Left: Phoebe Cummings working at her home in Stafford. Photo: Camilla Greenwell Right: a biscuit-fired fragment from the artist’s residency at the V&A in 2010. Photo: Camilla Greenwell

Major international brands got in on the act, too. Levi’s launched its ‘craftworker’ campaign to coincide with the revamp of its Regent Street store in 2010, focusing on a group of hip young things across art, music, performance and design and dressing them in, hey, denim. Neatly the company appeared to be taking Sennett at his word and finding skill in unexpected places, while at the same time hopping on the burgeoning bandwagon of hipster culture. Others quickly followed, with upmarket bag manufacturer LOEWE even launching a new craft prize where the winner picked up a cool 50,000 euros. It became increasingly difficult to walk into a pub, a global chain of coffee houses or buy a packet of crisps without reading the words ‘craft’ or ‘artisanal’. Even McDonalds joined the fray, blatantly aping the work of paper-cut artist Rob Ryan in its advertising.

On our televisions shows like The Great British Bake Off (launched in 2010 on BBC Two) and The Great British Sewing Bee became mainstream staples, while BBC4 introduced a Slow TV series. Meanwhile, in 2015, craft followed the design, art and fashion worlds by getting its own week in the capital. Oh yes, and the art world began to embrace skills and materials once more with the likes of Jesse Wine and Aaron Angell forging stellar reputations with works in clay often best described as sloppy, while the architecture collective Assemble picked up the 2015 Turner Prize for its ongoing collaboration with local residents in Liverpool’s Granby Four Streets to refurbish homes and make a slew of associated products. The award – which you fancy was heavily influenced by judge Alistair Hudson’s vision of the role of a ‘useful’ museum at Middlesbrough’s MIMA – prompted a fresh debate about what constitutes art and its place for 21st-century communities. Continuing to break the craft/fine art partition was conceptual work from the likes of Keith Harrison, Clare Twomey, Barnaby Barford and the recent winner of the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize, Phoebe Cummings. However, perhaps there is no better indication of the renewed interest in making than the (rather unexpected) success of the V&A and Crafts Council’s 2011 exhibition Power of Making. Curated by Daniel Charny, it was essentially a treasure trove (I always hesitate to use the phrase ‘cabinet of curiosities’) of products, materials and art pieces that attracted well over 300,000 people, making it the museum’s second most popular show ever – at least until David Bowie started breaking box office records.

So on the surface it seems that everything in the crafts garden is rosy, right? The public is on board, big brands can see so much commercial potential they are using it as part of their marketing strategy, the art world loves it and the government is taking it seriously. Hmmm, well, I’m not convinced. Making might be going through a media-inspired resurgence, but it’s impossible to avoid the sense that the foundations are built on sand. The Crafts Council’s 2016 report Studying Craft illustrates the education crisis currently engulfing the field with the number of students on craft GCSEs having fallen by 23 per cent since 2007/2008, while higher education courses have declined by a whopping 50 per cent between 2007/08 and 2014/15.

Clare Twomey (right) and a factory manager at Tate Exchange pouring clay into a mould. Photo: Oli Cowling © Tate

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