p. 18). A renewed policy focus on making things, they argue, presents a “chance for cultural policy to reinvent itself following a decade or more of consumption-based creative city strategizing” (ibid.). The role of material production and craft in urban regeneration has been highlighted in cases around the world, for example, in Australia (Carr & Gibson, 2016), China (Gu, 2014; O’Connor & Gu, 2014; Yang et al., 2021) and Serbia (Mikic, 2020). Jakob and Thomas (2017) note this policy trend and, in the UK context, claim that “emerging policies cement craft not simply as a form of heritage and culture, but particularly as tools for the revitalization of local economies” (2017, p. 497). Comunian and England (2019) provide a specific case study of craft in this regard, focusing on glassmaking clusters in the English cities of Sunderland and Stourbridge. In the UK context, the role of culture in urban regeneration became prominent during the 1980s and 1990s, through the Greater London Council’s strategy to invest in cultural industries “as a means of economic regeneration of the decaying post-industrial urban spaces of London” (Hesmondhalgh, 2018, p. 179). Later, the success of the Glasgow European City of Culture in 1990 and the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 1997 both turned those respective cities into attractive tourist destinations. The combination of urban policy and cultural policy resulted in the emergence of “creative cities” and “creative clusters”, which have been adopted by policymakers around the world. For example, Yang et al. (2021) discuss the example of the ceramics craft cluster in Jingdezhen, in the Jiangxi Province of China. Craft has also experienced a resurgence in China

Introduction 13 following an initial post-industrial decline, whereby craft has emerged as key to creative industries and creative cluster strategies (see also O’Connor & Gu, 2014). Yang et al. highlight how small-scale ceramics and porcelain production persisted throughout post-industrial decline because of how craftspeople adapted to incorporating contemporary designs into their work. Jingdezhen is now an important centre of ceramics production, visited by thousands of artists and craftspeople annually. The authors describe the case of Jingdezhen as an example of how even though craft-based production can experience peaks and troughs of popularity and decline, “the materiality of craft production makes it easy to re-emerge, especially in a place where production networks are closely rooted in social relations” (Yang et al., 2021, p. 554). While the economic contribution of craft to the creative industries is sometimes difficult to measure, it continues to be of interest to policymakers and academics in creative industries and cultural policy. Where less attention has been paid to craft as a creative industry is in relation to cultural labour and inequalities. Research on inequalities in the creative industries is a strand of research that has grown significantly in recent years.

Inequalities in the creative industries and craft Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, there has been increased academic interest in the conditions of cultural work, a strand of research which is often called “creative labour” (Hesmondhalgh, 2018, p. 71) or cultural labour (Oakley, 2009). Work in this area has mostly been concerned with issues around the precariousness of creative work (Gill & Pratt, 2008; McRobbie, 2002; Ross, 2008); pathways into creative work (Taylor & Luckman, 2020) including creative higher education (Ashton, 2013, 2015); and inequalities, particularly gender (Conor et al., 2015; Hughes, 2012), race (Cobb et al., 2020; Hesmondhalgh & Saha, 2013; Nwonka & Malik, 2018; Saha, 2018) and class and social mobility in the creative industries (Brook et al., 2020; Siebert & Wilson, 2013). Much of the early work in this area was in response to the “creative industries” paradigm, which had reopened debates about definitions of creativity and culture and what the new policy would mean for the arts and cultural industries. One concern was the policy emphasis on intellectual property and how this intensifies the art v commerce tension characteristic of cultural work (Eikhof & Haunschild, 2007; Throsby, 2001). The “creative industries” put creativity and culture at the heart of economic policy, and some researchers suggested that the emphasis on enterprise marginalised the arts and championed entrepreneurial individualism (Oakley, 2009). It was argued that this undermines the potential for collective action and solidarity between creative workers (McRobbie, 2002) and glosses over inequalities (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009). Banks and O’Connor (2009) point out that the creative industries construct created more issues around defining and measuring the creative industries, and understanding global contexts of the creative industries. They

14 Introduction also suggest that it led to a lack of coherent national and regional policies, and a problematic utopianism of creative work, as highlighted by Angela McRobbie. McRobbie’s (2002) important essay on the precariousness and informality of creative work highlighted how the creative industries can be exclusionary. She noted the “speeded up nature” of creative work under the neoliberal cultural policies of the late 1990s and early 2000s in the UK, where individualism and entrepreneurialism were glamorised. She described how the club and rave culture of the early 1990s in the UK influenced “the energizing and entrepreneurial character of the new cultural industries” (p. 519), and the individualistic, networked sociality of the creative industries meant that work was accelerated. There was an increased emphasis on self-promotion and taking on individual risk without the security of institutions, including trade union support. McRobbie points out that the informal, ad hoc and word-of-mouth nature of networking in the new creative industries could be exclusionary for many and called for further exploration of the specific consequences of individualisation for minoritised groups. Since then, many scholars have taken up this task. For example, in The Politics of Cultural Work, Mark Banks focuses on how cultural work is “constructed, managed and performed” (Banks, 2007, p. 3). Banks discusses the persistent tension, or division, between creative motivation and rewards of cultural work, otherwise known as “intrinsic” rewards, and economic motivations. Despite the “economisation of culture” which has been accelerated by creative industries policies, intrinsic rewards and possibilities for radical or collective action in creative work persist, and “Craft values and creative impulses remain vital motivations for action” (p. 114). He argues that the ‘art-commerce relation’ should be better understood as a constantly shifting inter-relationship between art, commerce and the social” (p. 184) – as this better accounts for modes of creative work that sit outside of the creative industries – such as socially engaged work, which can provide social, ethical and moral rewards for creatives. The rewards of creative work are discussed and developed by David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker (2013) in their analysis of the conditions of cultural work across three industries – television, magazine journalism and music. The authors discuss and develop the concepts of “good work” and “bad work” in the creative industries. This was in response to accounts of creative work which tended to be overly celebratory (as discussed by Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009). Hesmondhalgh and Baker look at individual experiences of creative work understood as “good work”, in terms of both the working conditions and process of creative work, as well as the creative work produced. For the authors, good work in the creative industries involves “decent pay, hours and safety; autonomy; interest and involvement sociality; esteem and self-esteem; self-realisation; work-life balance; security” (2013, p. 17). In reference to good work in creative products, this is “the quality of products involved and their potential contribution to the well-being of others, including (potentially) the common good” (ibid.). The

Introduction 15 concepts of “good work” and “bad work” provide a normative framework for accounts of cultural labour, particularly the quality of work in the creative industries. The research reveals the structural factors in the creative industries which heavily influence individual experiences and “which result in profound inequalities of access and reward” (2013, p. 221), whereby only a select few can enjoy the significant benefits and monetary rewards of a successful creative career, while the majority struggle in difficult conditions, with poor pay and long hours. Subsequent studies on cultural labour have shown that not much has changed; in fact, it may be getting worse. As Banks argues: The creative economy is not only failing to provide the conditions that would allow ordinary people to enter the labour market and participate in the production of culture but also actively exacerbating social inequalities in work through its own structures and patterns of organisation. (Banks, 2017, p. 145) In the field of cultural labour, these inequalities are evidenced in work on gender (Duffy, 2017; Raine & Strong, 2019; Scharff, 2018; Conor et al., 2015), race (Saha, 2018; Nwonka & Malik, 2018) and social mobility and class (Brook et al., 2020; Friedman & Laurison, 2020). Much of this work has focused on the traditional cultural industries – television, film, music, publishing and journalism. Relatively little research has been carried out on the lived experience of craft workers from minoritised groups, in part because of craft’s uneasy status as a creative industry. When the creative industries policy construct and discourse was launched, it had far-reaching influence in Australasia, East Asia, China and the USA, where its policies and discourse were uncritically taken up in various ways (Cunningham, 2009; Oakley, 2017). Kate Oakley (2017) argues that the creative industries policy focus on “jobs and growth”, as manifested across the world, has only intensified social and economic inequality. Oakley points out that cultural development models need to pay more specific attention to inequalities in cultural work. The emphasis on growth, jobs and economic measures of cultural value is evident in the Australian context, where creative industries policies zoned in on innovation and digitalisation and how the creative industries could add value to manufacturing and wider service industries (Cunningham, 2009, p. 381). In Australia, the creative industries discourse was used as a way for the cultural sector to “argue as an industry”, but under the coalition government, which gradually cut arts funding from 2013 onwards, that strategy failed as evidenced by the lack of support the sector received during the COVID-19 pandemic (Pacella et al., 2021). Cultural policies have been implemented inconsistently across Australia, mainly due to the short-term electoral cycles and governments not receptive to supporting culture (O’Connor, 2016), as well as an over-reliance on instrumental measures of cultural value (Meyrick & Barnett, 2017). Meyrick and

16 Introduction Barnett later argue that questions of the value of arts and culture in Australia need re-evaluation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic (Meyrick & Barnett, 2021), whereby for them, “the public role of arts and culture has become selfevident” and for the Australian cultural policy, “a new understanding of their public value” is required (p. 75). Pacella et al. (2020) highlight how the Australian government’s lack of support for cultural workers during the COVID-19 pandemic hints at a deeper ideological issue within the government at that time (which was a liberal/national coalition government). They suggest that the lack of financial support for the cultural sector, which almost mirrored the initial response of the UK during COVID-19 (Banks & O’Connor, 2021), indicates a lack of understanding of the working patterns and conditions of cultural work. This meant that many suffered financially during the pandemic, and women and racially minoritised people were the worst affected. There has been some work carried out on inequalities in Australia’s creative sector, for example, Luckman et al.’s (2020) examination of inequality in Australia’s broadcast industries and Cannizzo and Strong’s (2020) work on gender inequality in Australia’s screen industries. As Luckman, Andrew and Crisp (2019) acknowledge, there is relatively little research on inequalities in Australian professional craft. The funding cuts to the arts and cultural sector in Australia; the concerning lack of cultural policy, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic (Pacella et al., 2020); and particularly the lack of national organisation to support craft mean it is crucial to understand the experiences of makers in this area. This book only scratches the surface of these issues and is intended to act as a starting point for further research. While anyone seemingly could pick up knitting needles or a piece of wood and start creating something, making a career out of it is arguably more difficult for some groups than it is for others. As well as highlighting the issues, this book is also an attempt to point a way forward, drawing on case studies from both the UK and Australia and offering a practical and theoretical framework for making changes in craft.

Notes 1 I use the term “minoritised” to describe the people I have worked with and interviewed in this research, who are mostly women of colour. I prefer the term “minoritised” to acknowledge the systemic minoritisation of people who are non-white and acknowledge their intersectionality. 2 First Nations is the term I am using here to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are the original inhabitants of the land in Australia. While Aboriginal is still accepted as a term and is used at points in this book, Aboriginal is an English word which “became a colonial word to mean Indigenous people, as opposed to the colonists” (Broome, 2019, p. 3). Where the literature refers to Indigenous or Aboriginal, I will use those terms, but primarily my preferred term is First Nations because of its political intent.

Introduction 17

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Introduction 19 Eltham, B. (2012). We love getting crafty, but there’s no money in the kitty. Crikey. www.crikey.com.au/2012/03/02/we-love-getting-crafty-but-theresno-money-in-the-kitty/ Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of Feminism. From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. Verso Books. Friedman, S., & Laurison, D. (2020). The class ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged. Social Forces, 99(1), e5–e5. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz170 Gajjala, R., Faniyi, O. M., Ford, S., Untari, R., & Al Makmun, M. T. (2022). The persistence of the housewife ideology: Shifts in women’s roles in production of Sumbanese handwoven cloth. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25(6), 1617–1632. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494221136614 Garnham, N. (2005). From cultural to creative industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(1), 15–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/102866 30500067606 Gill, R., & Pratt, A. (2008). In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(8), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408097794 Gökarıksel, B., & Smith, S. (2017). Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(5), 628–644. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1343284 Grodach, C., O’Connor, J., & Gibson, C. (2017). Manufacturing and cultural production: Towards a progressive policy agenda for the cultural economy. City, Culture and Society, 10, 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2017. 04.003 Gu, X. (2014). Cultural industries and creative clusters in Shanghai. City, Culture and Society, 5(3), 123–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2014.07.005 Gu, X. (2022). Chinese Maker Culture – co-opting digitally mediated making for nation building. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 28(7), 875–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2022.2137155 Hesmondhalgh, D. (2017). Capitalism and the media: Moral economy, wellbeing and capabilities. Media, Culture and Society, 39(2), 202–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643153 Hesmondhalgh, D. (2018). The cultural industries (fourth edition). SAGE. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2013). Creative labour : Media work in three cultural industries. Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Saha, A. (2013). Race, ethnicity, and cultural production. Popular Communication, 11(3), 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/154 05702.2013.810068 Holden, J. (2015). The ecology of culture. A report commissioned by the arts and humanities research council’s cultural value project. https://publicart online.org.uk/downloads/news/AHRC%20Ecology%20of%20Culture.pdf Hughes, C. (2012). Gender, craft labour and the creative sector. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 18(4), 439–454. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286 632.2011.592187 Jakob, D., & Thomas, N. J. (2017). Firing up craft capital: The renaissance of craft and craft policy in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(4), 495–511. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015. 1068765

20 Introduction Langevang, T., Resario, R., Alacovska, A., Steedman, R., Amenuke, D. A., Adjei, S. K., & Kilu, R. H. (2022). Care in creative work: Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of care through arts-based methods. Cultural Trends, 31(5), 448–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2021.2016351 Luckman, S. (2015). Craft and the creative economy. Palgrave Macmillan. Luckman, S., Anderson, H., Sinha, R., Rentschler, R., & Chalklen, C. (2020). “The devil is in the level”: Understanding inequality in Australia’s film, TV and radio industries. Media International Australia, 176(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X19892772 Luckman, S., & Andrew, J. (2020). Craftspeople and designer makers in the contemporary creative economy. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44979-7 Luckman, S., Andrew, J., Crisp, T., (2019). Crafting self : Promoting the making self in the creative micro-economy. https://apo.org.au/node/220886 Luckman, S., & Tower, A. (2023). The value of craft skills to the future of making in Australia. University of South Australia. https://apo.org.au/ node/324171 Mamidipudi, A. (2019). Crafting innovation, weaving sustainability: Theorizing Indian handloom weaving as sociotechnology. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 39(2), 241–248. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-7586764 Mascia-Lees, F. E. (2016). American beauty: The middle class arts and crafts revival in the United States. In A. O. DeNicola & C. M. WilkinsonWeber (Eds.), Critical craft: Technology, globalization, and capitalism (pp. 57–78). Bloomsbury. McRobbie, A. (2002). Clubs to companies: Notes on the decline of political culture in speeded up creative worlds. Cultural Studies, 16(4), 516–531. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380210139098 Meyrick, J., & Barnett, T. (2017). Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid. Cultural Trends, 26(2), 107–124. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2017.1323840 Meyrick, J., & Barnett, T. (2021). From public good to public value: Arts and culture in a time of crisis. Cultural Trends, 30(1), 75–90. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09548963.2020.1844542 Mikic, H. (2020). Craft entrepreneurship and public policies in Serbia. In A. Naudin & K. Patel (Eds.), Craft entrepreneurship (pp. 29–48). Rowman & Littlefield. Murray, J. (2020). Volunteers stitch together to make scrubs for NHS The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/volunteers-stitchtogether-make-scrubs-for-nhs Naudin, A., & Patel, K. (2020). Craft entrepreneurship (A. Naudin & K. Patel, Eds.). Rowman & Littlefield. Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2jbt31 Nwonka, C. J., & Malik, S. (2018). Cultural discourses and practices of institutionalised diversity in the UK film sector: “Just get something black made.” The Sociological Review, 66(6), 1111–1127. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0038026118774183

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22 Introduction Taylor, S., & Luckman, S. (2020) Creative aspiration and the betrayal of promise? The experience of new creative workers. In S. Taylor & S. Luckman (Eds.) Pathways into creative working lives (pp. 1–28). Palgrave Macmillan. Throsby, D. (2001). Economics and culture. Cambridge University Press. Thurnell-Read, T. (2014). Craft, tangibility and affect at work in the microbrewery. Emotion, Space and Society, 13, 46–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. emospa.2014.03.001 Untari, R., Gajjala, R., & Sanjaya, R. (2020). The making of “asli” Sumba woven cloth: How globalising “intangible heritage” impacts women’s roles. Development in Practice, 30(8), 1094–1104. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09614524.2020.1759509 Virdee, S. (2019). Racialized capitalism: An account of its contested origins and consolidation. Sociological Review, 67(1), 3–27. https://doi. org/10.1177/0038026118820293 Wilkinson-Weber, C., & DeNicola, A. O. (2020). Critical craft (C. M. WilkinsonWeber & A. O. Denicola, Eds.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781003085119 Wolff, J. (2006). Groundless beauty. Feminist Theory, 7(2), 143–158. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1464700106064407 Yang, X. (Stephanie), Xu, H., & Ni, S. (2021). The creative renewal of a craft cluster: The role of materiality and mobility in cluster evolution. Regional Studies, 55(3), 546–555. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2020.1802417

2

UK professional craft: elitism and change

In this chapter, I focus on UK craft, looking at the experiences of women makers from racially minoritised groups. However, before I discuss these issues as revealed in my research, it is important to unpack the historical context of craft in the UK, which helps explain how the professional craft sector in the UK is structurally unequal and, for the most part, elitist.

The context of UK professional craft: guilds, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Commonwealth Institute In this section, I will discuss two aspects of the UK professional craft sector which have historically played a role in shaping the craft sector as it is today. First is the role of guilds and the Arts and Crafts movement in shaping British craft. Second is the Commonwealth Institute, a London-based cultural institution which displayed arts and crafts from Commonwealth countries during the 20th century and played some role in the UK’s attempt to reconcile with its colonial history. This is not a comprehensive history of craft in the UK; instead, it contextualises my argument about the UK professional craft sector – that it is structurally colonial and patriarchal and that these structural inequalities persist today and shape the experiences of people from minoritised groups in the craft sector. Craft guilds The hierarchical nature of professional craft in the UK is arguably rooted in the historical role of the guild. Craft guilds originated in the Middle Ages and were a significant part of economic life at the time (Koyama, 2020). Guilds protected craft workers and allowed them to sell their work (Richardson, 2001). According to Richardson’s historic account of medieval guilds, they operated primarily as cooperatives which no one was forced to join, but the sons of craftsmen within the guilds were often admitted “as a matter of course, while requiring other applicants to serve apprenticeships, pay entry fees, and demonstrate the skills necessary for the profession” (2001, p. 236). These requirements DOI: 10.4324/9781003301714-2

24 UK professional craft: elitism and change meant that entry into certain craft occupations was limited. While women were allowed to join,1 the only way they could be members was through marriage (Schmidt, 2009). The relatively high barriers to entry for guilds supposedly protected and assured standards of quality of the work produced. However, as Sheilagh Ogilvie (2008) argues, the closed nature of the guilds adversely affected the quality of work and development of skills, as well as “innovation and economic policy” (p. 175). Ogilvie suggests that guilds persisted because they redistributed resources to powerful groups, taking resources away from women, workers and consumers and distributing them to “cartels of male masters”, specifically “established masters, town officials, state bureaucrats, princes” (pp. 175–176). The restrictive barriers to entry and power imbalances meant that guilds eventually became inefficient and unsustainable. During the 20th century, the number of guilds declined sharply as industrialisation took hold, despite the efforts of the Arts and Crafts movement. A small number of guilds remain in the UK today, and some of these were created by the UK government’s Rural Industries Bureau. This was established in 1921 to support the rural and agricultural sector, and the guilds established were based on the membership structures of the medieval guilds (Jakob & Thomas, 2017). Jakob and Thomas focus on two of those guilds in the southwest of UK that were established by the Rural Industries Bureau – the Devon Guild of Craftsmen (now known as MAKE Southwest) and Gloucester Guild of Craftsmen. Both guilds were on a similar trajectory until 1985, when the Devon Guild invested in headquarters which led to an increase in membership. The authors highlight the experiences of individual members of guilds, highlighting the benefits of membership such as social connection, opportunities for exposure and exhibitions, and the assurance that being a member of a guild means “being recognised as producing work to a certain standard” (2017, p. 182). However, it is not clear what that “certain standard” means or who determines it. Indeed, these guilds still involve rigorous selection processes and interviews for anyone interested in joining. The guilds now primarily operate as gallery spaces and as communities of practice, but the standards of “quality” appear to be judged by a small number of members. Thomas and Jakob highlight how some guild members feel that standards need to be evaluated in light of technological developments and for guilds to remain relevant. It is worth noting that since Thomas and Jakob’s initial article, the Devon Guild of Craftsmen rebranded as MAKE Southwest “to more accurately represent their offering”, which is now “an acclaimed exhibition space for contemporary craft and design as well as a leading charity for craft education” (MAKE Southwest, 2023). While guilds do bring communities of makers together, the strict entry requirements and selection processes mean that it can be very difficult for makers to join. The few guilds that remain in the UK arguably continue to play a role in the hierarchical nature of professional craft because of the continued ties to the medieval model which is based on narrow selection processes.

UK professional craft: elitism and change 25 The British Arts and Crafts movement Another key part of the history of craft in the UK is the first wave of the British Arts and Crafts movement, which originated in the late 19th century. As the Industrial Revolution began in the UK during this time, guilds started to close as craft increasingly appeared to be laborious, expensive and time consuming in comparison to industrial production. It was in response to industrialisation that the Arts and Crafts movement began. William Morris is often regarded as the leading figure of the movement, along with John Ruskin. Morris advocated for the importance of handicraft and producing beautiful things, evidenced in a series of lectures he gave in Birmingham and Nottingham in the UK (Morris, 1882). According to craft historian Alan Crawford, the Arts and Crafts movement was guided by three principles: opposing the hierarchy between craft and fine art; the joy of craft labour and improving the design of objects consumed by the public (Crawford, 1997, p. 19). One element of the Arts and Crafts movement was education reform, and many schools started teaching classes in decorative arts that were relevant to local trades. Birmingham was renowned for its craft trades, and when the Birmingham Municipal School of Art was established by the Birmingham City Council in 1885, it became one of the leading centres for the Arts and Crafts movement in the UK (Crawford, 1984). The School of Art taught mainly elementary students, and according to Crawford, many of the students were young women. Despite the appearance of being inclusive – it is said that the Arts and Crafts movement was socialist politically – the movement also reinforced hierarchies in craft. In the early days of the movement, the Art Workers Guild was established by five architects who believed that architecture was an art form. The Guild was exclusively for men, and they would meet every 2 weeks in Bloomsbury or Holborn to discuss papers or watch craft demonstrations. According to Crawford, “the Guild’s motto was ‘The Unity of the Arts’, its atmosphere that of a slightly bohemian gentleman’s club, smoky and exclusive. It was the most important single organisation in the Movement, and in some ways its heart” (Crawford, 1984, p. 8). It is unsurprising, then, that Crawford states in a later work “it is generally true that women in the Arts and Crafts have a submerged presence” (Crawford, 1997, p. 17). This was mainly because women were still not allowed to work during the time of the movement. Instead, women were often restricted to home crafts such as needlework, and so a number of organisations were set up to help women sell their work. These included the Ladies’ Work Society, the Guild of Women Binders (Callen, 1979) and the Royal School of Art Needlework (Elliott & Helland, 2002). During this time, the art and craft work created by women, under the designation “the decorative arts”, was often dismissed by critics as “foreign, primitive, criminal, decadent and feminine influences” (Elliott & Helland, 2002, p. 2). The decorative arts, as the authors call it, occupied the

26 UK professional craft: elitism and change territory between “non-art” and “fine art” and included a wide range of activities such as weaving, pottery, metalwork, glass work and woodwork – all craft practices (p. 4). The role of women in the Arts and Crafts movement is still under acknowledged, despite that, as Anthea Callen suggests, the women involved “were crucial in the widespread dissemination of the ideals and practices of the Arts and Crafts movement” (Callen, 1979, p. 5). The daughter of William Morris, May Morris, played a crucial role in the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement. After studying embroidery at the South Kensington School of Design (later the Royal College of Art), she took over responsibility for the embroidery department at her father’s company, Morris & Co. May played a key role in the design of the Morris & Co “house style” and was one of the participants in the inaugural Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society show in 1887. She also wrote prolifically about her practice and later became a lecturer at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the Birmingham School of Art. The Women’s Guild of Arts, which she founded in 1907, has little record of its existence, only in May’s correspondence. She presided over the guild for 30 years, and its members included Mary Newill from Birmingham, embroiderer Mary Powell Turner, bookbinder Katherine Adams and painter Mary Sloane (Marsh, 2002, p. 44). May Morris set up the guild out of frustration at the Art Workers Guild’s “ladies’ nights”, which were supposed to be a chance to include women in the exclusive men-only Guild, but the women complained that the ladies’ nights were not taken seriously (p. 43). The tokenistic “ladies nights” demonstrate that despite the integral role of women, the Arts and Crafts movement alienated women and actually “reinforced the sense of ‘otherness’ experienced by craftswomen” (Callen, 1984, p. 6). Jan Marsh suggested that while the movement offered professional space for women to create and exhibit their work, they were “nevertheless effectively invisible in its public presentations and subsequent histories” (Marsh, 2002, p. 35). Marsh cites May Morris as a key illustrative example of the erasure of women from histories of the movement. The movement began to lose interest and momentum during the early 1900s, as exhibitions put on by its proponents began to draw criticism for their self-indulgence and elitism. Crawford sums up the main reasons for the demise: They claimed to have found a better way of making things than industry; but they never went to see what industry was like. If they had they would have found much boredom and degradation; but they would have found much handwork, not the machine-minding of their stereotype; and among the trade crafts they would have found skills that put their stumbling experiments to shame. Instead, they wrapped themselves in rhetoric and stood apart, a self-absorbed artistic elite. (Crawford, 1984, p. 24)

UK professional craft: elitism and change 27 It appeared the “gentlemen’s club” ethos on which the movement was founded on eventually became its undoing. Even so, the work of the Arts and Crafts movement and particularly those of Ruskin and Morris were hugely significant for contemporary craft, in that they attempted to elevate craft to the status of fine art, and in some ways succeeded. The efforts to elevate the status of craft in the UK continued when the Crafts Council was established in 1971, to promote “fine craftsmanship”, giving a certain idea of the type of craft they were willing to support (Jakob & Thomas, 2017). Initially named the “Crafts Advisory Council” (CAC), it was formed to advise the government on the needs of craftspeople and to promote nation-wide interest in craft products. It was renamed the Crafts Council in 1979. The Crafts Council operated as a branch of the Design Council until the early 1980s, when it became an independent organisation and was granted a Royal Charter. It continued to promote the idea of “fine craftsmanship” primarily through its exhibition programmes and providing grants for makers. It operated independently until 1999 following a review by Chris Smith, then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, when the Crafts Council shifted from a grant-making organisation to a funded organisation of the Arts Council of England. This meant that the Crafts Council could no longer provide funding for makers “and was instead charged with being a service delivery organisation” (Crafts Council, 2023). This would prove to be significant in terms of equality, diversity and inclusion, as the Crafts Council was required to report diversity data to the Arts Council and later sign up to the Creative Case for Diversity, which was launched in 2015 (Arts Council England, 2020). Even so, as I will show in this chapter, there is some way to go for the Crafts Council and the wider craft sector to address inequalities and discrimination. So far, I have primarily referenced equality and diversity in craft in terms of gender. This is in part because relatively little is known about the role of ethnically and culturally diverse groups during the early history of craft in the UK, particularly in creative industries research. Rose Sinclair has written about Dorcas Societies and Dorcas Clubs (2015), which were textile networks formed by Caribbean women on their arrival in the UK during the 1950s and 1960s. Sinclair notes how these societies were grounded in religion and mainly consisted of “middle-class women meeting at respective homes and engaging in making/crafting textiles, which would then be distributed for free to deserving poor in the parish” (Sinclair, 2015, p. 212). Sinclair highlights the significance of Dorcas Societies for liberating women from the private sphere, identity forming through making and the sense of community fostered by the groups. Parminder Bhachu (2005) also highlights the importance of making for community and reinforcement of identity for British South Asian women working in the textiles industry. She notes how the women who started this economy were migrants to the UK and part of the British Asian diaspora and had to manage their minority status in new settings. One of the

28 UK professional craft: elitism and change ways they did this was through fashion production, which allowed them to assert their cultural and aesthetic identity. Known as the “sina-prona” culture (literally translated to sewing and beading) of improvisational patterning, this economy was at first need-based, that is, sewing clothes for family and personal use (Bhachu, 2005, pp. 3–4), and the economy grew from there. Now, “British Asian women fashion entrepreneurs have started new national and transnational rhythms of fashion. Global connectors par excellence, their entrepreneurial skills are creating ‘female aesthetic communities’ which have important political and economic consequences in global markets” (Bhachu, 2005, p. 4). The research by Sinclair and Bhachu demonstrates the centrality of craft to British diasporic communities of women, and how craft is crucial for negotiations of cultural and aesthetic identity (see also Warren (2022), who also focuses on faith, specifically British Muslim women in craft). For both the UK and Australia, the origins and historical context of craft are inextricably bound to colonialism, which has shaped the way in which crafts created by racially minoritised groups is positioned and valued in the cultural field. As I will show in Chapter 3 on the Australian context, the ramifications and stories of colonialism manifest in different ways in the two countries, and craft is one tangible way in which this is demonstrated. In the UK, I have already alluded to this in the way women and minoritised groups were actively excluded from craft guilds. Then as the first wave of the Arts and Crafts movement died out, there emerged an attempt in the UK to tell a version of the story of the Empire and the Commonwealth through craft, art and culture which masked over its atrocities. This attempt was the Commonwealth Institute. Craft in the Commonwealth Institute First named the Imperial Institute, the Commonwealth Institute was set up to showcase work from around the Commonwealth, including artefacts, arts and crafts. The building (which is now home to the Design Museum in London) was opened in Kensington High Street by Queen Elizabeth II in 1962. The director of the institute at the time, Kenneth Bradley, described the new building as “a physical expression in London of all that is most constructive in the Commonwealth association” (Bradley, 1963, p. 404). The institute mainly housed permanent exhibitions from each country in the Commonwealth. Ten years later the director at the time, J.K. Thompson, reflected on the popularity of the institute, particularly among schoolchildren. He also described the importance of the Art Gallery, a separate space from the permanent exhibitions which provided “an opportunity to see examples of the best and most interesting work done by Commonwealth painters, sculptors, and craftsmen” (Thompson, 1972, p. 22), citing an exhibition of Trinidad Carnival costumes as part of the Commonwealth Festival of the Arts in 1965 and an embroidery exhibition by the Embroiderers’ Guild in 1972. Indeed, the Embroiderers’

UK professional craft: elitism and change 29 Guild held several textile art exhibitions at the Commonwealth Institute between the 1960s and the 1990s. The textile co-operative “The 62 Group”, which was at one point an associated group of the Embroiderers’ Guild, also exhibited in the Art Gallery at the institute. It appeared that the Commonwealth Institute provided a significant space for the exhibition of craft objects from a variety of traditions and cultures. The institute initially received substantial financial support from the government, which gradually diminished over the years until 1993 when the Conservative government at the time withdrew its grant. The institute eventually closed in 2004. Reflective papers written by respective directors at the institute, Bradley and Thompson, provide an insight into the priorities at the time, albeit their accounts were rather celebratory in tone. The director of the institute between 1978 and 1991, James Porter, wrote a more critical piece in 2007, highlighting the “pomp and ceremony” of the opening of the institute and the issues with what the Centre represented: The building itself was a repository of exotic memorabilia, exhibitions on the many territories of the Empire and a representation of the Imperial grandeur that was held by many to justify the relentless colonization of a large part of the globe. (Porter, 2007, p. 436) Porter noted how the institute changed over time to stay relevant, gradually shifting away from a nostalgia for the Empire (post-World War II) to more substantial commissions and a global programme, referencing a comprehensive project on Sri Lanka in 1981 which was opened by the queen in the presence of the prime minister of Sri Lanka, which for Porter was an “example of what could be achieved” (2007, p. 442). Ruth Craggs (2011) notes this postwar change of narrative, as the Commonwealth dramatically changed from a “white club” of nations to a more diverse organisation dominated by the newly independent countries in Africa and Asia. More optimistic narratives of the Commonwealth as modern and diverse emerged, and Craggs argues that “The Commonwealth acted as an ‘anaesthetizing rhetoric’ for a country attempting to come to terms with the loss of its world role, and remade the legacies of the Empire in a positive light” (Craggs, 2011, p. 248). These optimistic narratives, however, sat alongside “negative ideas about colonial hypocrisy and violence, imperial decline, and racialized stories that focused on the threat of immigration from the ‘new’ (black) Commonwealth” (p. 249). The Commonwealth Arts Festival was another attempt to alleviate bad feeling towards the British, in the aftermath of the Suez crisis in the mid- to late 1950s (p. 259). Craggs discusses the less favourable reviews of the festival, which mostly focused on how performances, arts and crafts were devalued by the setting of the Commonwealth Institute. For Craggs, the reviews “reflected wider narratives in which a Commonwealth of friendly, exotic, talented and unthreatening people

30 UK professional craft: elitism and change morphed into a population too different for comfort and unable to fit into British institutions when they came to live in Britain” (p. 260). She suggests that with the Commonwealth Institute and the Commonwealth Arts Festival, the Commonwealth was presented as “other”, “exotic” and “different”, celebrated only within the confines of the institute and the festival, and not in the increasingly multicultural population of London. So, while the Commonwealth Institute was a significant space for showcasing craft and art from around the world, it was presented as just that, in a museum-type setting, showcasing craft traditions from around the Commonwealth. Meanwhile, the work of the British Embroiderers’ Guild appeared to be separated off and shown in the Art Gallery. This indicates a potential hierarchy in the institute’s perceived cultural value of craft from a British guild, compared to craft from Commonwealth countries, most of it treated like artefacts. The Commonwealth Institute was an example of the promotion of imperialist nostalgia, a whitewashed version of colonial history (Gilroy, 2006, p. 12). The concept of imperialist nostalgia is explained by Renato Rosaldo as “a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed’ (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 108). Imperialist nostalgia “uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (ibid.). The Commonwealth Institute was a tangible manifestation of imperialist nostalgia, an example of Britain’s failure to reckon with the atrocities of colonialism. The historical context of institutions such as Guilds, the Crafts Council and the Commonwealth Institute is important for understanding the contemporary context of UK craft, which is characterised by hierarchies, elitism and whiteness. The hierarchical nature of contemporary craft means that certain types of makers, and certain types of craft, are valued more than others. Until recently, relatively little research has been carried out on the experiences of minoritised groups in professional craft and the relationship between inequality and cultural value in this context. In the next section, I discuss findings from my interviews with racially minoritised women working in professional craft.

Inequality, expertise and cultural value in UK craft In this section, I will discuss findings from interviews carried out with women makers in 2019 and 2020, on their experiences working in the UK professional craft sector. I introduce the concept of expertise, which is of interest here because it helps explain the hierarchical nature of craft and how it has persisted, and can also point a way forward for rethinking cultural value in craft, which I expand on in Chapter 4. Expertise is defined here as a knowledge of aesthetic codes and classifications, and skill in mastering the techniques to produce a work of aesthetic value that is recognised and legitimated as such

UK professional craft: elitism and change 31 (Patel, 2020, p. 2). As I have written elsewhere, the idea of the expert is often characterised by an authoritative, usually white, male figure (Patel, 2020) – an archetype that is mirrored in the art world in the form of the “genius” artist, again usually a white, male figure (Parker & Pollock, 2020; Pollock, 2015). Expertise is a term that is often taken for granted, and it is often not associated with creativity. Yet in craft, expertise is valorised, none more so than in Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (2010), which advocates for the value of craft skills and developing craft expertise over time. For Sennett, almost anyone can become a craft expert. However, Sennett does not take into account the experiences of women and working-class people, who may not have the time, resources or headspace to devote hours at a time to craft in the way Sennett describes (McRobbie, 2016). Furthermore, as mentioned in Chapter 1, while there are seemingly fewer barriers to craft, relatively few can make a full-time living from it and be regarded as a “master” of their craft. Those who do are usually white and male (Spilsbury, 2018). Furthermore, certain types of craft are historically dismissed as domestic or “women’s work” (Gipson, 2022), particularly textile crafts such as knitting and crochet (Parker, 2010). These hierarchies have endured in the UK due to the elevation of certain types of craft to fine art, as described earlier in this chapter, and the persistence of inequality in the art world. However, I want to suggest that the concept of expertise can assist in a re-evaluation of how craft is judged and valued. This is because expertise is somewhat linked to cultural value. For example, a hand-carved wooden spoon created by a renowned craftsperson will be deemed more valuable than a wooden spoon that I had carved during a wood carving class, mostly because my wooden spoon will be terrible due to my lack of expertise in spoon carving. However, just as expertise is linked to inequality, the criteria by which judgements of cultural value are made also tend to favour privileged groups, as argued by Oakley and O’Brien (2016): The contested definition of culture is connected to hierarchies of what is, and what is not, of value or worth. This raises the question of the relationship between one form of hierarchy, which suggests some cultural forms have more value than others, and other forms of social hierarchy, such as those of ethnicity, class and gender. (Oakley & O’Brien, 2016, p. 7) Eleonora Belfiore also highlights that cultural value is “shaped by the power relations predominant at any one time, and is a site for struggles over meaning, representation and recognition” (2020, p. 384). For the women interviewed in this research, such power relations are often experienced as intersectional oppression – overlapping systems of prejudice and discrimination (Crenshaw, 2013) that can affect how their work is judged by others in the craft sector.

32 UK professional craft: elitism and change For this part of the research, I carried out semi-structured interviews with 18 makers who identify as women and are from ethnically diverse backgrounds. They were aged between early 20s and mid-60s. All the interviewees were British and have family origins outside of the UK, mainly from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. They were based in various locations such as Birmingham, London and Newcastle, and most of them were either working as full-time makers in a studio or doing part-time jobs such as teaching and consultancy alongside their craft. Most of them had some sort of formal training in art and craft, mainly through university, with some completing craft courses at college. The types of practice the interviewees were involved in included ceramics, jewellery, textiles, leather and craft art. The interviews were carried out during 2019 and 2020, were semi-structured and lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours. Participants were asked about their journey into professional craft and their specific experiences in the sector. Some of the interviews were carried out before the COVID-19 pandemic, so they were face to face at participants’ places of work or studios. During the pandemic, interviews were carried out online via Microsoft Teams and recorded. Pseudonyms are used for all participants, who provided written consent. The methodology was informed by a cultural studies approach, whereby the methods are designed to get a sense of the lived experience of making culture, the relationships and “complex material conditions” (Gray, 2002, p. 12) that determine who makes culture and who determines its value. My research approach also involves abductive analysis, “which includes theoretical analysis within actual fieldwork. A researcher can move back and forth between what he or she finds in the field and existing social theories while he or she is actually in the field” (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014, cited in Hill Collins, 2019, p. 148). According to Patricia Hill Collins, “this iterative process of moving among theories and data sparks new analyses while changing the course of the fieldwork as it progresses in the field. One need not wait until the end of fieldwork to test one’s data against established theories” (Hill Collins, 2019, p. 148). This iterative process of fieldwork is particularly important for an intersectional approach because the research focus is defined by practical, real-world problems rather than from academic literature, as is the case for this research, which was a funded research project specifically focused on inequalities and diversity in professional craft. The excerpts from the interviews used were chosen as they best represented the two major themes that emerged from the analysis: racism and microaggressions, and how the work of the participants is judged. Racism and microaggressions in UK professional craft Many of the interviewees described experiences of racism and microaggressions in craft spaces such as studios or fairs. These experiences make it difficult for them to feel included or valued in professional craft communities.

UK professional craft: elitism and change 33 Microaggressions are “brief, everyday interactions that send denigrating messages to people of colour because they belong to a racially minoritised group” (Rollock, 2012, p. 517). Microaggressions were more commonly experienced by the interviewees, but there were some examples of racism. For example, Sophie, a craft artist of South Asian heritage based in Newcastle, experienced outright racism at a craft fair in the region. She described how a fellow stall holder, an older white man, came over to her stall and said “Oh yeah, we don’t want brown people here”. She said: “It was so in my face, it was horrible. Unfortunately, apparently, that is kind of like the norm at some markets, and it’s a bit strange”. The idea that racism is normalised at certain craft markets is sadly indicative of the increase in racism and discrimination throughout the UK during the Brexit conjuncture (Virdee & McGeever, 2020). Anita is a craft artist of South Asian heritage based in London and described how she frequently experienced racism and microaggressions from customers at studio events and from fellow members of the studio. She was once asked, “You’re not a Muslim, are you?” by a fellow studio holder. She said that Brexit and far-right politicians in the UK had legitimised racism: “They’ve basically said it’s all right to be racist. I mean I’ve even noticed it on the radio as well, and things that nobody would have said 10 years ago, people are now saying. It’s insidious. It’s creeping through all kinds of things”. Anita said that in professional craft, it is no different. “I think the irony is you assume that if you’re with artists, that they’re liberal, freethinking, expansive ideologies or alternative perspectives on life. When it’s actually just the same old, same old”. What Anita said echoes of Rosalind Gill’s research on the myth of the “cool, creative and egalitarian” creative and cultural industries (Gill, 2002), where even though workers in these sectors may appear liberal and inclusive, hiring practices and working conditions are incredibly discriminatory. The experiences of racism and microaggressions relayed by the interviewees occurred in many different areas of the sector – from studios, to customers and dealing with suppliers. Some interviewees described times when they were made to feel alienated and dehumanised in craft spaces. For example, Jennifer talked about her experience at a studio in London, where she was often confused with other black makers in the studios. She said that even though one of the other black makers there had a strong American accent, they were often confused. Jennifer described one encounter with a fellow studio holder she knew well: So we would come in, in the morning, “Oh, hi, how are you doing?” Just, like, a quick thing. So I know everything about her and know her brand. And then one morning I came in and she started talking to me and I realised that she didn’t know who I was. She was talking to me about the other girl. And I was just like, “Gosh, she thinks I’m the other person.” It’s, like,

34 UK professional craft: elitism and change all these months, you didn’t see me. I was just, like, this shape in front of you and that is so dehumanising. The woman Jennifer was talking to would not have realised how what she did was a form of microaggression, making Jennifer feel dehumanised. The idea that women of colour are not “seen” or appreciated in craft spaces was a common recurring theme in the interviews which took many forms. For example, Leila was a student on a textile course at a university and described how in a workshop she “was just minding my business and I just felt somebody’s hand in my hair, feeling through my braids, and it was my tutor”. She said that she felt shocked, and when she turned around, the tutor said, “Oh, I love your hair”. Leila said she didn’t know how to take it and felt that in a white-dominated classroom, she had no one to turn to who could understand her reaction and reassure her that the actions of the tutor were not welcome. Other experiences were related to makers being made to feel like they don’t belong in some craft spaces. For example, Rebecca, a jeweller of British South Asian heritage, described how she felt discriminated against by suppliers because of a combination of her race, gender and class: I have found people are quite often rude to me as well. I can’t tell if that’s because I’m young or I’m Asian or they don’t like work, I can’t tell what that is about, you know . . . [they] just look down on you and they think you don’t know what you’re talking about when you go and speak to them about a piece of work. . . . I just think people have a set view and they can’t change that. Some of it is class too. Rebecca later in the interview described herself as working class and speaking with a Midlands accent, which, combined with her outward appearance as a British South Asian woman, she felt contributed to people in the jewellery industry, particularly suppliers (who are mostly male), not taking her work seriously. Meg, a knitter, described how she gets looked at whenever she went to knitting shows in the UK, “You always get looked at like you’re weird. So, I love it when I do see different ethnicities, when I go to knitting shows, because we have a right to be there”. Meg spoke a lot about wanting to be treated better by others in craft, particularly when it came to judgement of her work: I mean, just because we’re of colour doesn’t mean our products are any less than somebody else’s that is white. [. . .] You know, we all just want to be on an equal playing field, and not having to compete and work twice as hard, where it’s so easy to some. Her comments point to the whiteness of professional craft in the UK and how difficult it can be for makers of colour to gain recognition. Even when

UK professional craft: elitism and change 35 some of the makers won prestigious awards or placements, which should give them increased status, this was often questioned by some. For example, Julia, who is of Caribbean heritage and based in London, described an instance when she had won an award and someone pointed to her skin and said, “Did this work for you then?” implying that she won the award because she was black. Anita, mentioned earlier, was once told by another studio holder “You’re only here to tick a box”. The idea of “box ticking” and tokenism is a common criticism of diversity schemes that aim to get more people of colour into the creative industries (Nwonka & Malik, 2018; Saha, 2018), and Julia and Anita were judged to not “belong” in craft spaces because they were seemingly there only to fulfil a diversity quota. Anamik Saha argues that policy attempts to increase diversity in the cultural industries are serving “an ideological function that sustains the institutional whiteness of the cultural industries even while they claim (often genuinely so) to do something more inclusive” (2018, p. 88). Indeed, some interviewees felt that such schemes can put them in a difficult position because of the “box ticking” accusation. They feel they are being judged based on their ethnicity and/or gender, rather than their work. Judgement and cultural value Many of the interviewees felt that their work was often unfairly judged by others. For example, Tina, who is of South Asian heritage and has a jewellery studio in London, has been based at her studios for 20 years and is well established in her field. She described her experience at an open studio event where she works: At Open Studios – I’ve sometimes had people – and they can see, at Open Studios, you have all your work out on display and it’s for sale. You can see that this is a workshop. And people have said to me – And usually it’s been people of a certain age and of a certain demographic. And they’ll say, “Is this all made here, in the UK?” Or, “Do you make this yourself?” Or, “Is it made here or is it made abroad?” Why would they ask me that? Tina felt that the origin of her work was being questioned because of her ethnicity. She described another instance where her craft expertise and the quality of her work were being judged by potential customers, despite her years of experience as a jeweller: Another guy bought a pair of earrings off me, they were like £150. And he said, “So, when they break, I can come back to you?” and I said, “What? Why would you even say that?” . . . And I said, “Look, I’m always here if there’s ever any problems with the piece, I’m here to fix it”. But I wished I’d have pulled him up, and said to him, “Do you know what, I don’t think

36 UK professional craft: elitism and change that’s a very nice thing to say to me. . . . Because you’re questioning me as a maker, and the quality of my workmanship. Tina said that microaggressions such as the comments about her work were “exhausting” to deal with. Described here are examples of the evaluative moment (Stewart, 2013) in craft, with potential customers. Simon Stewart argues that in studies of cultural production, more attention should be paid to the moment when cultural objects and their aesthetic qualities are evaluated by others. Stewart describes the dynamics of the evaluative moment, which include The presence of other people and the influence that they bear. Our evaluation of a cultural object is often something that is at least in part a result of dialogue with peers as well as with wider societal forces, and our judgment will be influenced by the presence of others. (Stewart, 2013, p. 120, emphasis in original) In the case of Tina, her presence as a maker seemingly has some bearing on the dynamics of the evaluative moment. She felt if she were white, she would not be asked if her jewellery were made abroad, thus not British, or she would not be asked if her jewellery would break, and implicitly seen as poor quality. It is not only the presence and identity markers of the makers that can influence evaluative judgements, but there are also wider social and cultural factors to consider. For example, Childress and Nault (2019) highlight how intermediaries in trade fiction publishing select manuscripts based on cultural proximity to themselves, or “cultural matching”. They describe how race in particular is a “marker of cultural similarity and difference” whereby intermediaries “select and pass on manuscripts along culturally inscribed racialized lines” (p. 116), resulting in inequalities faced by non-white authors in the publishing process. Their work, and the work of Simon Stewart, mostly applies to cultural intermediaries and their role in selecting work. However, the idea of cultural matching, and people being drawn to art and objects that they can relate to, could also be an underlying factor in the evaluative moment. Even so, that does not fully explain the microaggressions the makers experience and assumptions made about the quality of work produced, and in Anita’s case, even when her expertise is recognised and legitimated via a major commission, why her achievements are questioned by others. Anita is based at a shared studio in London, and she told me about a significant commission she received from the British Royal Family. She said that other makers at her studio “were really pissed off, that I did that. [they felt] the only reason I got the commission was because I was Asian, not because I was good at what I did”. Here, Anita’s craft expertise was seemingly questioned by her fellow studio holders, despite securing a very high-profile commission. Rather than being congratulated, her achievement was downplayed and could

UK professional craft: elitism and change 37 seemingly be explained by her ethnicity, rather than her craft skill. The British Royal Family and their iconography can sometimes be associated with a royalist and patriotic idea of “Britishness” and implicitly whiteness (Gilroy, 2002). Indeed, the explosion of craft’s popularity in the UK in recent years is to some extent coded with an idea of “twee” Britishness, captured in television shows such as The Great British Sewing Bee. This idea of “twee” Britishness is linked to a nostalgia for the handmade amidst the politics of austerity and crisis that underpin craft’s resurgence in the UK (Hall & Holmes, 2017; Luckman, 2015). The popular media coverage of craft in the UK predominantly reinforces ideas about what British craft “should” be and “should” look like – which broadly incorporate a Eurocentric aesthetic (Luckman, 2015), most likely to be created by white makers. Anita discussed the idea of “British” craft when talking about the type of work she is expected to produce, as an Asian maker. She said: “Craft is associated as something uniquely British. So, I can’t be seen to be doing a British craft because I’m not British. . . . On the one hand, I’m not allowed to do what’s British, but on the same extent I’m not allowed to do what’s culturally mine either . . . so I’m in a lose-lose situation”. Anita feels restricted by a framework of a British craft aesthetic that is marked by whiteness. Rebecca, the jeweller based in Birmingham, voiced similar concerns about the type of jewellery she is expected to make, which has an impact on how she defines herself as a jeweller. She said that it is Hard to describe myself as a jeweller because people don’t always understand. They have a certain perception of either somebody who obviously makes Asian jewellery or traditional jewellery, they don’t quite get that I’m quite versatile in what I do. . . . my work that relates to my culture doesn’t sell. Rebecca described how she made a collection inspired by her childhood and Indian heritage, but it did not get selected for shows and didn’t sell, which affected her confidence and direction in her work. She said: “It was almost like it was too Asian to be contemporary, but not commercial enough to sell”. Such issues with getting work adequately recognised is summarised by Rita, a knitwear designer of mixed heritage based in London, who said: “You so often remember that people’s first look at you is based on what they see, not on your work”. The moments of judgement that I have described in this section are all examples of how judgements about cultural value, of objects created by women of colour, are in these cases rarely made based on the aesthetic qualities of the objects or the perceived level of craft expertise. Instead such judgements, whether by critics or customers, are “grounded in structures and institutions of relative, and differential, power” (Wolff, 2006, p. 152). Other work on judgement in the creative industries suggests that evaluations about

38 UK professional craft: elitism and change the value of cultural objects can be influenced by the presence of others (Stewart, 2013; Wohl, 2015) and cultural proximity (Childress & Nault, 2019). In other words, people tend to favour things that they can relate to. In her research on literary criticism in the USA, Philippa Chong (2011) argues that critics engage in “reading difference”, where an author’s ethnicity and race are “constitutive of” the cultural value of a book. While the strategy of reading difference doesn’t necessarily increase the likelihood of a bad or favourable review, Chong found that reviewers were more likely to comment on the content of a novel when no mention was made of the author’s race or ethnicity. This resonates with the accounts of Anita, Rebecca and Rita in this section, who all felt that they were the ones being judged, not their work. While the other research mentioned here can go some way to explaining individual and group behaviours in the process of judgement, the prevalence of racism and microaggressions experienced directly by the makers interviewed for this article is indicative of a much wider issue, related to how value can be placed on people. The professionalised UK craft sector that these women are in sits within a wider capitalist system, the development of which, as Satnam Virdee (2019) highlights, is entangled with racism. Virdee details the development of “racialised capitalism” over centuries, arguing that “racism’s rise was incremental yet relentless over the course of modernity’s unfolding” (p. 7). Capitalism was able to advance through a process of racial categorisation and hierarchisation, which eroded working-class solidarity during industrial capitalism in the UK. This led to a form of socialist nationalism gaining traction during the 1960s and 1970s where “the British state, employers and workers had come to internalize a common British nationalism underpinned by a shared allegiance to whiteness” (p. 21). Virdee’s historical account helps us understand how people are valued on the basis of their skin colour and how this is imbricated within the development of capitalism. An understanding of how capitalism is racialised and hierarchical is essential for informing accounts of inequalities and racism, and as Beverley Skeggs notes: Whiteness is both material and ideological – another crucial concept we lost in the hegemony of the perspective of the privileged – always connected to value . . . without understanding the development of capitalism and its methods we cannot fully understand how class, race, gender and sexuality as classificatory systems of value proceed into the present. (Skeggs, 2019, pp. 32–33) This helps explain how makers of colour and women makers of colour, in particular, are not likely to be judged in the same way as a maker who is white and male, and in many cases, they experience racism and microaggressions in craft spaces that are often dominated by white people. The unequal system of capitalism underpins the conditions within which these women try to make a living from their craft and determines the extent to which their craft

UK professional craft: elitism and change 39 expertise is recognised and their work deemed to be of value within the wider sector. These racialised hierarchies are evident across the creative industries, as explained by Saha (2018). Saha discusses how the whiteness of the media industries cannot be addressed through diversifying the workforce, or “diversity initiatives”, because these reproduce whiteness (p. 93–95). When the creative and media industries themselves are inherently and structurally white, then white, Western hierarchies of cultural value are continually reproduced. The experiences of the makers in this section are also shaped by the historical context of UK craft, whereby women and people from racialised groups were actively excluded from or marginalised within key institutions in the sector. The larger organisations such as the Crafts Council, Goldsmiths’ Company and the guilds have played a key role in defining what the UK craft sector is. This idea of professional craft is linked to historical notions of craft “excellence” which are hierarchical and exclusionary. However, only highlighting that inequalities exist is not enough to effect change or social justice. Scholarship should also be looking towards how these inequalities can be addressed and beginning to imagine better types of creative work (Banks, 2023). To that end, I explored alternative pathways in craft as part of this research, specifically socially engaged craft organisations and the role they play in engaging people who may not think the craft “sector” in the UK is for them. I suggest that in relation to issues around inclusion, lessons can potentially be learned from socially engaged craft organisations, but there are also significant challenges with this model which are shaped by the policy context.

UK socially engaged craft: case studies In research on the creative industries, there has been some work on the potential role of social enterprises and socially engaged art in the creative economy. Angela McRobbie (2011) discusses the radical potential of social enterprise for rethinking creative work. In the context of the neoliberal, individualised, precarious and competitive nature of creative work and its potential effects on the future, McRobbie proposes a return to more collective and co-operative ways of working, to alleviate the pressures of self-reliance which neoliberal cultural policies have fostered. Writing in 2011, notably before the COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing effects, McRobbie says: I am interested to see what scope there might be for a creative ethos of social care and compassion. To sum up, we need to be wary of the term “social enterprise” as it is bandied about by the present government. It is too bland and ridden with cliches about “making a difference” or “putting something back”. But if structural under-employment is here to stay, and if we have in the UK over countless generations trained intelligent and energetic young people in the fields of arts and culture, it does not take such a

40 UK professional craft: elitism and change huge step of imagination to see how the downtime could become a space for developing radical strategies for social-co-operation, for better care of children and young people, for better provision of care and attention to disadvantaged populations, including the elderly for renewing civic society and for urban and environmental improvement. This would not be about volunteering but about a new injection of hope in the not-for-profit sector. (McRobbie, 2011, p. 33) As we have seen since, the “downtime” afforded by the COVID-19 pandemic (which, of course, wasn’t downtime for many) saw an increase in mutual aid efforts and community collaborations to help people in need (Grayson, 2020). Scholars saw the conjuncture as an opportunity to rethink creative work futures as more interdependent, caring and focused on sustainability (Banks & O’Connor, 2021; Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Gross, 2021; Pacella et al., 2021). Socially engaged and community art practice can seemingly point the way towards such a future for the creative economy, whereby moral and intrinsic rewards are crucial to the realisation of a notion of “good work” (Banks, 2007; Hesmondhalgh, 2017; Warren, 2014) more so than economic rewards. In the UK, many creatives and organisations do carry out socially engaged practice (McRobbie, 2011), but in scholarship on the creative industries, relatively little attention has been paid to this part of the creative economy (Alacovska, 2020; Belfiore, 2022). Ana Alacovska (2020) argues that creative work is often wrongly characterised as individualistic and “noncaring”. In her caring inquiry into socially engaged art workers in Southeastern Europe, Alacovska highlights their “attention to and orientation towards others in the community, involving care, compassion and mutual aid” (p. 734), as well as the workers’ commitment to carving out “hopeful spaces” of “social justice, human well-being, healing and emancipation” (p. 738) in difficult conditions. Alacovska points out the costs of this socially engaged work, both financially (in terms of little or no pay) and emotionally, as the workers often acted as untrained social workers who found it “difficult to disengage from the caring relationships and practise self-care” (p. 739). These are examples of what Eleonora Belfiore (2022) characterises as the “hidden costs” of socially engaged creative practice, which are exacerbated by the normative processes of contemporary arts funding in the UK which involve short-term, project-based funding. As I will show in the case studies in this section, the funding environment certainly contributes to concerns about the sustainability of socially engaged craft. The following case studies are a result of observations and interviews with people who run socially engaged craft organisations. The case study organisations are based in London, Birmingham and Edinburgh, three UK cities that have relatively culturally diverse populations. These particular organisations were chosen because craft practice is central to their provision, and they work specifically with communities and groups that are minoritised and

UK professional craft: elitism and change 41 underrepresented in the contemporary craft sector. I was particularly interested in how the organisations adapted to lockdown and the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020, how they foster an inclusive environment, the challenges they face in running a craft social enterprise and their future ambitions. The interviews and observations were carried out during 2021 and 2022 and involved a combination of in-person and online interviews and inperson observations. CraftA, London CraftA is based in London in the Greenwich area. The organisation was established in 2018 by Viv Cameron, whose mother was a seamstress for theatrical and film costume, which sparked her interest in craft from a young age. However, Viv only started working in craft after a different career, from which she had to take early retirement due to ill health. After she retired, Viv volunteered for a local arts cafe in London, and from there she became involved in setting up a textile festival and arts exhibition at the cafe. The success of the festival and exhibition enabled Viv to expand out of the cafe and into the community, and she began working with people to deliver therapeutic craft sessions, something Viv used herself to cope with her pain condition. Viv applied for funding to establish and grow the organisation, now known as CraftA. The workshops CraftA run are mostly textile based and seek to foster social inclusion and alleviation of loneliness by bringing people together. They engage primarily with minoritised groups and vulnerable people in London, and who they engage with, and where they work, is dependent on project funding. I visited them in summer 2022 when they were working with a Nepalese community, delivering a macramé session at a community centre in Woolwich, funded by Age UK, the country’s leading charity for working with older people. Viv delivered the session in collaboration with a tutor from Age UK, teaching participants basic macramé, a decorative art of tying or knitting together wool or string. The group also included other people from the community, as well as the Nepalese group. More experienced participants were teaching others how to do macramé, whereas some chose to watch and not participate. Viv stressed that everyone was free to participate how they wanted – there was no obligation. The macramé class I attended was part of one of the first programmes that CraftA ran since the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first UK lockdown in March 2020, CraftA quickly moved to online delivery of sessions, which became popular because few organisations were running online craft sessions at the time. Viv said this was because she and the people she collaborated with were familiar with using Zoom and social media, and so the quick adaptation at the beginning of lockdown enabled them to deliver sessions to a wider audience. Through the online classes, CraftA began to attract participants from around the world. They also engaged directly with local care

42 UK professional craft: elitism and change organisations during the lockdown, sending out making kits to over 120 care organisations for people who were isolated at home. CraftA’s work is dependent on networks and collaborations with local organisations such as care homes, housing associations, charities such as Age UK and philanthropic funders. CraftA has been successful in securing funding for its work from various charities and funders and ensures that inclusion is built into every aspect of its work, from how it engages to its branding. However, Viv described how the process of running CraftA and sustaining it via funding applications was “almost too much work for one person”. She described how a “professional funding mentality” was required and that, luckily for her, she enjoys the funding process. The sustainability concerns and reliance on funding were common themes across all the case studies. Flourish Jewellery Project, Edinburgh The Flourish Jewellery Project began in 2020 as part of Silverhub Studios, a jewellery social enterprise in Edinburgh established by Lisa Arnott. Lisa runs Flourish with Jessica Howarth, and both have qualifications in community arts and community development. They had known each other for six years, and through Silverhub, they delivered outreach making workshops to a range of groups, including veterans and young carers. They discussed the idea of a focused jewellery-making programme for mental health and well-being and applied for funding from Creative Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic. Flourish involved the delivery of jewellery-making workshops for vulnerable groups, mainly women who had suffered trauma and/or are recovering from addiction. Both founders are very well networked in Edinburgh, particularly the local area of Leith. They have connections with local and national organisations such as Police Scotland, domestic violence services, universities and charities which help them connect to communities. The initial funding from Creative Scotland allowed Jessica and Lisa to fit out the Silverhub studios for COVID-safe sessions, which they were able to run in the summer of 2020, after the first UK lockdown. They subsidised certain costs for the participants, such as transport and childcare, which were often barriers to access for many of the women they worked with. As part of the jewellery-making programme, participants also received a kit with tools and materials to allow the participants to continue making from home. I visited Silverhub Studios during spring 2022 and observed one of their classes, in which Jessica and Lisa taught a group of seven women metalsmithing techniques such as stone setting. They were working towards creating pieces for an end-of-programme exhibition. Lisa told me how they are preparing for the next programme, Glow, in which the women taking part in the current programme will be able to take their skills to the next level. Many of the women in the class described how jewellery making improved their mental health and self-confidence.

UK professional craft: elitism and change 43 The running of Flourish requires a great deal of time and commitment from Jessica and Lisa, who said their background in community work is crucial to its success because of the complex experiences of participants who may have suffered from trauma (and may still be), mental health issues and financial difficulties. They work with women’s services, charities and social workers to inform their approaches to working with the women. Lisa said: “We’ve been upskilling our practice, doing trauma-informed based practice. We’re not social workers. We’re quite clearly jewellers but we’re also trained community development workers”. Lisa’s quote encapsulates the multifaceted nature of their work – in relation to not only practice but also the pastoral care of participants. As well as the challenges of socially engaged work, sustainability is also an ongoing issue for Flourish, as they are reliant on applying for regular funding. Jessica has a master’s in social prescription and socially engaged practice, and both Jessica and Lisa felt that this was the best route for sustainable funding – applying for health-related funding rather than arts funding. Social prescription is increasingly used in the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, whereby arts and craft programmes are deployed to help individuals who require help with their mental health. Lisa and Jessica identified a need for this when reports emerged about a substantial increase in domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and they connected with domestic violence services and Police Scotland to do their outreach programmes, to bring participants in to Silverhub Studios. Nearly a year after my visit to Silverhub, Flourish participants exhibited in Birmingham in April 2023 as part of the tenth anniversary of Shelanu, a craft social enterprise for refugee and migrant women supported by Craftspace in Birmingham (see Evans & Fortune, 2019; Patel, 2021 for more on Shelanu). Flourish and Shelanu held a skill sharing workshop at the Birmingham School of Jewellery, whereby the Flourish participants learned new jewellery techniques from Shelanu members. A few of the Flourish members told me how much their confidence had increased as a result of the programme, exhibition and working with Shelanu, and they wanted to look in to selling their work. The exhibition and collaboration, and certainly the longevity of Shelanu, offered inspiration for Flourish and their members. Path Carvers, Birmingham Path Carvers was established in 2017 by wood carver JoJo Wood and her partner Sean. Path Carvers provides workshops and training sessions focusing on wood carving for mental and physical health. They aim to make craft as accessible as possible, providing free or subsidised classes and taster sessions for people with health conditions. They also encourage participants to think of craft as a career and offer help with various aspects of craft enterprise such as marketing and selling online.

44 UK professional craft: elitism and change JoJo has a teaching background, and Sean was a psychiatric nurse with a background in setting up social enterprises to help people with mental and physical health. JoJo has taught wood carving around the world, and the two decided to set up Path Carvers, with a specific focus on teaching people to carve small implements such as spoons and spatulas from wood to help people with mindfulness and mental health. Both JoJo and Sean value craft for their own well-being and wanted to bring their skills and knowledge to teach people in the local community in Stirchley in Birmingham. Another motivation is to make wood carving more accessible to people because as Sean said, “woodworking and craft in particular is a very white, middle-class activity”. JoJo said that woodworking classes or courses are mostly out in the woods and are expensive because they often include a residential. The residential format is not accessible for people who live in the city and rely on public transport, and not everyone can afford to pay for a residential or set aside the time because of care or work commitments. So, JoJo and Sean set up their workshop in a unit on Stirchley high street in Birmingham, which would attract local people who could drop in for a chat with JoJo or could attend weekly wood-carving clubs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, JoJo and Sean decided to move premises because of the increasing gentrification of the area. They said they were eventually “priced out” of their workshop because Stirchley began receiving press coverage about being a desirable place to live, leading to house price increases and, gradually, gentrification. They are now based in Balsall Heath, another area in south Birmingham with a very ethnically and culturally diverse local community. The premises where they are now based run “Second Saturdays”, where on the second Saturday of each month, local organisations offer free creative classes for the community. For Path Carvers, this has allowed them to introduce more people to carving. The lockdowns necessitated by the pandemic also enabled Path Carvers to reach more people. JoJo and Sean anticipated there may be issues with their provision in the early stages of the pandemic and began online carving club meetings before the official UK lockdown. Because they were proficient with Zoom and digital media, the transition to online working was relatively smooth, and Path Carvers were able to increase their engagement. Their online wood-carving classes attracted people from around the world, including from the USA. JoJo and Sean also arranged for delivery of wood to participants who were isolating or had restricted mobility. JoJo noted that despite the increased opportunities offered by online provision, some people also could not engage because of audio or visual difficulties. The increased exposure they had during the pandemic enabled Path Carvers to grow, but at the same time, both Sean and JoJo had concerns with maintaining an income, during a difficult and uncertain time. Since the lockdown, Path Carvers have seen increased opportunities in Birmingham and beyond. For example, they hold a wood carving for mental health class in Bearwood, Birmingham, which is fully funded for participants. In summer 2022, they

UK professional craft: elitism and change 45 held their first wood-carving summer school, and they have also set up a mental health helpline, working with a mental healthcare provider, for craftspeople to talk to them about any issues they might be facing. For JoJo and Sean, it is their passion for craft and helping others that has kept them going through a challenging 2 years.

Socially engaged craft in the UK: change, challenge and growth The three case study organisations featured in this section might come from different parts of the UK, focus on different materials and engage with different community groups. However, there were some significant commonalities across the three organisations which provide a snapshot of how socially engaged craft played a key role during the COVID-19 pandemic to bring people together, alleviate loneliness and improve mental health. All three enterprises were ultimately driven by the passion and enthusiasm of their founders, with care and empathy at the core of what they do. Path Carvers and CraftA were quick to switch to online working and delivery during the lockdown due to their confidence with working digitally. This presented both challenges and opportunities – while reach and engagement did increase, there were still issues with engaging people who were less digitally proficient or could not access platforms such as Zoom. The ability to move to digital provision demonstrates how socially engaged craft organisations can be agile and adapt well to challenges, and this adaptability enabled them to grow. However, as with much creative work, a multitude of skills are needed. Bid writing, alongside craft expertise and community development skills, and sometimes working with people with complex issues, makes this work particularly challenging. The mental and sometimes physical toll of this work is a concern. All three case studies highlight examples of the “hidden costs” of socially engaged practice (Belfiore, 2022). The lack of state or structural support for social enterprises in the UK, as highlighted by Belfiore, means that they must be constantly on the lookout for new funding opportunities, and working on multiple income streams is difficult to sustain in the long term and is an example of the “organisational portfolio precarity” which is commonplace in creative work (Ashton, 2023). Local context and networks are crucial in attempting to mitigate these effects, with all the enterprises collaborating with a range of third sector, public and private organisations to apply for funding, reach new groups, access new opportunities or space, or provide specialist support. The wider network of organisations outside of craft and the creative industries is crucial to the survival and sustainability of these organisations, which remain in a precarious position because of the reliance on piecemeal funding, and the extraordinary dedication of the founders.

46 UK professional craft: elitism and change There are clear issues with the socially engaged model in terms of sustainability and the way in which social enterprises seem to uphold the ideals of neoliberalism by putting pressure and responsibility on the individual for success or failure (McQuilten, 2017). These are concerns that I will revisit and expand upon in Chapter 5. The case studies featured in this chapter do demonstrate the importance of socially engaged craft in the wider craft ecology. They open craft to new audiences and people who might not think craft is for them. They bring people together and help with mental, physical and social issues. Socially engaged craft is a largely different world from the professional craft sector, which, as I discussed earlier in this chapter, is bound up in elitism and legacies of exclusion. There are lessons that professional craft could learn from the socially engaged sector in terms of working with care and empathy, and a commitment to opening participation in craft, and a focus on social justice and equality. I will further expand on these ideas in Chapter 4, where I will discuss the concepts of care and parity of participation to imagine what genuine change in the craft sector might look like. However, before that, in the next chapter, I focus on the Australian craft sector.

Note 1 This is only in the British context. There are records of women-led guilds operating in Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries (see Broomhall, 2008; Schmidt, 2009).

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48 UK professional craft: elitism and change Gray, A. (2002). Research practice for cultural studies: Ethnographic methods and lived cultures. SAGE. Grayson, D. (2020). Mutual aid and radical neighbourliness. Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 75, 27–31. Gross, J. (2021). Practices of hope: Care, narrative and cultural democracy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 27(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.10 80/10286632.2019.1702032 Hall, S. M., & Holmes, H. (2017). Making do and getting by? Beyond a romantic politics of austerity and crisis. https://archive.discoversociety. org/2017/05/02/making-do-and-getting-by-beyond-a-romantic-politics-ofausterity-and-crisis/ Hesmondhalgh, D. (2017). Capitalism and the media: Moral economy, wellbeing and capabilities. Media, Culture and Society, 39(2), 202–218. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643153 Hill Collins, P. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Duke University Press. Jakob, D., & Thomas, N. J. (2017). Firing up craft capital: The renaissance of craft and craft policy in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(4), 495–511. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015. 1068765 Koyama, M. (2020). A review essay on the European guilds. The Review of Austrian Economics, 33(1–2), 277–287. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138019-00476-7 Luckman, S. (2015). Craft and the creative economy. Palgrave Macmillan. MAKE Southwest. (2023). About us. https://makesouthwest.org.uk/about-us Marsh, J. (2002). May Morris: Ubiquitous, invisible, arts and crafts-woman. In B. Elliott & J. Helland (Eds.), Women artists and the decorative arts 1880–1935: The gender of ornament (pp. 35–52). Routledge. McQuilten, G. (2017). The political possibilities of art and fashion based social enterprise. Continuum, 31(1), 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304 312.2016.1262103 McRobbie, A. (2011). Re-thinking creative economy as radical social enterprise. Variant, 41, 32–33. https://romulusstudio.com/variant/pdfs/issue41/ amcrobbie41.pdf McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Polity. Morris, W. (1882). Hopes and fears for art. Roberts Brothers. Nwonka, C. J., & Malik, S. (2018). Cultural discourses and practices of institutionalised diversity in the UK film sector: “Just get something black made.” The Sociological Review, 66(6), 1111–1127. https://doi. org/10.1177/0038026118774183 Oakley, K., & O’Brien, D. (2016). Learning to labour unequally: Understanding the relationship between cultural production, cultural consumption and inequality. Social Identities, 22(5), 471–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13504630.2015.1128800 Ogilvie, S. (2008). Rehabilitating the guilds: A reply. The Economic History Review, 61(1), 175–182. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2007.00417.x

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50 UK professional craft: elitism and change Warren, S. (2014). “I want this place to thrive”: Volunteering, co‐production and creative labour. Area, 46(3), 278–284. https://doi.org/10.1111/ area.12112 Warren, S. (2022). British Muslim women in the cultural and creative industries. Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474459341 Wohl, H. (2015). Community sense. Sociological Theory, 33(4), 299–326. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275115617800 Wolff, J. (2006). Groundless beauty. Feminist Theory, 7(2), 143–158. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1464700106064407

3

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn

I visited Australia for this research in November 2022. I had planned to visit earlier, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the visit by 2 years. The title of this chapter is “lessons to learn”, not necessarily because the situation in Australia is any better than that in the UK with regard to racism, both in craft and in society more generally.1 However, in Australia, practices such as acknowledging country – which is acknowledging the First Nations groups who are the historical custodians of the land verbally before events and/or in writing, at least represent an open acknowledgement of Australia’s colonial history, even though it is not necessarily universal and there remains some resistance to the practice. The acknowledgement of country, for me, set the tone at events I attended and seemed to pave the way for respectful conversations. In addition to the socially engaged craft organisations that will be featured in this chapter, I also visited two major commercial craft fairs – one in Adelaide and one in Melbourne. Like similar fairs I had visited in the UK, I noticed they reflected the general homogeneity of the craft sector – overwhelmingly white, middle class and heteronormative, and this tends to be reflected in the aesthetics of what is being produced (Luckman & Andrew, 2020, p. 18). It was this homogeneity, as identified in the first phase of my UK research and outlined in the previous chapter, that led me to focus on the wider craft ecology – particularly the socially engaged sector, in both the UK and Australia. I wondered whether the “lessons to learn” could come from outside of professional craft because both countries have a rich and culturally diverse craft history, which is not always reflected in the commercial side of craft. Socially engaged organisations tend to have direct links to minoritised and under-represented communities, offering opportunities for people to engage with craft and potentially open new pathways to craft. So far in this book, I have discussed some of the possibilities and challenges for UK socially engaged craft, and in this chapter, the focus is Australia. Before discussing the Australian case studies, I will first outline the context of craft in Australia. Because craft and the creative economy in Australia have been covered extensively through the work of Susan Luckman and others (Cochrane, 1992; Luckman, 2015; Luckman & Andrew, 2020), in the sections DOI: 10.4324/9781003301714-3

52 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn to follow I will focus primarily on the role of First Nations artists and craftspeople in shaping the craft sector.

Craft in Australia: a background Craft in Australia is wrapped up in the histories of British colonialism. The British colonisation of Australia during the late 18th century had terrible consequences for First Nations people, their way of life, and nature and the environment. The violence, displacement and genocide have had long-lasting impacts that persist today. For example, the ramifications continue to be felt of the Stolen Generations – when First Nations children were taken from their families as part of assimilation policies up until as recently as 1970. The children suffered horrendous abuse, and the ramifications of this are still being felt, and investigations are ongoing to find out the extent of the abuse and genocide during that time (Allam & Collard, 2023). In 1995, the Bringing Them Home report was released (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997), which was a result of a national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The report included 54 recommendations to support healing and reconciliation for the Stolen Generations. A formal apology was eventually given in 2007 by the then Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The length of time it had taken for an apology, the persistence of inequality for First Nations communities and, of course, the recent Indigenous Voice referendum result indicate the extent to which colonialism has had a long-lasting negative impact on the lives of First Nations people. This context is important for discussing the development of craft in Australia. Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue, who was the inaugural chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 1990, speaks about the strength of Indigenous culture in her introduction for the book Kaltja Now, a book about Indigenous arts in Australia, written by the artists themselves: Indigenous Australians have been forcibly united: united in dispossession, in oppression, poverty, sadness, and never let it be forgotten, in struggle and resistance. But even in such a hostile and destructive social environment, traditions and cultures have persevered. (O’Donoghue, 2001, p. vii) Craft was and remains a part of everyday life for First Nations people. Weapons, tools, cooking utensils and other everyday objects have always been made using the materials available from the land. However, during the middle of the 20th century, First Nations art and craft began to gain appeal in the Western fine art market, largely due to the work of the Papunya artists, a group of First Nations artists and craftspeople who worked in the Papunya region (which is about 200 km north-west of Alice Springs) and came to prominence during

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 53 the 1980s. The origin of the Papunya artist movement is often attributed to Geoffrey Bardon, a local art teacher who provided acrylic paints and materials to some of the older men in the region in 1971. Within 2 years, around 1,000 works were created, and Papunya Tula Artists Inc was founded as a company (Perkins, 2001, p. 77). According to Hetti Perkins, a curator of First Nations origin, the works were originally thought of as curiosities, before rocketing in popularity during the 1980s. This popularity culminated in a 1988 exhibition in New York, which went on to tour North America (p. 78), and the transition of First Nations art into the Western fine art system appeared to be complete. However, the Papunya movement began before Geoffrey Bardon. Renowned First Nations artist Albert Namatjira, in the 1930s, founded and pioneered the Hermannsburg Watercolour School,2 which is about 150 km south of Papunya. Albert initially practised wood carving, before progressing to watercolours. Albert was part of the first group of First Nations Australians to create paintings for sale to the public. Clifford Possum, a renowned Papunya wood carver, was selling his carvings since the 1950s and was approached by Namatjira to begin painting as part of his watercolour school; however, Possum declined because he was happy with his craft. Clifford Possum and Albert Namatjira are arguably the pioneers of First Nations art and craft, decades before its transition into the Western fine art system (Fisher, 2016). Both painting and making are traditionally central to the everyday lives of First Nations people and are a part of ritual and ancestry. Ritual paintings are referred to as “Dreamings” (Myers, 2002) and are often produced collectively. In his anthropological work on Aboriginal painting, Fred Myers highlighted how paintings produced by Aboriginal artists (primarily Pintupi and then Papunya artists) transitioned into the Western “art-culture system” (p. 22). The artists who Myers spoke to described how their paintings are derived from stories that represent ancestral beings, the land and the mythological past. They emphasised that their paintings are not “made up” but “Come from the ‘Dreaming’ (tjukurrtjanu). . . . They are therefore more valuable than anything humans might invent” (p. 33). The features of the land – hills, trees, lakes and creeks – are said to be the marks of the mythical ancestors’ activities as they travelled through the land, shaping it as they go. These marks are apparent in the prominent and recurring symbols of Dreaming paintings, which represent waterholes, hills and trees. While much discussion about First Nations art and its popularity in the Western art market tends to focus on paintings, Phillip Jones notes how craft objects and making also became a part of the Westernised art market. On the tools and artefacts of First Nations people, Jones states: Today most of these objects are no longer made as the tools or paraphernalia of a hunting and gathering society. Their form, which is an echo of that supplanted existence, is allied to new functions; making money,

54 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn satisfying the varying demands of an arts and crafts industry, and restating cultural identity. In fact, forms of Aboriginal art have evolved specifically to act as currency between the two cultures. The craft industry has become politically vital in attempts to represent Aborigines, and Aboriginality, to Europeans who are prepared to buy the art and (perhaps) the culture, and maybe even its political stance. (Jones, 1992, p. 134) Laura Fisher (2016) also notes the importance of First Nations art and craft for highlighting injustice and inequality, and the ongoing racism and discrimination that First Nations people face in contemporary Australian society (p. 13). In addition, its popularity has led to a wider awareness of art and craft created by First Nations people, enabling many artists to create and sell their work and support their communities. At the same time, there have been several concerns voiced about the popularity of First Nations art and its assimilation into the Western art market. According to Fisher, there are arguments that this assimilation is the “final frontier of colonial oppression due to the unbridled commodification of various images and motifs, and Aboriginal artists have been portrayed as enslaved to the market” (p. 20). There are also concerns with how First Nations art in the Western market is contextualised (or not) in gallery spaces that were built to show work from a Eurocentric, Western tradition (Perkins, 2001). Hetti Perkins describes how it is difficult to curate or contextualise works for the contemporary Western gallery space when the artist does not speak English and cannot offer a conceptual account of his/her work (p. 83). Yet, the work must be housed in such spaces to appeal to the market. Furthermore, First Nations art is often produced communally, and so it is problematic when the Western art market tends to valorise individual artists. A significant issue remains around the conditions of the production of First Nations art and concerns of exploitation. In 2019, the chairperson of the APY3 Art Collective said that the alleged exploitation of First Nations artists, most of whom were frail and elderly, is akin to “modern day slavery” (Allam & Davidson, 2019). This concern relates to the treatment of artists by art dealers, whereby the APY Collective and other First Nations art centres had raised concerns about private dealers taking artists away from their homes and into town, known as “carpet bagging”. As well as taking artists away from their communities, unethical dealers would try and take paintings away in exchange for small amounts of money or drugs and alcohol, and sell them in the city for huge profits (Delaney, 2016). The Indigenous Art Code was established in 2008 to try and address unethical and exploitative treatment of First Nations artists, but it was only a voluntary code. The “Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act” was introduced in 2010 to set rules for payment to artists, to try to guard against exploitation. However, this resale royalty is only for individuals: it doesn’t recognise collective authorship, a barrier for First Nations art

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 55 (Pham, 2010). In 2021, the Australian government introduced the National Indigenous Visual Arts Action Plan, which involved additional funding for art centres, negotiating reciprocal agreements with international dealers for royalty resales and improved broadband and digital infrastructure. While the initiatives were welcomed, the general manager of the APY Art Collective said that the plan would do nothing to guard against the continuing issue of unethical and unscrupulous dealers in Alice Springs (Burke, 2021). Another concern relates to the appropriation and copying of First Nations art, which is exploitative and damaging. Fred Myers (2005) discusses three cases of forgery in the Aboriginal art market and identifies these cases as characteristic of how Aboriginal art is not simply assimilated into the market but recontextualised and placed within classifications that have origins in Western art history and thus certain hierarchies of value, which cannot appropriately “assimilate all the potential properties of indigenous painting to its own schemas” (p. 89). Speaking about the place of First Nations art in mass culture, Laura Fisher discusses the appropriation of “Aboriginalia”: “the appropriation of Aboriginal themes and motifs by non-Indigenous artists and designers” and was characteristic of “a strong desire to establish a firmer sense of Australia’s independence from its colonial origins and find signifiers of Australia’s uniqueness” (Fisher, 2016, p. 130). This echoes my discussion about the Commonwealth Institute in Chapter 2, whereby the display of art and craft created by First Nations communities is placed into a completely different context, in an attempt to reconcile with colonial histories and its atrocities. When conceived of in this way, arguments about the assimilation of First Nations art into the Western art market as the “final frontier” of colonialism gain credence. It is important to note that until the 1990s, the highest profile First Nations artists were almost exclusively men. First Nations curators and art historians such as Hetti Perkins have worked to highlight the work of women in the increased popularity of First Nations art and craft. Two of the most wellknown women specialised in craft; they are ceramicist Thancoupie and weaver Yvonne Koolmatrie. Thancoupie was born in 1937 in the Weipa community, in Far North Queensland, and started her career as a teacher and part-time artist. She wanted to pursue ceramics and moved to East Sydney Technical College to undergo training as a ceramic artist. From there, her work in ceramics broke new ground for First Nations craft and broadened perceptions of Aboriginal art (Mellor, 2001, p. 90). Her work was heavily informed by her family’s culture and her connection to nature, with many pieces based on seed pods or vegetable forms. Yvonne Koolmatrie was a Ngarrindjeri woman, from near the Murray River in South Australia. Her work was strongly influenced by her Ngarrindjeri heritage and spirituality, ranging from functional items such as eel traps and shrimp scoops, to intricate Dreamings (Koolmatrie, 2001, p. 99). Janis Koolmatrie highlights Yvonne’s strong feelings about the appropriation of

56 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn Aboriginal art and craft, saying that “[u]nder no circumstances would she endorse either the teaching or imitation of traditional Indigenous weaving or other art forms by non-Indigenous people, as such practices amount to theft” (Koolmatrie, 2001, p. 102). While much of the discussion in this section has focused on the cultural object and its decontextualisation in the Western art market, the quote above about Yvonne Koolmatrie also points to the importance of process and how the process of making in First Nations communities should be protected. This highlights how important craft is to First Nations communities and the harm that copyright infringement and appropriation can cause. This section has provided some background to Australian craft, focusing primarily on the growth of First Nations art and craft in the Western art market during the 20th century. What was clear to me when I visited Melbourne and Adelaide was how First Nations art and craft appeared to be largely separated from the “mainstream” and “commercial” craft. Some First Nations craft could be found in certain mainstream craft shops, and large areas of galleries would be dedicated to First Nations craft and art. However, on visiting a commercial craft fair, the presence of First Nations art and craft was almost entirely absent. So, while First Nations craft and art has been assimilated into the “high” or “fine” art market, it appears not to have permeated the wider craft and creative industries in Australia. Some of the reasons for this relate to the cultural policy and the development of the creative industries in Australia, which inspired the UK approach to cultural policy during the 1990s.

Creative industries and cultural policy in Australia In 1994, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating released the Creative Nation report (DoCA, 1994). This was one of the first times a nation had produced a cultural policy of this kind, one which focused on the economic contribution of culture. It celebrated the value of Australian culture and acknowledged the heritage and cultural traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. The introduction posits that culture is “essential to our economic success” (DoCA, 1994, p. 2). The Creative Nation report heavily influenced the UK’s cultural policy development and the subsequent Creative Industries Mapping document, which introduced the term “creative industries” (Bakhshi, 2023, p. 4). The term and policy construct of “creative industries” was then readily, and often uncritically, taken up by governments around the world (Cunningham, 2009; Oakley, 2017). Even though Creative Nation was the first time Australia had introduced a formal cultural policy, there had been previous examples of culture playing a key role in the policy agenda in Australia, one of the most notable coming from Don Dunstan, who was the premier of South Australia during the 1970s. Dunstan played a key role in developing arts and culture in South Australia and remains an influential figure in Australian politics. In parallel with the

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 57 progressive national policies of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, Dunstan introduced a set of reforms around First Nations land rights, the environment, women’s rights and supporting the arts (Woollacott, 2020). Dunstan had a passion for arts and craft and helped establish cultural organisations such as the JamFactory and Carclew in Adelaide, which both work with the local community. The JamFactory in Adelaide was established following Dunstan’s commission of a study of design and craft industries in South Australia, which recommended that a “Craft Authority” be established to support craft training and production, given the state’s abundant resources of material, the growing interest in craft and small-scale manufacturing and the potential employment opportunities for young makers (Richards, 2013). Dunstan established the new Craft Authority with his advisor Peter Ward and Dick Richards, who was a curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The South Australian Craft Authority found a home in a former jam factory, before being relocated to its current premises in 1992. Dunstan spoke of his reasons for opening the Craft Authority at an exhibition in 1974, which included: We wanted to encourage the development or the continuation of rare or interesting skills, gratuitously, not because any one person or group of people would necessarily make a profit from such a program, but because it was a nice thing to do, a civilised thing to do. (Richards, 2013, p. 21) Dunstan’s speech points to an idea of craft and creativity not necessarily centred on employment but the intrinsic rewards of creativity (Banks, 2007) and the idea of making as doing something well, for its own sake (Sennett, 2010). It is a social democratic approach to cultural policy that is argued by some scholars to be a way forward for more egalitarian creative industries (Banks, 2017; McRobbie, 2016). While the “Dunstan Decade” (Woollacott, 2020) had a significant impact on the Australian political landscape, economic rationalism eventually took hold, gradually eroding state support for arts and culture. The short-term electoral cycles in Australia mean that it has been difficult for any long-term approach to cultural policy to come to fruition (Meyrick & Barnett, 2017). At the time of writing, the current Labour government introduced “Revive: Australia’s Cultural Policy for the next five years” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2023), which promised a A$252 million investment in arts funding over the following four years. The policy highlights six key pillars of focus, one of them being First Nations arts and craft. The document emphasises that these policies build on the work of previous progressive cultural policies by Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating. Dunstan’s premiership was a key moment for the craft sector, and in South Australia there remains a legacy, encapsulated in the success of the JamFactory and the longevity of Guildhouse, the primary craft development

58 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn organisation in South Australia. However, policy support for the craft sector has historically been uneven and fragmented across Australia. The Crafts Council of Australia was established in 1964, emerging from the World Crafts Council. From there, the Crafts Association of South Australia was formed in 1966 (now known as Guildhouse), and throughout the 1970s, crafts councils were being established in all states. From this followed Craft Australia which was established in 1971, and it was forced to close in 2012 following funding cuts. The National Craft Initiative was then established in 2013 and concluded in March 2016 (Luckman et al., 2019). Over time, the presence of crafts in Australian cultural policy became more and more subsumed into the broader visual arts portfolio, and thus specific support for the craft sector has dramatically reduced. Coupled with the lack of a coherent cultural policy in Australia for the last decade or so, the commercial craft sector in Australia has received little state support. As a result, the craft sector has been on a steady decline since 2006; however, that decline stabilised in the period 2016–2021 (Luckman & Tower, 2023). Because of the lack of state support for craft, the sector is entrepreneurial in Australia. Craft entrepreneurship has been made easier over the past decade with the rise of “Etsypreneurship” (Luckman, 2015), seemingly allowing makers to easily set up a craft business online. Luckman explains both the opportunities and pitfalls of online craft marketplaces, particularly in how platforms and algorithms work to enhance the visibility of people and groups who are over-represented in craft, at the expense of people from minoritised groups, helping create an image of craft as white, female, middle class and heteronormative. This concurs with work on the wider issue of how online platforms reproduce and reinforce existing inequalities (Noble, 2020), including in the creative and cultural industries (Patel, 2020; Poell et al., 2021). Aboriginal art centres A significant aspect of Australia’s art and culture market is the Aboriginal art centre model, the development of which occurred in parallel to the development of Australia’s commercial craft and cultural sector during the 1970s and 1980s. While my discussion in the previous section focused on First Nations craft, the Papunya artists and individual makers such as Yvonne Koolmatrie and Thancoupie, it is worth devoting further attention to the development of art centres and their relationship to the cultural sector in Australia. Aboriginal art centres are organisations that tend to operate in the remote and desert regions of Australia, are community owned and governed, and focus on the production and marketing of art and craft that is created by Aboriginal people (Wright & Morphy, 2000, p. 9). Aboriginal art centres began to be established during the 1970s, as a policy attempt to address issues around authenticity and the credibility of Aboriginal art, as Jones and Birdsall-Jones (2014) describe, “Prior to the 1970s, Aboriginal cultural objects were only perceived as art

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 59 when they fit European conventions and only then through a redefinition of art that started in museums, so many objects were ignored or were not considered collectable” (p. 300). The Australian Federal government established “Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd” in 1971, which helped establish credible outlets for Aboriginal art, with the aim to create a market for the work (Peterson, 1983). Jones and Birdsall-Jones show that cultural policy was central to the progressive Federal policies of the 1970s which were led by Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labour Party, who was the prime minister of Australia between 1972 and 1975. Whitlam’s policies aimed for Aboriginal equality and justice to facilitate “self-determination” and to uphold and promote Aboriginal cultural expression. Whitlam expanded and renamed the Australian Council for the Arts and included within it a separate Aboriginal Arts Board, which was established to provide policy and grant support for all forms of cultural activity. The Aboriginal Arts Board comprised many Aboriginal artists and cultural figures at the time and signalled the Federal government’s willingness to acknowledge the centrality of arts and culture to Aboriginal life (Myers, 2002, p. 139). Such policies, however, originate from Western processes and structures. As Myers (2002) points out, the cultural policies created to establish the Aboriginal art market have economic motivations at their core, creating a situation where Aboriginal artists and craftspeople resist or challenge these structures that are at odds with their primary motivation for creating arts and crafts. These incommensurate value systems made it very difficult for art advisers such as Geoffrey Bardon to operate as intermediaries between art centres. In Bardon’s case, this related to the Papunya Artist Inc Cooperative he helped establish. Bardon claimed that government officials would stop him from taking paintings to market, “not only out of ignorance and a desire to control Aboriginal people’s lives, but also and perhaps less consciously because of the way the painting challenged the official policies of assimilation” (Myers, 2002, p. 126). Myers highlights the specificity of the Aboriginal art market, in particular the range of people and institutions that form the social, cultural and historical context within which Aboriginal art is produced, which has implications for how Aboriginal art is valued. This is an important aspect of Myers’ work which I will return to in the next chapter when I discuss hierarchies of value in craft. The simultaneous development of Australian cultural policy, and the parallel development of Aboriginal art centres and the art market originating from these, is no accident. During the 1970s, key figures such as Don Dunstan and Gough Whitlam introduced socially democratic policies that prioritised arts and culture and aimed for equality and social justice for First Nations people. Myers noted how the Papunya Artists Inc cooperative operated much like an art centre, insomuch as it retailed artworks. However, their practices also emphasised the group’s identity and Aboriginal values, in line with Aboriginal self-determination policies at the time. For example, interested buyers

60 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn were not allowed to specify works they wanted to purchase. Instead, they had to buy a consignment of paintings that included the work of many from the cooperative. This is because Aboriginal artists believed that work from the Dreaming was all equally valuable (Myers, 2002, p. 127). Art centres such as Papunya were initially reliant on government grants because of initial oversupply of paintings and relatively scarce demand. It was a welfare approach, but the money did not go directly to producers in the form of income support; instead, it went towards supporting a marketplace. This particular formation of cultural policy during the 1970s involved some input and agency from Aboriginal people, particularly the Aboriginal Arts Board, which was said to be involved in the development of what was seen as a “culturally appropriate strategy” for producers (Myers, 2002, p. 135). Craft became a feature of this strategy, whereby craftworkers were eligible for a “training allowance” to enable them to develop their skills and become selfsufficient (Myers, 2002, p. 145). This welfare support did not last too long, as an economic downturn hit Australia during the early 1970s, leading to arts budget cuts and a scaling back of support for First Nations painters, craftspeople and art centres, which were increasingly expected to become economically self-sufficient. This came to a head when the interest in Aboriginal art exploded during the 1980s. More art centres were established, especially in the latter part of the decade (Myers, 2002), and they became key in the distribution of First Nations art and the eventual development of cultural policy in Australia (Jones & Birdsall-Jones, 2014). Central to the cultural policy was the idea of Aboriginal art as “a potential driver for commercial, social and cultural benefits” (Jones & BirdsallJones, 2014, p. 300). Laura Fisher notes how Australia’s Creative Nation cultural policy placed Aboriginal arts and crafts as a potential lynchpin of the Australian cultural economy. The aim was to maximise the economic opportunity of Aboriginal art through tourism, commercial export and the 2000 Olympic Games (Fisher, 2016, p. 135). At the same time, the Aboriginal policy landscape was changing, which had direct implications for cultural policy. The Department for Aboriginal Affairs became the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) in March 1990. The Creative Nation policy had a direct effect on the ATSIC, which introduced a cultural policy framework in 1995 that emphasised the importance of maximising economic opportunity while maintaining control over the commercialisation of Aboriginal arts and crafts. For art centres, the demand for entrepreneurial minded approaches was becoming more crucial too, again as a result of the Creative Nation policy (Fisher, 2016, pp. 136– 137). The ATSIC was dissolved in 2005, and elements of it were absorbed into the Federal government, which felt that the ATSIC wasn’t working because poverty and deprivation remained high. The commercial potential of Aboriginal art that was central to the Creative Nation strategy was not enough to address the social and structural issues in Australian society that persist today.

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 61 This was because the commercial benefits of Aboriginal art were, and are, distributed unevenly among artists and their communities (Fisher, 2016, p. 147). Fisher argues that this is an example of how cultural policies can be connected to alleviating social exclusion (see also Hesmondhalgh, 2018, p. 190). There are clearly problems with creative industries policies, and many of these arguments are well documented elsewhere (e.g. see Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Banks & O’Connor, 2009; Kong, 2014; Oakley, 2009; O’Connor, 2009). As highlighted in the previous chapter, any policies that originate from institutions and governments that were built on colonialism and capitalism are likely to reproduce and uphold oppression and systematic inequality. However, there are examples of practice within art centres and social enterprises that point to a potential way forward for reimagining the craft sector. Luckman et al. (2019) highlight the work of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, a social enterprise art centre for women in the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) lands, which cover the Central and Western desert regions of Australia. Tjanpi Desert Weavers were established by the NPY Women’s Council more than 20 years ago, to provide a way for First Nations women to make an income from fibre art. Tjanpi supports over 400 craft artists across 26 communities, and they run workshops and exhibitions and have a gallery and shop in Alice Springs. Work by Tjanpi artists has received international recognition, including work being shown at the Venice Biennale. Luckman notes how Tjanpi enables the women to create work that is inspired by their connection to the landscape – literally weaving the landscape into their work using grasses. The manager of Tjanpi who was interviewed by Luckman, Michelle Young, commented on the “joy” that Tjanpi brought to its women, describing it as “contagious and unstoppable” (p. 96). Other studies of art centres in Australia also highlight the social and cultural benefits for First Nations people. For example, Mackell et al. (2023) explored the impact of art centre participation on First Nations Elders. Their work is framed within an intergenerational model of care, using Indigenous methodologies that involve research co-creation and participatory action research with participants. Mackell et al. highlighted the art centre as a place for healing, expression and holding of knowledge and a safe space for First Nations Elders. The importance of safety is highlighted and potentially instructive for reimagining more socially just and equitable art and craft spaces: Safety is interpreted as time out from daily stressors and those resulting from loss, grief or trauma; to access support without judgement; and to be “who they are” where elsewhere colonial and racist norms dominate health, social, education, and justice structures. (Mackell et al., 2023, p. 299) Spaces such as art centres and social enterprises tend to exist separately from the mainstream, commercial craft sector; however, as the Tjanpi weavers

62 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn showing in Venice Biennale shows, there can be some crossover. With this in mind, craft practice can better be thought of as an ecology, as characterised by Bartleet et al. (2022) in their work on art centres. Like Mackell et al., Bartleet et al. adopted a postcolonial, indigenous approach to research, working with First Nations academics and practitioners to co-create their research on remote creative practice in Barkly in the Northern Territory. The authors mapped creative activity using John Holden’s (2015) ecological approach, considering the wider benefits of cultural practice and taking into account cross-cultural, cross-art form and cross-sector perspectives. Holden’s idea of cultural ecology challenges prescriptive economic approaches, conceiving of culture as “an organism not a mechanism; it is much messier and more dynamic than linear models allow” (Holden, 2015, p. 2). This approach reveals the wider benefits people can gain from engaging in all types of cultural activity, de-centring economic approaches. Social enterprises generally operate on a not-for-profit basis, working with and for communities, which is why in craft, they are potentially instructive for reimagining craft as a sector. Having given some focus to UK craft social enterprises in the previous chapter, in the next section I discuss two craft social enterprise case studies, deriving from my research and interviews in Australia during 2022.

Socially engaged craft in Australia: case studies In the previous chapter, I discussed case studies of socially engaged craft in the UK. As part of the research for this project, I also visited two socially engaged craft organisations in Australia – one in Adelaide and one in Melbourne. Before I go into those, it is worth considering the specific context of social enterprise in Australia, particularly in relation to the creative industries. Grace McQuilten (2017) highlights how social enterprise is becoming an increasing influence in the Australian economy, with its potential for job creation and stimulating entrepreneurship (2017, p. 69). Much literature on social enterprise in the Australian context derives from business and finance, rather than the creative sector. McQuilten notes that creative social enterprise has tended to emerge from the craft and design sector, mainly because of the relatively low barriers to access and participation in craft and the cheap cost of materials. The growth of craft social enterprise in Australia can arguably be linked to the cultural policy context outlined in the previous section, whereby culture is used as a means to alleviate social and economic challenges. As McQuilten indicates in the Australian context, the model of social enterprise is appealing to funders “because it seems to offer a market solution to entrenched social problems that were once almost exclusively addressed by the state and charitable organisations” (McQuilten et al., 2020, p. 124). While there are these concerns, craft social enterprises also have transformative potential. They are a means through which to challenge existing hierarchies and paradigms, bring people together and foster a sense of ownership

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 63 and independence among marginalised groups, as is the case with some of the First Nations art centres discussed earlier in this chapter. The two craft organisations featured in this section are quite different in terms of origin, size and focus. However, they both work to use craft as a means for self-expression and provide a platform for individuals and communities that are under-represented in the commercial craft sector. The JamFactory, Adelaide The JamFactory is a craft organisation in Adelaide, and it has a prominent presence in the city. Its building sits just off North Terrace, which is Adelaide’s main cultural boulevard. At the time of my visit, the building was decorated with a large mural, so it was easy to spot. The building is owned by the local government and is provided rent-free. It is open to the public, with a shop and art gallery on the ground floor. Visitors can book free tours in midweek, and the tours include the opportunity to view the glass-blowing facilities and the associates (the artists and makers based there) at work. As well as studio space for makers, the JamFactory offers craft workshops to the public which were launched in 2021 when the strongest lockdowns from the COVID-19 pandemic were largely lifted. The JamFactory was established in 1973 and was called the South Australian Craft Authority, as part of a significant set of socially democratic reforms by Don Dunstan of the Australian Labour Party, who was the premier of South Australia during the 1960s and 1970s. As discussed in the previous section, the JamFactory moved to its current home on North Terrace in 1992, after initially being based at a former jam factory. The JamFactory has had a long-standing connection with First Nations artists, with touring exhibitions of First Nations craft being a part of the early programming during the 1970s (Osborne, 2013, p. 31). There are some strong connections with First Nations art centres such as Bula’bula Arts at Ramingining in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. However, the organisation notes that much more needs to be done to ensure more First Nations makers are either associates or staff at the organisation, and that First Nations art is more fully integrated into the programming and retail space. The CEO of the JamFactory, Brian Parkes, is conscious that the standard associate programme, which involves a combination of training, mentorship and studio space, may not be appropriate for everyone and acknowledges that there may need to be a bespoke programme for First Nations artists. The JamFactory’s longevity, augmented by state support, is an interesting case study in the Australian context that could be instructive for UK craft because despite the pressure of running a day-to-day social enterprise, at least the management does not need to worry about the rent of the building, which allows the JamFactory to allocate their income to developing more artists. However, the rent arrangement does not mean that it hasn’t faced pressure

64 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn over the years from different conservative and liberal governments, which put pressure on the JamFactory to become self-sustaining. During the 1990s, coinciding with the move to the current premises, the textile workshop was closed by the then CEO Frank McBride, and Don Dunstan was chair at the time. McBride wanted to reconnect makers with industry, in the vein of Dunstan’s original vision which the JamFactory had seemingly shifted away from, focusing more on promoting craft as fine art under previous CEOs. To facilitate this, they opened furniture and metals workshops and moved to commercial furniture design, which remains a part of the JamFactory’s offering today. Through many changes at the board and CEO levels over the years, new ideas were introduced such as masterclasses and international exhibitions which raised the profile of the JamFactory, and many of its associates have gone on to win awards and achieve international standing. When asked how they foster a sense of inclusivity at the JamFactory, Brian explained that a genuine care for their participants is key, but also being alert to any unconscious biases in the recruitment of associates and staff. A duty of care, and a focus on the craft expertise and skill of their makers, is important to the way they work. He says that “we, as an organisation, are highly values based. And within those values we talk about the importance of valuing the ideas and skills of the maker in all of our thinking, whether it’s the way we approach redevelopment or communication strategy, or anything that we want to think about the skills and inherent knowledge of makers”. Brian is also aware of the inequalities in the sector, and they exercise positive action where necessary. For example, for their furniture making programme which tends to be dominated by men, they ensure that they give preference to women when it comes to making selections. On selection processes, Brian said “We would err on the side of supporting someone from a more marginalised background if there was a decision to make between two people”. During the first lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, the JamFactory received some subsidy from the government to keep running. They managed to stay open as a workplace, so that makers could come in and make their work, and as a result, online sales for the organisation quadrupled. Brian said that the potential reasons for their success during lockdowns and the pandemic may include people choosing to spend more money on quality products, a “pendulum swing against globalised production and homogeneity, towards being able to tell stories about the cup you’re drinking out of, or the brooch that you’re wearing”. The increase in demand for craft during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 also meant that more people wanted to try making for themselves, and the JamFactory oriented to this by offering community craft classes once the lockdown was lifted. The JamFactory had not offered such classes before and is part of a concerted effort to bring the general public into the workshops and working with the associates, beyond visiting the gallery and shop. This was important for the JamFactory to remain connected to the local community and be accessible for everyone.

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 65 The Social Studio, Melbourne The Social Studio was founded in 2009 and is a social enterprise that primarily aims to provide work and training opportunities for people from refugee and new migrant backgrounds, mainly in fashion, textiles and the creative arts. Since 2009, the enterprise has grown from a small training provider to an ethical clothing manufacturer with a shop, situated in the Collingwood Yards complex in Melbourne. The Social Studio has a long-standing partnership with the Melbourne-based university RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), which is where the Social Studio co-founder Dr Grace McQuilten is currently based as an associate professor. A key offering from the Social Studio is an accredited course in clothing and textiles production, which is delivered in partnership with RMIT. This course helps participants develop their craft skills for potential future employment in fashion and textiles, offering pathways to the industry for migrant and refugee people. The clothing manufacturing offer of the Social Studio is an important income generator, as it has developed an in-house clothing label and also manufactures clothes for third parties. This part of the social enterprise expanded significantly during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the CEO, Dewi Cooke, described how responsive the Social Studio was to the sudden demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) because Dewi had friends in the healthcare sector. They placed orders for PPE with the Social Studio when Melbourne first went into lockdown. The flexibility with which the Social Studio adapted and the resources it put in place meant it was ready for a significant increase in demand when face masks became mandatory for everyone. Dewi and the staff at the Social Studio were able to prototype and learn how to produce masks on a larger scale. During the initial lockdowns in the state of Victoria, the Social Studio was part of what Dewi described as a collective effort, “doing something to help fight [COVID-19]. There was a real sense of collective organising, really”. This echoes my earlier point about the increase in mutual aid activity during the first lockdown in the UK in 2020, when craft organisations were often at the centre of collective responses to help the vulnerable (see also Patel, 2022). Care is at the centre of what the Social Studio does, and Dewi provided several examples of how they ensure an inclusive, safe environment for all, such as providing extra teachers for students taking the accredited course, “so that students have much smaller class groups, are able to take the time, because obviously English is not often their first language and often not their second”. They also employ a student pathways coordinator, to help students set goals and identify issues that might make it harder for them to participate in a course, such as navigating government departments and “life admin stuff”, as Dewi calls it, “which can become overwhelming for people from new countries or different countries”. The Social Studio also has a dedicated prayer space, and Dewi emphasised the importance of flexibility when it comes to cultural diversity. She described how they gave one employee two weeks off after a death in the

66 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn family because in that particular employee’s culture and community, there is a two-week mourning period. Dewi also described keeping the mission of the Social Studio at the forefront of their decision making: “If we’re approached about a project or if we want to work with somebody, we’re like, ‘Does this create an opportunity for somebody that they wouldn’t have ordinarily?’ And that’s just the reminder that we’re always thinking about”. The Social Studio certainly benefitted from the demand for face masks and PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its flexibility, as well as its carecentred approach, meant it was well placed to respond. The partnership with RMIT is important for exposure and maintaining the core offering of providing training to people of refugee and new migrant status. However, despite the recent expansion, the Social Studio is still reliant on philanthropic funding, and so they are looking to expand the manufacturing side of the social enterprise to become more self-sustaining.

Craft social enterprises in Australia: enterprise and flexibility A striking feature of the two social enterprises featured in this section, and in the Australian commercial craft sector in general, was the strong emphasis on enterprise, and particularly having multiple income streams. The JamFactory generates significant income through its shop, furniture manufacturing, associate programme and community craft classes. The Social Studio can generate income through its shop and textile manufacturing. It was notable that in both cases manufacturing was a key aspect of their work. In the Australian cultural policy context, Grodach et al. (2017) suggest that craft manufacturing and production could be key to addressing some of the inequalities in the wider creative economy, specifically tapping into the skillsets of people and communities that have long been marginalised in the sector. As they explain, “Urban policymakers have turned toward and interpreted the cultural economy in two primary ways: as an appendage of a larger creative or knowledge economy or as a means of enhancing consumption”. This has resulted in gentrification and the displacement of residents and businesses from inner city areas. Thus, “creative industries and consumption-focused interpretations of the cultural economy have contributed to the growing polarisation of cities, culturally and economically. . . . these policies have been criticised for implying that industrial workers and inner-city working class and migrant communities are ‘outmoded’ or ‘uncreative’, needing to be replaced by more ‘talented’ outsiders” (p. 17). The Social Studio in particular works with groups that are traditionally marginalised in the creative economy, helping new migrant and refugee makers develop their skills and potentially turn that into a business. It is an example of what Grodach et al. were describing, in terms of a progressive form of cultural production which would build upon “industrial, migrant and working-class skills and legacies” (p. 18). Thus, manufacturing helps “make the case” for craft social

Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 67 enterprises, to show a degree of contribution to the economy, and sustainability. It is a slightly different approach from the UK case studies, which appeared to be focused on mental health and well-being, and thus an eye towards social prescription and gaining funding to primarily meet health- and social care objectives, rather than urban and economic development. The two differing approaches in both countries suggest a failure in cultural policy, to effectively support smallscale craft and particularly socially engaged craft (see Belfiore, 2022). Despite the challenges presented by the policy context, and the COVID-19 pandemic, both organisations have thrived in recent years. This reflects findings on the Australian craft economy by Luckman and Tower (2023) who highlight that “as reflected in the stabilisation of craft GVA from 2016 to 2021, there is increasing demand for skilled Australian making and in many ways the pandemic has been a boon to local production” (p. 64). Flexibility in adapting to changing circumstances is key to the JamFactory’s longevity and the reason why Social Studio flourished during the pandemic. Both received some additional funding during the pandemic, and both experienced a significant growth in income. It certainly helps that both have some sort of stability in place: in the case of the JamFactory, it is not having to pay rent because it is subsidised by the local government, and in the case of the Social Studio, it is the long-running relationship with RMIT, which allows them to deliver accredited textile manufacturing courses. This is crucial, given the ongoing uncertainty since Australia closed its borders during 2020. As Meyrick and Barnett (2021, p. 85) argue, “a new role for public policy must involve a ‘re-socializing’ of policymaking and its opening-up to new and diverse publics”. When I visited both organisations featured in this section, it was apparent to me how connected they were within their locality. Both had important links with universities and the local creative industries, much like the UK case studies. Both organisations are an integral part of the craft ecology in their cities. These relationships are crucial for understanding the progressive potential of craft social enterprises for imagining a more inclusive craft sector. In the next chapter, I will discuss a theoretical and practical framework to this end.

Notes 1 This was sadly more apparent than ever in October 2023 when the Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum was unsuccessful. The referendum, if successful, would have meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would be recognised in the Australian constitution. 2 The Hermannsburg Watercolour School originated from a missionary settlement. Missionaries were a way in which colonisers could impose Christian values on to First Nations people, to “civilise” them to be integrated into “society” (Broome, 2019, p. 27). 3 APY is the abbreviation for Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, which is a large area of First Nations land in the remote northwest of South Australia.

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Craft in Australia: lessons to learn 69 Fisher, L. (2016). Aboriginal art and Australian society: Hope and disenchantment. Anthem Press. Grodach, C., O’Connor, J., & Gibson, C. (2017). Manufacturing and cultural production: Towards a progressive policy agenda for the cultural economy. City, Culture and Society, 10, 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ccs.2017.04.003 Hesmondhalgh, D. (2018). The cultural industries (fourth). SAGE. Holden, J. (2015). The ecology of culture: A report commissioned by the arts and humanities research council’s cultural value project. Jones, P. (1992). Arts and manufactures: Inventing Aboriginal craft. In N. Ioannou (Ed.), Craft in society: An anthology of perspectives (pp. 131– 152). Freemantle Arts Centre Press. Jones, T., & Birdsall-Jones, C. (2014). Meeting places: Drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 20(3), 296–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2013.786059 Kong, L. (2014). From cultural industries to creative industries and back? Towards clarifying theory and rethinking policy. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 15(4), 593–607. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2014.977555 Koolmatrie, J. (2001). The Ngarrindjeri weaver. In Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Ed.), Kaltja now: Indigenous arts Australia (pp. 98–103). Wakefield Press. Luckman, S. (2015). Craft and the creative economy. Palgrave Macmillan. Luckman, S., & Andrew, J. (2020). Craftspeople and designer makers in the contemporary creative economy. Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44979-7 Luckman, S., Andrew, J., & Crisp, T. (2019). Crafting self: Promoting the making self in the creative micro-economy. https://apo.org.au/node/220886 Luckman, S., & Tower, A. (2023). The value of craft skills to the future of making in Australia. https://apo.org.au/node/324171 Mackell, P., Squires, K., Cecil, J., Lindeman, M., Fraser, S., Malay, R., Meredith, M., Young, M., Nargoodah, L., Cook, B., Schmidt, C., Dow, B., & Batchelor, F. (2023). Aboriginal community-controlled art centres: Keeping elders strong and connected. Articulating an ontologically situated, intergenerational model of care. Australasian Journal on Ageing, 42(2), 293–301. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajag.13178 McQuilten, G. (2017). The political possibilities of art and fashion based social enterprise. Continuum, 31(1), 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304 312.2016.1262103 McQuilten, G., Warr, D., Humphery, K., & Spiers, A. (2020). Ambivalent entrepreneurs: Arts-based social enterprise in a neoliberal world. Social Enterprise Journal, 16(2), 121–140. https://doi.org/10.1108/SEJ-03-2019-0015 McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Polity. Mellor, D. (2001). Thancoupie: Earth shaper. In Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Ed.), Kaltja now: Indigenous arts Australia (pp. 88–97). Wakefield Press. Meyrick, J., & Barnett, T. (2017). Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid. Cultural Trends, 26(2), 107–124. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2017.1323840

70 Craft in Australia: lessons to learn Meyrick, J., & Barnett, T. (2021). From public good to public value: Arts and culture in a time of crisis. Cultural Trends, 30(1), 75–90. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09548963.2020.1844542 Myers, F. (2002). Painting culture: The making of an Aboriginal high art. Duke University Press. Myers, F. (2005). Some properties of art and culture: Ontologies of the image and economies of exchange. In D. Miller (Ed.), Materiality (pp. 88–117). Duke University Press. Noble, S. U. (2020). Algorithms of oppression. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479833641.001.0001 Oakley, K. (2009). The disappearing arts: Creativity and innovation after the creative industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(4), 403– 413. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286630902856721 Oakley, K. (2017). Whose creative economy? Inequality and the need for international approaches. Les Enjeux de l’information et de La Communication, 17/2(2), 163–171. https://doi.org/10.3917/enic.021.0163 O’Connor, J. (2009). Creative industries: A new direction? International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(4), 387–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/102 86630903049920 O’Donoghue, L. (2001). Introduction. In Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Ed.), Kaltja now: Indigenous arts Australia. Wakefield Press. Osborne, M. (2013). A place and an idea – JamFactory 1973 to 2013. In M. Hancock Davis, M. Osborne, & B. Parkes (Eds.), Designing craft/crafting design: 40 years of JamFactory (pp. 29–46). JamFactory. Patel, K. (2020). The politics of expertise in cultural labour: Arts, work, inequalities. Rowman & Littlefield. Patel, K. (2022). In conversation with Deirdre Figueiredo MBE, director of Craftspace. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25(6), 1652–1664. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494221136615 Perkins, H. (2001). From genesis to genius. In Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Ed.), Kaltja now: Indigenous arts Australia (pp. 76–87). Wakefield Press. Peterson, N. (1983). Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd: A brief history. In P. Loveday & P. Cooke (Eds.), Aboriginal arts and crafts and the market (pp. 60–65). North Australia Research Unit. Pham, L. (2010). The Resale Royalty Right: What does it mean for Indigenous artists? The Indigenous Law Bulletin, 7(20). http://classic.austlii.edu. au/au/journals/IndigLawB/2010/35.html Poell, T., Nieborg, D. E., & Duffy, B. E. (2021). Platforms and cultural production. Wiley. Richards, D. (2013). JamFactory – the beginning, a personal view. In M. Hancock Davis, M. Osborne, & B. Parkes (Eds.), Designing craft/crafting design: 40 years of JamFactory (pp. 17–28). JamFactory. Sennett, R. (2010). The craftsman. Yale University Press. Woollacott, A. (2020). Being a women’s adviser at the state level: Deborah McCulloch and Don Dunstan in 1970s South Australia. In How the personal became political (pp. 97–113). Routledge. https://doi.org/ 10.4324/9781003034421-7 Wright, F., & Morphy, F. (2000). The art and craft centre story volume two. ATSIC.

4

Making changes in craft

The case studies on socially engaged craft organisations in the UK and Australia as featured in this book demonstrate their importance to the craft ecology, at the very least on a local level. However, they also face several challenges. Many of these challenges are a result of the cultural policy context in both countries, which prioritises entrepreneurial and neoliberal approaches with little state intervention. An exception is the JamFactory in Adelaide, which has its premises subsidised by the government, and this rent relief has enabled the organisation to expand and somewhat mitigate against the rolling back of state support for culture and craft in Australia. All the organisations work with groups that are under-represented in the mainstream, commercial craft sector. There was a slight difference in focus between the UK and Australian case studies, in that the UK organisations were focused primarily on mental health, well-being and social cohesion, whereas the two Australian organisations were much more geared towards helping people make money from their craft. That is not to say that is exclusively the case in both countries of course. The conditions and constraints within which socially engaged craft organisations in both countries operate are a result of the policy context. Because state support for craft has been reduced in Australia over the past decade or so, there is much emphasis on entrepreneurialism and adopting the same capitalist, neoliberal ideals that social enterprises are supposed to challenge (McQuilten et al., 2020). In the UK, creative social enterprises are almost fully dependent on external funding and piecemeal projects, which create precariousness and working patterns and conditions that are difficult to sustain. This situation for UK creative social enterprises is a moral failure of cultural policy (Belfiore, 2022). These organisations have become important for people, especially post-COVID-19 lockdowns, yet the hidden costs of running these organisations, particularly the financial and emotional toll of socially engaged work, are exacerbated amidst this precariousness. Despite the challenges, socially engaged craft organisations are examples of how craft can bring people together, foster a sense of belonging and inclusion, enable people to gain skills and confidence, make money from DOI: 10.4324/9781003301714-4

72 Making changes in craft their work and potentially catalyse resistance against oppressive structures (McQuilten et al., 2020). These organisations may be instructive in imagining a more inclusive craft ecology that better reflects the breadth and plurality of craft practice in all its forms, for all its purposes beyond the economic. In creative industries literature, there has been some important recent work on alternative models for creative work, but this is yet to be adequately theorised in relation to craft. In this chapter, I introduce a two-part framework for conceptualising how inequalities could be addressed in craft, which could be applied to the wider creative industries and arts. It covers the micro, macro and meso levels of craft and cultural production. The first part focuses on the micro level – the practice of craft and the qualities of the cultural object produced (Born, 2010), which can be understood through the framework of expertise (Patel, 2020). I discuss how expertise, as evident and manifest in the object, could destabilise existing hierarchies of value, given what has been discussed about hierarchies of value in UK and Australian craft in the previous two chapters. These hierarchies of value are upheld by the mechanisms of judgement and evaluation in contemporary craft, which are rooted in a Western and Eurocentric process that is exclusionary, and so I suggest, at the meso level, that judgements of value in craft should originate through the process of community evaluation as described by Janet Wolff (2006). The second part of the framework in this chapter considers the macro level – the wider cultural and social context that shapes how craft is practised, who gets to practise it and who gets to participate in craft as a creative industry. It draws on more recent work in cultural labour and cultural studies on care (Alacovska, 2020; Chatzidakis et al., 2020) to change the approach – fostering an ethos and a duty of care for all involved in the craft ecology. It also considers the overarching way in which creative work is thought of, drawing the concept of parity of participation (Fraser, 2013) and more recently Mark Banks’ idea of contributive justice (Banks, 2023) to imagine a more equitable way forward for the mainstream craft sector which values all forms of craft practice as a meaningful contribution to cultural life, as demonstrated in the work of the craft social enterprises featured in this book. There are tensions with this model and implications for contemporary craft, which is a sector at risk given the policy context, and I will discuss these tensions further in the conclusion to this book.

Change what is judged and how: craft expertise and the craft object Throughout this book, I have highlighted how craft created by people from minoritised groups is devalued or judged through a white and Western lens, in both the UK and Australia. In the UK context, I have revealed the interpersonal experiences of black and brown women in craft, who felt that their work was judged unfairly (see Chapter 2). In Australia, many would argue

Making changes in craft 73 that First Nations art and craft has reached a status of “fine art”. However, that in itself is problematic, given how First Nations art is derived from ancestry and ritual, and thus operates in a separate regime of value to Western art (Myers, 2005), which means it is often decontextualised, appropriated and devalued (Fisher, 2016). Furthermore, First Nations art tends to be collectively produced, which runs counter to the common trope of the individualised, “genius” artist (Wolff, 2006). One of the ways in which these issues could start to be addressed is by paying closer attention to the craft object itself and its qualities, and the process of making that produced the object. This process can be conceptualised as craft expertise. Expertise is a term often associated with power and authority, particularly in policy and bureaucratic circles (Prince, 2014; Schlesinger, 2013). In other work, I have reframed the concept of expertise in creative work (see Patel, 2020), to consider the skills and mastery of a creative worker, developed over time. Expertise is a term often taken for granted, and proclamations about being an expert in something are very easy to make in the age of social media. I offer a definition of expertise in the production of creative work which I call aesthetic expertise, which is “a knowledge of aesthetic codes and classifications, and skill in mastering the tools and techniques to produce a work of aesthetic value that is recognized and legitimated as such” (Patel, 2020, p. 2). This is distinct from aesthetic expertise in the judgement or appraisal of art work; instead, I focus on production and the expertise of creators. My conceptualisation of aesthetic expertise is informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art (1996), within which Bourdieu discusses how art, and the artist, is socially constructed. Bourdieu claims that artists make a name for themselves by processes of recognition and consecration, carried out by those in power in the art world. My framework acknowledges that expertise is socially constructed because it entails not only individual skill and mastery but also recognition of that skill and mastery. However, I suggest that the ability to develop aesthetic expertise is dependent on access to capital resources, particularly economic (for materials, equipment and space), social (networks) and cultural (education, training and familiarity with conventions) (Patel, 2020). Importantly, to develop expertise, time is also needed (see Banks, 2019, on time and precarity in cultural work). All these resources are distributed unevenly and disproportionately to privileged groups. While in my previous work I discuss these issues in the context of art, they can also apply to craft. The idea of having the time and access to resources to develop expertise is a counter to Richard Sennett’s claim in The Craftsman that “nearly anyone can become a good craftsman” because abilities derive from play, which everyone does at a young age (Sennett, 2010, p. 268). Sennett discusses how the craftsman becomes an expert over time, as a result of “obsession” and a drive for excellence. This is a masculine and relatively privileged view of craft expertise which, as Angela McRobbie points out, does not consider the labour of women in craft. She suggests that Sennett’s idea

74 Making changes in craft of craftsmanship does not apply to people (mostly women) who are making work to sell on Etsy while juggling other responsibilities (McRobbie, 2016). This helps explain why, as discussed in Chapter 1, men tend to be the highest earners in professional craft, despite making up a smaller proportion of the workforce (see Spilsbury, 2018; also Luckman et al., 2019). This wider context around the distribution of resources is an important one which I will return to later in this chapter, but for now I want to unpick the usefulness of expertise for considering the craft object and its qualities. If expertise is something developed over time, involving practice and mastery, that mastery is often manifest in the craft object produced. Accounts of expertise and mastery tend to centre on individual endeavour, but it is important to acknowledge that work can be collectively produced, as with First Nations artists and the Dreaming, despite historical narratives focusing on individuals. The process of developing expertise is also social, often involving learning and connection with others (Mamidipudi, 2019). This is evident in the socially engaged craft organisations featured in this book, almost all of which involve group sessions and collaborative making. While in many cases people will focus on their individual work, I observed in sessions at CraftA and Flourish how participants would learn from each other, especially where English was not their first language. Thus, in the context of craft, the development of expertise can be uneven and contingent, depending on access to resources and the social context within which the maker operates. However, in many cases, particularly among diasporic communities, craft techniques and skills can be passed down and embedded in daily life (Tulloch, 2022), and there is a risk that such techniques could be lost over generations (Sinclair, 2015). Such skills and techniques require a great degree of precision and concentration, and it may take weeks, months or even years to produce something, as making is weaved in with the rhythms of daily life. This type of craft practice tends to be undervalued in the wider ecology, but the expertise becomes evident in the qualities of the object. I suggest that the craft expertise as manifest in the craft object should inform any judgements of value. Such an approach would help not only appreciate the effort and skill of the creator but also evaluate the qualities of the object produced. It would help foster “objective respect” (Banks, 2017) – in other words, “to respect cultural objects and practices, by evaluating them in terms of their own objective qualities, as well as their subjective apprehension and value” (p. 146), bringing focus to the cultural object. This line of thought has origins in anthropology, specifically in materiality – “a theory of the quality of objectness” (Myers, 2005, p. 88). Daniel Miller says that in research, we need to show “how the things that people make, make people” (Miller, 2005, p. 38). This is demonstrated in Fred Myers’ work on Aboriginal art and craft. Myers’ discussion of regimes of value and materiality is pertinent here. He describes three cases of scandal or forgery within the Aboriginal art market, which illustrate “what happens when contact occurs between what I call a

Making changes in craft 75 revelatory regime of value characteristic of indigenous Australians and the ‘Western art-culture system’” (Myers, 2005, p. 89). The issues I discussed in the previous chapter on the assimilation of Aboriginal art and craft into the fine art market, particularly how money for the art is distributed among communities, issues with labour and the decontextualisation of the work, demonstrate the importance of recognising the specific material context within which craft objects are produced and recognised. The long process of Aboriginal art being recognised as fine art – recognised as “legitimate” in the Western context (Fisher, 2016) – has jarred with the original purpose and meaning of the work. Because of this, Aboriginal fine art should be better understood as the work of the producers and their social and historical contexts, rather than the judgement of the Western critics who valorised it. Myers’ work on the regime of value in Aboriginal art and its relationship with the Western art culture system demonstrates how processes of evaluation and judgement also uphold colonial hierarchies of value in the craft and art world. According to Georgina Born (2010), accounts of the cultural object and the role of traditions are largely absent from studies of cultural production. This is important for thinking through how craft produced by minoritised groups can gain “objective respect”. Born offers a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production that moves beyond strategising between actors and structures imposed on groups, to emphasising agency, the influence of aesthetic traditions on artists and their role in creating or transforming them. Born, drawing on work on materiality by Miller and Myers, suggests that analyses of cultural objects and material properties, as well as their mediation, circulation and historical context, are crucial for destabilising existing judgement processes and thus hierarchies of value. She says that “the goal is to redirect the field of criticism itself, . . . towards a critical field that is focally concerned with the social and material, the temporal and ontological, as these mediate and imbue the aesthetic” (Born, 2010, p. 198). Born outlines the methodological, critical and policy implications of considering the cultural object; how it is created and how it is mediated and received. This aligns with my conception of craft expertise and its potential to address hierarchies in craft, by encouraging an appreciation of process and qualities of the object produced. It connects to my earlier discussion in Chapter 2 on how judgements of value are linked to inequality in craft. This point is also best summarised by one of the craft practitioners in my UK research, Olivia, who is a craft artist of West African heritage based in London. She said: When I’m in spaces like that [professional studios and craft fairs], I do always look at the work first. Obviously I notice if there are no ethnic minorities there but I always look at the work first because I think that’s what, if anything, it should be judged on. That’s what I want to be judged on, my work. I don’t want to be judged as a person.

76 Making changes in craft I acknowledge that my definition of aesthetic expertise mentions “aesthetic value” that is “recognised”, and what is considered to be of aesthetic value is highly subjective and tends to be rooted in colonial and Eurocentric criteria. Furthermore, these processes tend to be embedded within racialised capitalist systems, as I discussed in Chapter 2. As Nancy Fraser highlights, capitalist systems have a complex and “highly mediated relation to institutionalised patterns of cultural value” (Fraser, 1999, p. 42). Fraser acknowledges that capitalist institutions “are neither wholly constrained by, nor fully in control of, value patterns” (ibid.). Following Fraser, is there space for some transformation or resistance from within the mainstream craft sector? Potentially, but the way in which craft objects are valued and evaluated needs to be addressed, incorporating “interpretive and value communities” as described by Born (2010, p. 199). Janet Wolff’s concept of community evaluation can help us think through how processes of evaluation could be more inclusive and transparent, and decentre Western, Eurocentric notions of value in cultural production. Change who judges and how: community evaluation Janet Wolff’s work is situated within the sociology of art, and her most influential work has focused on the social production of art (1981) and feminist aesthetics and aesthetic judgement (2006). As with discussions around expertise, capitalist notions of art making tend to centre on the idea of the individual “genius”, a notion which originates from the Renaissance. Sociologists such as Bourdieu (1996), Becker (2008) and Wolff (1981) dispelled that myth, demonstrating how art is socially produced. Art is a product of social structures and individual practices and is also dependent on the artist’s circumstances and upbringing. These authors also noted how the judgement and valuation of art are socially constituted. Wolff focused on the judgement of art, considering the relationship between beauty and feminist aesthetics. She argued that aesthetic judgements do not derive from any certainty or universal criteria, and because of that, such criteria can seemingly be negotiated. Wolff also highlights how theories of postcolonialism, race and gender have “exposed the myth of objectivity in Western art history” (2006, p. 148). She acknowledges that there are both aesthetic and “extra-aesthetic” value judgements at play which exclude women, people of colour and non-Western artists from the canon. Wolff developed an approach that recognises aesthetic criteria as “grounded in community”, where the criteria for the judgement of works of art are a result of reflexive discussion within “communities of interpretation” (2006, p. 152) located within a specific culture and its values, to avoid universalising judgements about the value of cultural objects. When thinking about how craft objects created by the women in this research are judged and valued, Wolff’s work indicates that one possible way to address this is through value judgements taking place reflexively within

Making changes in craft 77 communities, rather than against established hierarchical standards. Wolff uses the example of the artist Kathleen McEnery, whose work she rediscovered and curated for an exhibition. Wolff wondered on what grounds she thought McEnery’s work was “any good” (2006, p. 145) because McEnery was marginalised once she moved away from New York, and her work seemingly became “more provincial” and increasingly associated with amateurism. The social and historical context of McEnery’s marginalisation, for Wolff, allows her then to address the question of whether her work was “any good”. Wolff found that McEnery’s “credentials, such as high-profile exhibitions she was previously involved in, and Wolff’s own judgement of the work based on the criteria she learned from discourses on aesthetics such as “questions of form, colour and composition” assisted her judgement. The context of the marginalisation of the artist revealed gendered hierarchies at play and, to quote Woolf, the “complex intersection of the aesthetic and the political” (2006, p. 145). Wolff shows that aesthetic judgements need to be fully contextualised and ideally “as the reasoned outcome of dialogue and communication on the basis of community” (ibid.). If we return to the case of the First Nations and Aboriginal artists and craftspeople in the previous chapter, we can see how work can easily be decontextualised and judged against the criteria of the fine art world, which is a different regime of value to the Aboriginal art community. Although Aboriginal art has transitioned to the Western art-culture system (Myers, 2005), the rewards have been distributed unevenly, and the risk is that the work is decontextualised in fine art settings such as galleries. Negotiations of value were not always carried out with the community the work derived from and in the context within which they originated, which is why there were so many tensions when it came to issues of payment (Myers, 2002). More democratic and community-based forms of judgement of craft expertise are required, in order to move past or deconstruct the existing hierarchies. It is such hierarchies that feed into judgements of value in the UK context and that disproportionately affect makers from racially minoritised groups, as demonstrated in Chapter 2. Community evaluation is a way forward in craft, but for it to work, it requires the democratised and equitable involvement of people from across the ecology of craft. To this end, there needs to be a different way of doing things.

Change the approach: care in craft Ideas of care in relation to creative work have become prominent in scholarship on the creative industries in recent years, as part of the “cultural labour turn” (Hesmondhalgh, 2018) in research examining the conditions of creative work. Ideas and concepts of care have emerged in response to the neoliberalisation and precariousness of creative work (Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Dent et al., 2023; McRobbie, 2016). This work suggests that care can be harnessed to facilitate a more collective way of working and solidarity, in the context

78 Making changes in craft of the reduction of welfare support for creative workers (de Peuter & Cohen, 2015). The work of Joan Tronto (1993, 2013) has been a key reference point for writing on care in the context of creative work (see Alacovska, 2020; Belfiore, 2022) because of her focus on an ethics of care as a basis for political transformation. For Tronto, “caring seems to involve taking the concerns and the needs of the other as the basis for action” (1993, p. 105). Tronto identifies four steps in the process of care: attentiveness – caring about, responsibility – caring for, competence – care giving, and responsiveness – care receiving (Tronto, 2013, pp. 34–35). This has recently been used as an interpretive framework for studies of care in the creative industries. For example, Dent et al. (2023) analysed the caring practices of intermediary organisations in the creative industries during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. They identified the additional care work carried out by intermediary organisations when individual cultural workers were left without a safety net. Their research demonstrates the range of organisations involved in care work in the creative industries, often spanning across different sectors. It is much like the craft social enterprises featured in this book, which relied on the wider ecology of organisations across health- and social care sectors to access funding and deliver craft workshops. Tronto’s framework is a useful basis for discussion on what a caring ethos in craft looks like and where it can be evidenced. Craft has long been associated with ideas of care – caring for others through making things that they need, care for objects, repairing and restoring them, and self-care through mindful practice and the immersion of careful attention. Therefore, it was of little surprise that craft surged in popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. Certain sections of society were able to learn new craft skills or revisit a practice. Care was a prominent sentiment during the onset of the pandemic – self-care, caring for others and clapping for carers in the UK (Wood & Skeggs, 2020). Wood and Skeggs identified the ways in which ideas of care were co-opted and exploited for political and corporate gain. The Care Collective outline these cautionary tales in their Care Manifesto (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). They claimed that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, “carelessness reigns”, citing the inadequate responses to the pandemic particularly in the UK, the USA and Brazil. They note: The crisis of care has become particularly acute over the last forty years, as governments accepted neoliberal capitalism’s near-ubiquitous positioning of profit-making as the organising principle of life. It has meant systematically prioritising the interests and flows of financial capital, while ruthlessly dismantling welfare states and democratic processes and institutions. (Chatzidakis et al., 2020, p. 9) This is the context within which socially engaged craft became a key focus of this research because of the roles that the case study organisations played within their communities during the pandemic. The socially engaged craft

Making changes in craft 79 organisations featured in this book all demonstrate an ethos of care at their core and a great deal of flexibility and resistance to adjust to the challenges of the COVID-19 lockdowns. In the UK, CraftA and Path Carvers switched quickly to online provision of craft classes and attracted new participants from around the world. The Flourish Jewellery Project secured funding to make their workshops COVID-safe, to ensure they could welcome back participants in a safe manner when lockdowns were lifted. In Australia, the Social Studio pivoted to mask manufacturing early on, which played a key role in their expansion. The JamFactory began offering craft classes to the community when they were able to reopen. This flexibility was crucial and helped these organisations adjust to the challenges of the pandemic and remain in operation. While the Australian organisations received government subsidy and maintained manufacturing streams to keep going, the UK enterprises were more reliant on funding, which often came from sources related to health and well-being, rather than the creative or arts funding provision. Driving all the organisations forward is the caring ethos of the organisers, putting their practitioners and participants at the forefront of their thinking, for example, the Social Studio creating prayer spaces for employees and workshop participants and being flexible around religious holidays and cultural observances. Flourish and Path Carvers subsidised costs for participants whenever they could, lowering the barriers to participation, such as childcare and travel costs. The socially engaged case studies in this book provide examples of carecentred approaches to creative work. There has been increased discussion about care and socially engaged practice in creative work (Alacovska, 2020; Alacovska & Bissonnette, 2021; Langevang et al., 2022; Serafini & Novosel, 2021). For example, Ana Alacovska (2020) highlights the socially engaged practice that is commonplace in the cultural sector, finding what underpinned the experiences of creative workers in Southeastern Europe in a post-socialist context was the “attention to and orientation towards others in the community, involving care, compassion and mutual aid” (p. 734). Like the case studies in this book, Alacovska revealed how the creative workers cared for the communities they worked with and were “committed to carving out hopeful spaces of social justice, human well-being, healing and emancipation” (p. 738). However, Alacovska also notes how working with communities and socially engaged practice meant that some workers “found it difficult to disengage from the caring relationships and practise self-care. Self-care, however, does not refer to self-indulgence or the mindless positivity of selfhelp but to occupational self-preservation and professional integrity in the face of suffering” (p. 739). Therefore, socially engaged practice does involve a level of personal and emotional investment, which, as mentioned earlier in this book, add up to the “hidden costs” of socially engaged creative practice (Belfiore, 2022). Some of the people involved in the case study organisations in this book have backgrounds in community work and social work. This is essential to

80 Making changes in craft ensure a safe environment for participants, so that they are cared for and also that the workers have the tools to deal with complex situations. Alacovska’s research revealed how some creative workers also “dabbled as social workers” without any training. This can do more harm than good to all parties involved (Belfiore, 2022). The complex demands of socially engaged craft practice were in some evidence in the interviews I carried out with those running craft social enterprises. For example, the two people who run Path Carvers both found it difficult at times to cope with the financial uncertainty caused by the pandemic, and the physical and mental health challenges they faced. They also talked about the specific challenges makers can face, especially during a lockdown: It is often quite a lonely thing, craft. Like we are saying, most craftspeople do work on their own, and they are often in more remote locations. They are not always surrounded by other creatives. And it is a fairly specific set of problems that come with being a craftsperson that are not necessarily going to be understood by the average person. It was their own struggles during the lockdown that led to Path Carvers establishing a helpline for makers to talk about their mental health. It is not necessarily a way for them to make income; instead, they identified a need in their community and worked to put something in place to help, a clear example of a caring practice. In another case study, those who run the Flourish Jewellery Project have qualifications in community development, as well as teaching jewellery making skills. They also had to provide pastoral support to their participants, many of whom had gone through very traumatic events. This is on top of ongoing financial uncertainty and the constant cycle of applying for project funding, which only adds to the myriad of challenges socially engaged creative workers face (Belfiore, 2022). Cultural policy needs to do more to support socially engaged creative work and pay due attention to its potential hidden costs for practitioners. The work that socially engaged craft organisations do is crucial in terms of their place in the wider craft ecology and for fostering caring and more inclusive spaces for people from minoritised groups to participate in craft and develop their skills and confidence. The link between caring practices and ideas of equity and inclusion in creative work has been explored through the concept of cultural democracy (Gross & Wilson, 2020), underpinned by the Capabilities Approach (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 1999). Cultural democracy is commonly understood as “the expansion or redistribution of the means of cultural production” (Gross & Wilson, 2020, p. 331). It is a concept used to frame the idea of culture as an ecology, whereby everyone should have access to culture. Gross and Wilson’s approach to cultural democracy and care is characterised by the Capabilities Approach, attributed to theorist Amartya Sen

Making changes in craft 81 (1999). Sen claimed that expansion of human capabilities “to lead the kind of lives they value – and have reason to value” (p. 18) is key to freedom within societies, which Sen believes is key to economic development. For example, poverty can be seen as “a deprivation of basic capabilities, rather than merely as low income” (p. 20), and evaluation of societies should pay attention to the extent to which individuals can access and expand their capabilities. Martha Nussbaum (2011) builds on Sen’s formulation by defining ten “Central Capabilities” that she sees as crucial for well-being and social justice. These include life (living a life of normal human length); bodily health, bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play and control over one’s political and material environment (pp. 34–35). Nussbaum says that this list is not definitive but suggests that “The basic claim of my account of social justice is this: respect for human dignity requires that citizens be placed above an ample (specified) threshold of capability, in all ten of those areas” (p. 36). Hesmondhalgh (2017) argues that in relation to cultural experiences (which fall under “senses, imagination and thought”), Nussbaum’s “approach to cultural flourishing is potentially rather cognitivist and intellectualist, often stressing ‘high cultural’, contemplative artistic experiences” (p. 214). Hesmondhalgh suggests that Nussbaum’s approach needs to be extended to account for a wider range of cultural activities and requires consideration of how certain activities can enhance people’s flourishing and how such practices are embedded in everyday life, drawing on media and cultural studies traditions. In the context of media production, Saha (2018) notes that the concept of cultural democracy as emphasised in cultural policy (e.g. through “diversity schemes”) requires minority practitioners to negotiate white, Western notions of taste and quality (p. 105). It is indeed important to note here that much of the academic discussion on cultural democracy, capabilities and care does not explicitly consider the experiences of racialised minorities. The capabilities approach “offers ideas with which to understand the role of multiple (tangible and intangible) resources in enabling human freedom and flourishing – including the freedom to aspire” (Gross, 2021, p. 10). For minoritised groups, an example of an intangible resource could be a sense of safety in a space, where they feel included and seen, as demonstrated in the case study of the Social Studio, for example. In terms of tangible resources, we can go back to my earlier discussion on expertise, where arguably having the time, space and resources to develop expertise in an area, or say craft, is an example of where humans can engage and develop their “senses, imagination and thought” and potentially flourish. Even having the opportunity to develop skills and expertise in anything should be a key part of human capability. These concepts of capabilities and flourishing are elements of what real change in craft could potentially look like – and this involves the idea of parity of participation.

82 Making changes in craft Change the system: parity of participation and contributive justice Scholars such as David Hesmondhalgh (2017) have built on the capabilities approach to consider the creative and media industry and the function of media and culture under capitalism, bringing in political economy perspectives. Given my earlier discussion in Chapter 2 on racialised capitalism (Skeggs, 2019; Virdee, 2019), Hesmondhalgh’s work and the concepts he draws on are important for considering the wider system within which inequalities in craft originate and are reproduced, and how they could be addressed. Hesmondhalgh (2017) discussed solid normative foundations for critique of the media and cultural industries under capitalism, drawing on moral economy and its two related concepts – well-being understood as flourishing and the capabilities approach. For me, all of these concepts are linked to and inform the idea of parity of participation, as I will explain later. Andrew Sayer (2011) argued that the concept of well-being as flourishing can help explain and evaluate human social life and our relation to the world from a pluralist objective point of view, that is, considering people’s material conditions, their social relations and sense of well-being. For Sayer, a sense of well-being relates to material conditions such as one’s job, recreational activities and political interests, for example, and how others are treating us. Wellbeing and ill-being are states of being that relate to people’s daily concerns and are shaped by moral and ethical norms that are institutionalised by social structures. These moral and ethical norms – that is, that abuse is harmful, and homelessness is bad – are constitutive of a sense of well-being or ill-being. Inequalities – whether they be racial, gender, class or intersectional, also affect people’s sense of well-being and how people value themselves in relation to others (hooks, 2000; Skeggs, 2011). When we talk to creative workers about their experiences and they give voice to experiences of racism and other forms of discrimination, as the makers featured in Chapter 2 have, it is important as researchers to take their feelings and insights seriously as experiences of harm and suffering, which affect their well-being and sense of flourishing, (Sayer, 2011; Banks, 2017). Flourishing is understood here as “being able to expand or develop one’s human faculties and capacities, which derive from being able to live well and work in environments that are safe, supportive and sustaining” (Banks, 2017, p. 156), a definition that is pertinent to this book’s themes around inequalities and development of expertise in craft. Therefore, to address wider questions around inequalities in craft and the creative sector, the fundamental idea of well-being as flourishing and the related concept of capabilities provide a normative basis from which to evaluate what positive change looks and feels like. Hesmondhalgh (2017) explains how well-being, understood as flourishing, can help provide a critique of media and culture under capitalism, particularly capitalism’s failure to promote well-being, flourishing and the expansion of capabilities in favour of narrow conceptions

Making changes in craft 83 of economic growth, exploitation and exacerbation of inequalities (Oakley & Ward, 2018). Given that a person’s sense of well-being as flourishing is linked to their personal and material circumstances, and social relations and how people treat them, the concept of recognition is important here, especially as we have been discussing questions of inequality and value. My conception of expertise in craft involves not only individual development of skills and mastery but also recognition of that as expertise – that the person who made it can be considered an expert and that the object they produce is the work of an expert. Questions of value, personhood and social justice are linked to the politics of recognition and redistribution, an approach developed by Nancy Fraser (2013). Fraser’s work on the feminist politics of recognition is useful for conceptualising ideas of justice in what she terms late-capitalist and neoliberal society. Fraser’s approach is in response to shifts in political theory and feminism which, during the turn of the 21st century, became concerned with a politics of recognition and identity politics, and turned away from promoting economic equality for women and racially minoritised groups. Fraser claimed that the turn to a politics of recognition “Dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social egalitarianism” (Fraser, 2013, p. 10). Fraser contends that any perspectives which centre on recognition alone lack credibility, so she proposed that a politics of recognition be accompanied by a politics of distribution. The politics of both are linked to value – who or what is valued in society, and it parallels with my earlier discussion on the gendered and racialised politics of expertise. As Fraser notes, “a major feature of gender injustice is androcentrism: an institutionalized pattern of cultural value that privileges traits associated with masculinity, while devaluing everything coded as ‘feminine,’ paradigmatically – but not only – women” (p. 176). It resonates with ideas of certain forms of craft, particularly textile craft, as “women’s work” which is historically devalued (Bhachu, 2005; Parker, 2010). Craftswomen not being associated with the figure of the expert or master craftsman is tied to the politics of recognition as outlined by Fraser. Intertwined with this are the politics of distribution, which relate to unequal pay for women, which is rooted in the economic structures of society. Structures of racialised capitalism (Virdee, 2019) mean that maldistribution is not restricted to gender but intersects with race and class too. To theorise maldistribution and malrecognition, Fraser proposes a normative conception of justice which encompasses both economic and cultural justice – parity of participation. According to the principle of parity of participation, “justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers” (p. 178). For parity of participation to be possible, two conditions must be met. First, the distribution of material resources needs to ensure participants’ independence and “voice”.

84 Making changes in craft Second, “It requires that institutionalized patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem” (ibid.). Fraser thus conceptualises misrecognition as a form of injustice, of social subordination which prevents participation as a peer in social life. Fraser’s focus on justice is important here, as it requires an examination of structural hierarchies of cultural value which perpetuate inequality and injustice. As I have shown in this book, this is evident particularly in professional craft at all levels – at a structural level in the origins of professionalised craft through guilds, at an institutional level in terms of pervasive inequalities and the whiteness of craft organisations and at an interpersonal level in form of racism and microaggressions experienced by makers. The applicability of Fraser’s work to issues of injustice and inequality in cultural work is explained in Mark Banks’ Creative Justice (2017). Banks offers a potential framework for conceptualising what creative justice might look like, drawing on Nancy Fraser’s work on parity of participation. Banks suggests three concepts that might advance the cause of creative justice – objective respect, parity of participation and reduction of harms. Banks utilises Sayer’s pluralist-objective approach to well-being, which focuses on the possibility of specifying the normative conditions under which people might be better or worse off, for example, being treated with respect by others, having dignity and having access to the material resources and conditions to flourish and expand one’s capabilities. While these ideas provide a useful normative and theoretical basis for a conception of creative justice, how does it translate practically? Banks has since built on these ideas to consider distributive and contributive justice in cultural work (Banks, 2023). Banks argues that to effect social justice in cultural work, investment or improvement must be made in systems of distribution. The fact that inequalities persist in cultural work, despite so many “diversity” schemes (see Nwonka, 2015; Nwonka & Malik, 2018; Saha & Lente, 2022), suggests that there are issues with how resources are distributed. Banks identifies three problems – of scarcity, discrimination and competition (Banks, 2023, pp. 2–3). All three of these problems persist – Banks suggests that the scarcity of opportunities in cultural organisations is manufactured and weighted towards the socially privileged. As I have shown throughout this book, discrimination is commonplace in craft and creative work. And in terms of competition – judgements on expertise are made often through the lens of race, gender and class. As Banks notes, “An identified ‘lack’ of talent is an irresistible alibi for the exercise of a social discrimination that prevents equality occurring” (p. 4). Building on the idea of creative justice, Banks suggests that contributive and distributive justice is required, linked to ideas of well-being and flourishing: “distributive justice emphasises what we might receive or get from society, contributive justice emphasises what opportunity we might have to give to society, in pursuit of different personal or social priorities or goals” (p. 5). Banks offers some tangible ways in which ideas of redistribution, recognition

Making changes in craft 85 and creative justice could be realised, which overlap with the ideas of care in creative work mentioned earlier in this book, particularly around more collaborative and co-operative ways of working. Some of these practices are evidenced in the socially engaged craft case studies, where craft skills and opportunities are opened to more people, and the role that craft can play in a sense of well-being and belonging. However, there are issues in terms of the lack of financial support for these organisations. Existing systems of distribution mean that working conditions for people who run socially engaged craft organisations are very difficult, which could further disadvantage them. The fact that this work exists in a separate sphere from commercial or “professional” craft work preserves existing hierarchies. Banks suggests that public cultural work should be subject to a “greater social sharing” that disregards existing criteria of selection. Instead, access to cultural contribution should be free and accessible for all, removing the damaging effects of competition (Banks, 2023, p. 10). Such an idea undoubtedly would have implications for professional craft, which is already struggling after funding cuts in the UK and particularly in Australia (Luckman & Tower, 2023). At the same time, the system as it is does not work – it is elitist, unequal and harmful for people from minoritised groups. A flattening of the hierarchy, along the lines of what Banks has described, would need to take place across the entire craft ecology and beyond for the potential negative consequences on aspects of the craft sector to be allayed. In this chapter, I have discussed a potential two-part theoretical framework spanning the micro, meso and macro levels of craft production. It brings together the ideas of expertise and the cultural object, with concepts of community evaluation, care and parity of participation, to illustrate what social justice and equity in craft might look like. The work on capabilities, wellbeing as flourishing and parity of participation provides a normative foundation for my framework which breaks down the politics of expertise in craft, whereby anyone should be able to develop their skills and expertise in craft, contributing to a sense of well-being as flourishing. How craft practice is judged needs to be opened to a community and done collectively and contextualised. The idea of community evaluation runs counter to Banks’ idea of judgement mechanisms being removed altogether to eliminate competition, but community evaluation potentially democratises and flattens a mechanism of craft (and creative work in general) which will be very difficult to remove completely. Craft is associated with mastery, quality and prestige, and built into it are hierarchies. In the UK, a tangible example is how the British Royal Family applies a royal emblem to products they believe to be of expert British craftsmanship and quality. The issues here are much wider than craft – they are ingrained into Western capitalist society. So, what role can craft realistically play in imagining more inclusive and equitable creative industries? In the next chapter, I will attempt to outline some ways in which this could be done and offer suggestions for further research and action.

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5

Conclusion

Ever since the development of specific “creative industries” policies during the 1990s, craft’s status as a creative industry has been discussed at length. Before then, there was continuous debate about craft’s status as an art form and the relationship between craft and fine art. Attempts to elevate craft to a status of fine art is evident in the establishment of bodies such as the Crafts Council during the 20th century. In the contemporary context, these debates remain, and the need to advocate for craft as a key part of the creative economy is more important than ever, given the ongoing funding cuts to the sector (Luckman & Tower, 2023). Despite the notable “turn to the handmade” in recent years, demonstrated in the continuing popularity of sites such as Etsy and the explosion of craft-related television shows, craft as a creative industry is under threat. Craft’s associations with amateurism and feminised domestic labour contribute to this tenuous status and mean that craft in all its diversity is undervalued and under-represented in contemporary cultural policy. The idea that “anyone” can participate in craft is both a blessing and a curse. It is likely the reason why craft continues to grow in popularity, where the “aura of the analogue” (Luckman, 2015) becomes more appealing as the pace of work and life continues to speed up. However, it also helps funding bodies and policymakers justify the winding back of support. If the barriers to access are so low and seemingly anyone can participate in craft and potentially make a living from it through micro-enterprise, then the sector seemingly does not need support. This is far from the case. In this context, much research on craft attempts to advocate for its continued relevance to the economy and society. However, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the experiences of minoritised groups in contemporary craft. This book contributes to addressing this gap and also offers some theoretical and practical ideas for moving beyond highlighting that inequalities exist, towards action. My case studies on craft social enterprise in the UK and Australia are an attempt to do this. The case studies not only highlight where potentially inclusive practice is taking place but also demonstrate the challenges experienced in the wider craft ecology and socially engaged craft, an area overlooked in creative industries and cultural policy discourse. In this DOI: 10.4324/9781003301714-5

90 Conclusion concluding chapter, I provide a brief summary of the contributions of the book and potential areas for further research and action.

Craft as a creative industry In the first chapter of the book, I discussed the context for craft as a creative industry, particularly in the UK and Australia, the two countries of focus for the book. The UK and Australia were chosen as the countries because of the similarities in the profile of professional craft, in that it is dominated by white, middle-class people, which affects the aesthetics of what is being made and the profile of the customer who buys the craft (Luckman & Andrew, 2020; Spilsbury, 2018). The two countries have been central to the proliferation of creative industries discourse and policy around the world, with the first such policy originating from Australia’s Creative Nation report, which informed the UK’s Creative Industries Mapping Document in 1999. Within both countries, craft has a precarious status as a creative industry, whereby in the UK the Crafts Council had to lobby to keep craft as a creative industry category in 2013, and in Australia craft has received relatively little consideration in cultural policy – instead, the alignment with business and manufacturing is crucial to the survival of the sector. Finally, both countries have rich and diverse craft traditions and cultures, particularly among the UK’s South Asian, Caribbean and African diasporic communities, and Australia’s First Nations craft heritage. These traditions and aesthetics are not visible enough in professional craft, and the experiences and voices of these makers are not present enough in the sector or in academic research. In Chapters 2 and 3, I provide some context for why inequalities and hierarchies persist in contemporary craft. First in Chapter 2 in the UK context, I discuss the histories of craft guilds, which actively excluded women and minority groups. As the number of guilds declined due to the growth of industrialisation, the British Arts and Crafts movement emerged in response, to bring about a craft revival during the late 19th century. While the movement was based on socialist principles, it too was exclusionary despite the influential role of women such as May Morris, the daughter of William Morris, in the success of the movement. As the movement waned and craft lost popularity at the beginning of the 20th century, the Commonwealth Institute was established, which was an attempt by the UK to portray its “inclusive” idea of the “commonwealth”, presenting craft and artefacts from around the Commonwealth, alongside brief descriptions or histories of each country. Presenting the work in this way arguably “museumised” it, taking it out of context and ultimately devaluing it (Fisher, 2016). The stories of guilds, the Arts and Crafts movement and the Commonwealth Institute illustrate why professional craft in the UK has hierarchies and whiteness built into its structure. The attempts to elevate its status to fine art meant that craft by culturally diverse groups tended to be separated off (or put

Conclusion 91 in a “museum” setting); thus, racialised hierarchies are ingrained into craft. How judgements of craft value are made and how makers from culturally diverse groups are judged are shaped by racialised hierarchies. Satnam Virdee’s use of the concept of racialised capitalism (2019) is useful for explaining this in terms of craft as a creative industry, whereby the industry is undergirded by racialised capitalism, reproducing inequalities. This is manifest in the lived experiences of the makers I interviewed in UK professional craft, all of whom identified as women from racially minoritised groups. They recalled experiences of racism and microaggressions throughout their craft careers, in a variety of spaces including fairs and studios. Their experiences are a result of the hierarchical and elitist nature of craft in the UK, as well as the wider context of the UK’s colonial history and relationship with racism (Gilroy, 2002; Solomos, 2022) which shapes and continues to shape the experiences of minoritised groups in craft. The case studies of craft social enterprises in the UK highlight some of the ways in which craft organisations work with minoritised groups and create a sense of inclusion and belonging. This was particularly evident in how the organisations adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued to serve their communities. By lowering barriers to access such as subsidising travel and childcare costs, or collaborating with specific charities and organisations to ensure participants feel safe, the enterprises demonstrated an ethos of social justice and care which ensured they could engage people through craft. The case studies also highlight the specific challenges the organisations face within the UK cultural policy context, which currently does not adequately support creative social enterprises (Belfiore, 2022). The case studies reveal many of the “hidden costs” of creative social enterprise, particularly the mental toll and emotional labour of being both a craft practitioner and working with minoritised and sometimes vulnerable groups. The hidden costs of social enterprise are argued to be a “moral failure” of cultural policy (Belfiore, 2022). The social enterprises in the UK have a precarious existence, relying on short-term funding for specific projects, which can help certain targeted communities, but are not sustainable in the long-term. Craft social enterprises are crucial to the wider craft ecology and instructive in terms of what can practically be done to foster greater inclusion in craft. This was evident in the case of Australian craft too. Research on professional craft in Australia has highlighted its whiteness and homogeneity (Luckman & Andrew, 2020). In Chapter 3, I discuss the Australian context of craft through a focus on First Nations and indigenous craft, and the role of indigenous art centres in the cultural sector. During my short stay in Australia, I did not get a chance to speak to any First Nations craftspeople, but I learned a lot about the context by visiting centres such as the Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Centre in Adelaide. My initial plan was to focus on socially engaged craft enterprises in Australia, as a point of comparison with the UK. However, on visiting, it was stark how absent

92 Conclusion First Nations craft was from mainstream and commercial craft spaces, particularly the fairs. The whiteness of professional craft was visible and tangible in both Adelaide and Melbourne, and further research should focus on the lived experience of this, for First Nations and racially minoritised makers in Australian professional craft. For this book, I felt it was important to foreground the context of First Nations art and craft, within the context of creative industries and cultural policy in Australia. This is because of how central it has been in recent years to the creative economy and cultural policy, with the transition of First Nations art and craft into the fine art market, enabling artists to make a living. The transition also raises concerns about the labour of the work and the ancestral work being taken out of context into different regimes of value (Myers, 2002). Even so, while First Nations craft and art has been assimilated into the “high” or “fine” art market, it appears not to have permeated the wider craft and creative industries in Australia. Some of the reasons for this relate to cultural policy and the development of the creative industries in Australia. The reduction in support for craft in the sector means that there is more emphasis on enterprise and developing multiple income streams, which the two case study organisations, JamFactory and the Social Studio, did well. Like the UK case studies, the Social Studio works to reduce or remove barriers to access for people from minoritised groups interested in craft. The JamFactory has a slightly different approach, in that it also caters to the fine art market but works with a caring, social justice ethos. I suggest that the case study organisations from both the UK and Australia are instructive for imagining a more inclusive craft sector.

Making changes in craft My two-part framework lays out the conceptual and practical ways in which inequalities could be addressed in craft. It covers the micro, meso and macro levels of craft production, starting with craft objects themselves, the people who make them and then processes of judgement, before considering broader issues around how people treat each other in craft and how organisations operate, before finally discussing the macro-level reforms that need to take place around how culture is produced within the wider creative industries and how the many and varied rewards of that are distributed. First at the micro level, I discussed changing what is judged and how in craft, in response to my evidence throughout the book on how craft produced by minoritised groups is misjudged and undervalued. This was in evidence in makers from diasporic communities in the UK and also in my discussion of how First Nations art and craft transitioned into the fine art market, and the many issues that presented. I suggest that one of the ways in which these issues could start to be addressed is by paying closer attention to the craft object itself and its qualities, and the process of making that produced the object. This process can be conceptualised as craft expertise. I understand that

Conclusion 93 as “a knowledge of aesthetic codes and classifications, and skill in mastering the tools and techniques to produce a work of aesthetic value that is recognized and legitimated as such” (Patel, 2020, p. 2). This is distinct from aesthetic expertise in the judgement or appraisal of art work; instead, I focus on production and the expertise of creators. If expertise is something developed over time, involving practice and mastery, that mastery should be manifest in the craft object produced. There are issues with this, in that the time and resources required to reach the level of craft mastery are not available to everyone. However, if we only focus on objects themselves, we can appreciate the level of craft skill and expertise that has gone into it, regardless of who created it, where or how long it took, fostering “objective respect” (Banks) and returning focus to the cultural object (Born, 2010). This is particularly applicable to craft skills and techniques that are not widespread within the Westernised and Eurocentric mainstream craft sector but are practised within communities and families (Tulloch, 2022) and are a key part of cultural heritage and tradition (Mamidipudi, 2019). The link between the object, craft expertise and wider reception also needs consideration, which is why I suggest “changing who judges and how”. For this, I draw on the work of Janet Wolff (2006) to discuss how judgements of expertise and cultural value in craft objects should be made reflexively within communities, rather than by a relatively small group of gatekeepers. Wolff shows that aesthetic judgements need to be fully contextualised, and ideally “as the reasoned outcome of dialogue and communication on the basis of community” (2006, p. 145). For this to happen, wider changes need to be made in terms of the system and structure of craft, which is undergirded by neoliberal, racialised capitalism, preserving hierarchies and reproducing inequalities. Recent research on care in creative work in response to these conditions not only highlights how care could foster a more inclusive creative industries sector but also highlights the additional work carried out by socially engaged creative organisations, which is similarly evidenced in the case studies in this book. The link between caring practices and ideas of equity and inclusion in creative work is explored through the concept of cultural democracy (Gross & Wilson, 2020), underpinned by the Capabilities Approach (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 1999). The Capabilities Approach has been discussed in relation to culture by Hesmondhalgh (2017) and Banks (2017) in relation to how culture and cultural production can enhance people’s sense of well-being as flourishing (Sayer, 2011). I suggest that in relation to craft, its accessibility in terms of seemingly anyone being able to do it, and the mental health and well-being benefits it can offer, fits with these ideas of craft production seemingly being inherently “good” for people. However, given the experiences of racism and microaggressions described by the ethnically diverse makers in this book, craft isn’t always inherently good, resonating with the proclamation that actually “culture is bad for you” (Brook et al., 2020). This relates to basic concerns some scholars have had about ideas of well-being as flourishing in cultural work, bringing us to the macro level of the framework.

94 Conclusion Experiences of racism, microaggressions and other interpersonal forms of malrecognition and maldistribution (Fraser, 2013) contribute to people’s sense of not being well, of not flourishing. Flourishing is understood here as “being able to expand or develop one’s human faculties and capacities, which derive from being able to live well and work in environments that are safe, supportive and sustaining” (Banks, 2017, p. 156). Therefore, to address wider questions around inequalities in craft and the creative sector, I suggest the fundamental idea of well-being as flourishing and the related concept of capabilities provide a normative basis from which to evaluate what positive change looks and feels like. Given this, Nancy Fraser’s concept of recognition is useful. My conception of expertise in craft involves not only individual development of skills and mastery but also recognition of that as expertise – that the person who made it can be considered an expert and that the object they produce is the work of an expert. Questions of value, personhood and social justice are linked to the politics of recognition and redistribution, as developed by Nancy Fraser (2013). Craftswomen not being associated with the figure of the expert or master craftsman are tied to the politics of recognition. Intertwined with this are the politics of distribution, which, for Fraser, relate to unequal pay for women, which is rooted in the economic structures of society. I suggest that structures of racialised capitalism (Virdee, 2019) mean that maldistribution is not restricted to gender but intersects with race and class too. Fraser’s concept of “parity of participation” as a form of social justice is the idea that everyone should be able to participate in cultural life as peers; thus, malrecognition and maldistribution need to be addressed (Banks, 2017). In terms of how such concepts could translate into action, Banks suggests that cultural production should be subject to a “greater social sharing” that disregards the existing criteria of selection. Instead, access to cultural contribution should be free and accessible for all, removing the damaging effects of competition (Banks, 2023, p. 10). Such an idea would have damaging consequences for professional craft, which is already struggling after funding cuts (Luckman & Tower, 2023). At the same time, professional craft is elitist, unequal and harmful for people from minoritised groups. A flattening of the hierarchy, along the lines of what Banks has described, would need to take place across the entire craft ecology and beyond. The framework I set out is an indicative collection of ideas for thinking through, at different levels, how existing hierarchies in craft could be challenged or deconstructed. I invite people to interrogate, challenge or build on this work in relation to craft and potentially other creative industries. Some actions can be taken to address the many issues raised in this book. Cultural policy needs to better support the entire craft ecology, but justification for this cannot be restricted to only instrumental or economic; the benefits to communities, society and a sense of well-being are also important. For socially engaged craft, following Belfiore, there should be “provisions to

Conclusion 95 ensure the fulfilment of duties of care towards both artists and participating communities” (Belfiore, 2022, p. 1). The sector as a whole should be attentive to the work of socially engaged craft and the ethos of care and look into mechanisms of mutual support and collaboration. The professional sector should have social justice at its core and work towards being actively antiracist. Opportunities to develop craft expertise and participate need to be more freely accessible for all, and narratives and histories of craft need to focus more on the work of women and racially minoritised craftspeople (Sinclair, 2015). Craft is associated with expertise, mastery and elitism, but it also helps people, contributes to a sense of well-being, fosters social inclusion and can catalyse social justice. In some ways, craft could lead the way in imagining more inclusive creative industries. In reference to Lorna Hamilton-Brown’s quote at the beginning of this book, policymakers could and should provide greater support to makers and organisations across the craft ecology, to allow them to “build their own table”, if they want to. I am conscious that I have made links between craft and care as inherently “good”. However, as some scholars have highlighted, understandings of care in capitalism also need to be genuinely inclusive, and not just centre whiteness (Sobande, 2020, 2022a, 2022b). Francesca Sobande importantly highlights how ideas of care are being co-opted for commercial gain, particularly during and after the pandemic. There is this concern in craft too in relation to the idea of craft being a site for resistance, as expressed by Kathleen Morris: As a mode of cultural capitalism, craft is mined for its connotations of citizenship and social responsibility, advocating rebellion yet ensuring its impotence. The symbolic power of the manifesto is often harnessed, and draws upon an imagined populist history of grassroots uprising, becoming a persuasive – albeit illusory – counterpoint to neoliberal capitalism. Ultimately, this theoretical framework serves to perpetuate the conditions of the late capitalist state rather than destabilize them, underscoring power inequity, cultural hegemony, and rebellion as commodity. (Morris, 2016, p. 5) Future research could expand critical work on craft, for example, by exploring craft movements and activism, specifically in relation to anti-racism and the Black Lives Matter movement, and, related to this, ideas of care and how it is co-opted for commercial gain. Such issues have been highlighted in celebrity and media culture by Francesca Sobande (2022a, 2022b), so it would be useful to see further interrogation of these issues in craft. I appreciate that this book has primarily focused on two colonial countries – the UK and Australia. Thus, the primary focus of the research is the Western creative industries context, which is a limitation of the book. Much more research needs to be done on the lived experience of groups that are

96 Conclusion under-represented and minoritised in craft, around the world, and this research needs to directly inform the sector and policy on actions to make craft more inclusive. These actions can be co-created with makers, through intersectional and indigenous research methods. For example, Patricia Hill Collins’ (2019) approach of intersectionality as critical social theory is useful, whereby intersectionality is a “resistant knowledge project” (p. 116). Through resistant knowledge projects, knowledge about the experiences of intersectional oppression is produced with and by people who are harmed by racism, heteropatriarchy and colonialism, who will “have a vested interest in developing critical social theories that foster resistance projects of antiracism, feminism, and decolonization” (ibid.). In addition, the indigenous research approaches by Mackell et al. (2023) and Bartleet et al. (2022), mentioned in Chapter 3 of this book, are also instructive, as they also work with communities in co-producing knowledge. Building on the Making Changes in Craft report (Patel, 2021), during 2022 and 2023 the Crafts Council worked with Glasgow Caledonian University on a project funded by the UK’s Centre for Cultural Value, titled “Making Meaning through Craft: Disrupting the Craft Canon” (Radclyffe-Thomas et al., 2023). The project explored “Living Labs” as a methodology for exploring what craft means to diasporic communities in the UK. A Living Lab “is a collaborative and reflective research approach facilitating sharing and knowledge exchange using appreciative inquiry” (Radclyffe-Thomas et al., 2023, p. 11). The Living Lab took the form of a focus group with a participatory craft activity, through which participants discussed their personal experiences related to craft and the value of craft to them. The findings reveal the myriad of ways in which participants value craft and what it means for their cultural heritage, and the authors provide recommendations for funding bodies, research councils and development organisations to “recognise the value of undertaking more research with cultural organisations into the cultural value of craft in the context of race, racism and a wider intersectional approach” (p. 45). The project by Radclyffe-Thomas and the Crafts Council shows there is at least, now, a more substantial conversation going on about inequalities in craft and issues of racism in the UK craft sector, and some actions are being taken. However, funding cuts mean that at the time of writing in December 2023, there is currently reduced capacity for such research projects to continue at the Crafts Council. Given the issues discussed in this book, it is debatable how useful it is for craft to remain a part of the creative industries, given the ongoing funding cuts, how craft as a sector must fight for recognition in competition with the larger broadcast and media industries, and the pervasive issue of inequalities and “winner takes all” dynamics of competition across the creative industries. It seems it is more important now than ever to reflect on craft’s status as a creative industry.

Conclusion 97

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Index

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) 60 Aboriginal art 55, 58 – 62, 75 Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd 59 Aboriginal Arts Board 59, 60 Aboriginalia 55 Adams, K. 26 Adamson, G.: The Craft Reader 1; Thinking Through Craft 2 aesthetic expertise 73, 76, 93 Alacovska, A. 40, 79 Alice Springs 55, 61 All That Glitters (BBC) 9 amateurism 77, 89 Andrew, J. 16 APY Art Collective 54, 55, 68n3 Arnott, L. 42, 43 art centres: Aboriginal 58 – 62 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society 26 Arts and Crafts movement 4, 23 – 28, 90 Arts Council of England 27 Art Workers Guild 25, 26 ATSIC see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) attentiveness 78 Australian Council for the Arts 59 bad work 14, 15 Baker, S. 14 Banks, M. 8, 12, 13, 15, 72, 84, 93; Creative Justice 84; The Politics of Cultural Work 14

Bardon, G. 53, 59 Barnett, T. 16, 67 Bartleet, B. L. 62, 96 Becker, H. 76 Belfiore, E. 31, 40, 94 – 95 Bennett, J. 11 Bhachu, P. 27 Birdsall-Jones, C. 58 – 59 Birmingham City Council 25 Birmingham Municipal School of Art 25, 26 Birmingham School of Jewellery 43 BIS see Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Black Lives Matter movement 95 Bloomsbury 25 Blown Away (Netflix) 9 Born, G. 75, 76 Bourdieu, P. 76; The Rules of Art 73 box ticking 35 Bradley, K. 29 Brexit 33 Bringing Them Home report (Australia) 52 Bula’bula Arts 63 CAC see Crafts Advisory Council (CAC) Callen, A. 26 Cameron, V. 41 – 42 Cannizzo, F. 16 capabilities approach 7, 8, 80 – 82, 93 capitalism see racialised capitalism Carclew 57

100 Index care 77 – 85 Care Collective 78 carpet bagging 54 carving 31, 40, 43 – 45, 53, 79 Central School of Arts and Crafts, London 26 Centre for Cultural Value, UK: “Making Meaning through Craft: Disrupting the Craft Canon” 96 Chatzidakis, A.: Care Manifesto 78 Childress, C. 36 Chong, P. 38 colonialism 28, 30, 52, 55, 61, 96 commercial craft 5, 6, 51, 56, 58, 61, 63, 66, 71, 92 Commonwealth Festival of the Arts 28 – 30 Commonwealth Institute 23, 28 – 30, 55, 90 community evaluation 7, 72, 76 – 77, 81, 85 competence 78 Comunian, R. 12 contributive justice 82 – 85 Cooke, D. 65 – 66 COVID-19 5, 9, 15, 16, 32, 39 – 45, 51, 63 – 67, 78, 79, 91 craft, definition of 2 CraftA, London 41 – 42, 45, 74, 79 Craft Australia 11 Craft Authority 57 craft ecology 4 – 8, 46, 51, 67, 71, 72, 80, 85, 89, 91, 94, 95 Craft Expertise project 1 craft guilds 4, 23 – 26, 28, 30, 39, 46, 84, 90 craft object 72 – 77 craft renaissance 9 Crafts Advisory Council (CAC) see Crafts Council Crafts Association of South Australia (now Guildhouse) 58 Crafts Council 1 – 3, 10 – 11, 27, 30, 39, 58, 90, 96 craft social enterprises 66 – 67 Craftspace 43 Craggs, R. 29 – 30

Crawford, A. 25, 26 Creative Case for Diversity 27 creative cities 12 creative clusters 12 creative industries: craft as 2, 3, 9 – 13, 56 – 62, 89; definition of 3; inequalities in 13 – 16 Creative Industries Mapping Document 56, 90 creative labour 2, 3, 13 Creative Nation report 56, 60, 90 Creative Scotland 42 Crisp, T. 16 crochet 9, 31 cultural democracy 80, 81, 93 cultural labour 7, 13, 15, 72, 77 cultural matching 36 cultural policies 6, 11 – 13, 15, 16, 56 – 62, 66, 67, 71, 80, 81, 89 – 92, 94; moral failure of 5, 91; neoliberal 14, 39 cultural production, theory of 75 cultural value: and inequality, relationship between 30 – 32; judgement and 35 – 39 DCMS see Department for Culture, Media and Sport, UK (DCMS) decorative arts 25 – 26 Dent, T. 78 Department for Aboriginal Affairs (Australia) 60 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) 11 Department for Culture, Media and Sport, UK (DCMS) 3; Creative Industries Mapping Document 10 – 11 Design Council 27 Devon Guild of Craftsmen (MAKE Southwest) 24 distributive justice 84 diversity: of craft practices 2, 4, 5, 32, 89; cultural 65; and inclusion 27; initiatives 39; “schemes” 35, 81, 84 Dorcas Clubs 27

Index 101 Dorcas Societies 27 The Dreamings 53, 60, 74 Dunstan, D. 56 – 59, 63, 64 East Sydney Technical College 55 ecological approach 62 ecology of culture 4 economic inequality 15 economisation of culture 14 elitism 26, 30, 46, 95 Embroiderers’ Guild 28 – 30 England, L. 12 entrepreneurial individualism 13 entrepreneurialism 5, 14, 71 ethics of care 78 Etsy 5, 6, 9, 10, 74; Etsypreneurship 58 evaluative moment 36 expertise 6 – 7, 10, 30 – 31, 35 – 37, 39, 45, 64, 72 – 77, 81 – 85, 92 – 95 female aesthetic communities 28 fine craftsmanship 27 First Nations 6, 11, 16n2, 52 – 54, 58, 60, 63, 68n3, 73, 77, 92 First Nations Elders 61 Fisher, L. 54, 55, 60 – 61 Flourish Jewellery Project, Edinburgh 42 – 43, 74, 79 Fraser, N. 8, 76, 83 – 84, 94 gender inequality 8, 16 genius 73, 76 gentrification 12, 44, 66 Gill, R. 33 Glasgow European City of Culture 12 Gloucester Guild of Craftsmen 24 good work 14 – 15, 40 Greater London Council 12 Grodach, C. 12, 66 – 67 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 12 Guild of Women Binders 25 Hamilton-Brown, L. 1 Hermannsburg Watercolour School 53, 67n2

Hesmondhalgh, D. 3, 8, 14, 81, 82, 93 Hill Collins, P. 32, 96 Hobbycraft 9 Holborn 25 Holden, J. 4, 62 Howarth, J. 42, 43 imperialism 30 imperialist nostalgia 30 Indigenous Art Code (2008) 54 Industrial Revolution 25 inequalities 1, 3, 4, 7, 12 – 16, 36, 38, 39, 52, 54, 58, 64, 66, 72, 75, 82 – 84, 89 – 94, 96; and cultural value, relationship between 30 – 32; economic 15; gender 8, 16; prevalence of 6; social 15; structural 23; systematic 61 intersectionality 16n1, 96 intersectional oppression 31 intrinsic rewards 14 Jakob, D. 2, 11, 12, 24 JamFactory, Adelaide 6, 57, 63 – 64, 67, 71, 92 jewellery 34 – 37, 42, 80 Jingdezhen, China: ceramics craft cluster 12 – 13 Jones, P. 53 – 54 Jones, T. 58 – 59 Keating, P.: Creative Nation report 56, 60, 90 knitting 9, 16, 31, 34, 41 Koolmatrie, Y. 55 – 56, 58 Ladies’ Work Society 25 Living Labs 96 Luckman, S. 2, 9, 16, 51, 58, 61, 67 Mackell, P. 61, 62, 96 Making Changes in Craft report 96 marginalisation 77 Marsh, J. 26 McBride, F. 64 McEnery, K. 77

102 Index McQuilten, G. 62, 65 McRobbie, A. 14, 39 – 40, 73 – 74 Meyrick, J. 15 – 16, 67 microaggression 4, 8, 32 – 36, 38, 84, 91, 93, 94 Miller, D. 75 minoritisation 16n1 Morris, K. 95 Morris, M. 26, 27, 90 Morris, W. 25 Morris & Co 26 Myers, F. 53, 55, 59, 74 – 75 Namatijra, A. 53 National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) 11 National Craft Initiative 58 National Health Service (NHS) 43 National Indigenous Visual Arts Action Plan 55 Nault, J. F. 36 NAVA see National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) Newill, M. 26 Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) lands 61 NHS see National Health Service (NHS) NPY see Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) lands NPY Women’s Council 61 Nussbaum, M. 81 Oakley, K. 15, 31 O’Brien, D. 31 Ocejo, R.: Masters of Craft 2 O’Connor, J. 13 O’Donoghue, L.: Kaltja Now 52 Ogilvie, S. 24 organisational portfolio precarity 45 Pacella, J. 16 Papunya Artist Inc Cooperative 59 Papunya Tula Artists Inc 53 parity of participation 8, 46, 72, 82 – 85, 94 Parkes, B. 63, 64 Path Carvers, Birmingham 43 – 45, 79, 80

Perkins, H. 53 – 55 personal protective equipment (PPE) 65, 66 Police Scotland 42, 43 Porter, J. 29 Possum, C. 53 PPE see personal protective equipment (PPE) The Prince’s Master Crafters (Sky) 9 racialised capitalism 5, 38, 82, 83, 91, 93, 94 racism 4, 5, 8, 32 – 35, 38, 51, 54, 82, 84, 91, 93 – 96 Radclyffe-Thomas, N. 96 Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act of 2010 54 responsibility 78 responsiveness 78 “Revive: Australia’s Cultural Policy for the next five years” (Commonwealth of Australia) 57 Revive policy 11 Richards, D. 57 Richardson, G. 23 RMIT see Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Rosaldo, R. 30 Royal Charter 27 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) 6, 65 – 67 Royal School of Art Needlework 25 Rudd, K. 52 Rural Industries Bureau 24 Ruskin, J. 25, 27 Saha, A. 35, 39, 81 Sayer, A. 8, 82 self-care 78 self-indulgence 26, 79 Sen, A. 7 – 8, 80 – 81 Sennett, R. 9 – 10, 12; The Corrosion of Character 10; The Craftsman 31, 73 Shelanu 43 Silverhub Studios 42, 43 “sina-prona” culture 28 Sinclair, R. 27, 28

Index 103 “The 62 Group” 29 Skeggs, B. 38 Sloane, M. 26 Smith, C. 27 socially engaged craft 4 – 7, 39 – 41, 45 – 46, 51, 62 – 67, 71, 74, 78 – 80, 85, 89, 91, 94, 95 Social Studio, Melbourne 6, 65 – 67, 79, 81, 92 South Australian Craft Authority 57 South Kensington School of Design (later the Royal College of Art) 26 Sri Lanka 29 Stolen Generations 52 Strong, C. 16 structural inequality 23 systematic inequality 61 Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Adelaide 91 Thomas, N. J. 2, 11, 12, 24 Thompson, J. K. 28, 29

Thurnell-Read, T. 2 Tjanpi Desert Weavers 61 – 62 tokenism 35 Tower, A. 67 Trinidad Carnival costumes 28 Tronto, J. 78 Turner, M. P. 26 Virdee, S. 5, 38, 91 Ward, P. 57 well-being 7, 8, 14, 40, 42, 44, 67, 71, 79, 81 – 85, 93 – 95 Western art-culture system 75, 77 Whitlam, G. 56, 59 Wolff, J. 72, 76 – 77, 93 Women’s Guild of Arts 26 Wood, J. 43 World Crafts Council 11, 58 Yang, X. 12 – 13 Young, M. 61