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INTRODUCTION GRANT GIBSON Editor of Crafts magazine Right: Assemble, winners of the 2015 Turner Prize. Photo: Courtesy of Assemble Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 2008, published by Allen Lane 18 2018 sees the 10th anniversary of the publication of Richard Sennett’s seminal book The Craftsman. In my view it’s impossible to underestimate its import – at a stroke it exposed as a myth the worn-out, but nevertheless widely held, perception that craft is the sole province of retired boomers with time on their hands. Instead, it argued that we are in fact surrounded by craft and that skill is something innate in all of us, from the Linux programmer hunched over a computer to the hospital nurse dealing with another winter crisis. As Fiona MacCarthy pointed out in her Guardian review: ‘Sennett alters one’s view of craftsmanship by finding so much meaning in the detail. The grip on the pencil, the pressure on the chisel: he persuades us that these things have real significance.’ Quite so. By accident or design, The Craftsman presaged an extraordinary decade for making. Other books followed in its wake. A little under a decade ago, I found myself in a central London branch of Costa Coffee with ceramist Edmund de Waal. As we parted I asked him what he was up to next, and he told me he was heading to the Lake District to finish a book he’d been writing about his family’s collection of tiny, Japanese carved figures, or netsuke. Apparently they had a bit of a history. I thought it sounded an intriguing idea but hardly something that would prove popular with the public, which just goes to show how wrong you can be. Then there was Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands, or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good, in which the American academic-turned-mechanic created a manifesto arguing that manual work was more satisfying than climbing the corporate ladder. Thanks in part to Crawford’s treatise, for a brief moment making even entered the political lexicon. In 2010, for instance, John Hayes, then Minister of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, delivered a genuinely eye-opening lecture at London’s RSA entitled ‘The craft so long to lerne’: Skills and their Place in Modern Britain, in which he opined: ‘People speak of the intellectual beauty of a mathematical theorem. But there is beauty, too, in the economy and certainty of movement of a master craftsman. I believe that both kinds of beauty must be recognised on their own terms. And that implies not that the stock of academe must fall, but that the stock of craft must rise.’ While much of what he had to say was hackneyed and over-romanticised – referencing attacks from the Luftwaffe and the Euston Arch spring immediately to mind – it was still remarkable to hear an active politician discussing the importance of aesthetics with such abandon. More famously, of course, the former Chancellor (and now editor of the Evening Standard) George Osborne closed his 2011 budget by describing his vision of a nation ‘carried aloft by the march of the makers’. Once properly ensconced in power, however, this rhetoric quickly dried up. Granby Workshop team, left to right: Jacqueline Kerr, Paula Frew, Fran Edgerley (Assemble), Sufea Mohammed Noor, Mohammed Saad, Patrick Brown, Vicki Opumu, Joe Halligan (Assemble), Lewis Jones (Assemble). Photo: Julian Anderson INTRO
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INTRO 19

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INTRODUCTION

GRANT GIBSON Editor of Crafts magazine

Right: Assemble, winners of the 2015 Turner Prize. Photo: Courtesy of Assemble

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 2008, published by Allen Lane

18

2018 sees the 10th anniversary of the publication of Richard Sennett’s seminal book The Craftsman. In my view it’s impossible to underestimate its import – at a stroke it exposed as a myth the worn-out, but nevertheless widely held, perception that craft is the sole province of retired boomers with time on their hands. Instead, it argued that we are in fact surrounded by craft and that skill is something innate in all of us, from the Linux programmer hunched over a computer to the hospital nurse dealing with another winter crisis. As Fiona MacCarthy pointed out in her Guardian review: ‘Sennett alters one’s view of craftsmanship by finding so much meaning in the detail. The grip on the pencil, the pressure on the chisel: he persuades us that these things have real significance.’ Quite so. By accident or design, The Craftsman presaged an extraordinary decade for making. Other books followed in its wake. A little under a decade ago, I found myself in a central London branch of Costa Coffee with ceramist Edmund de Waal. As we parted I asked him what he was up to next, and he told me he was heading to the Lake District to finish a book he’d been writing about his family’s collection of tiny, Japanese carved figures, or netsuke. Apparently they had a bit of a history. I thought it sounded an intriguing idea but hardly something that would prove popular with the public, which just goes to show how wrong you can be. Then there was Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands, or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good, in which the American academic-turned-mechanic created a manifesto arguing that manual work was more satisfying than climbing the corporate ladder. Thanks in part to Crawford’s treatise, for a brief moment making even entered the political lexicon. In 2010, for instance, John Hayes, then Minister of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, delivered a genuinely eye-opening lecture at London’s RSA entitled ‘The craft so long to lerne’: Skills and their Place in Modern Britain, in which he opined: ‘People speak of the intellectual beauty of a mathematical theorem. But there is beauty, too, in the economy and certainty of movement of a master craftsman. I believe that both kinds of beauty must be recognised on their own terms. And that implies not that the stock of academe must fall, but that the stock of craft must rise.’ While much of what he had to say was hackneyed and over-romanticised – referencing attacks from the Luftwaffe and the Euston Arch spring immediately to mind – it was still remarkable to hear an active politician discussing the importance of aesthetics with such abandon. More famously, of course, the former Chancellor (and now editor of the Evening Standard) George Osborne closed his 2011 budget by describing his vision of a nation ‘carried aloft by the march of the makers’. Once properly ensconced in power, however, this rhetoric quickly dried up.

Granby Workshop team, left to right: Jacqueline Kerr, Paula Frew, Fran Edgerley (Assemble), Sufea Mohammed Noor, Mohammed Saad, Patrick Brown, Vicki Opumu, Joe Halligan (Assemble), Lewis Jones (Assemble). Photo: Julian Anderson

INTRO

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