ABSTRACT
The crafts are often presented as being oppositional. The majority of crafts activity has not taken place in ivory towers but through active engagement with society, not least because the results are utilitarian. Like the crafts, sustainability sometimes clothes its rhetoric in a nostalgia borrowed from Romanticism, in this case one that idealises nature. It is also sometimes deeply conservative and in opposition to modernity. Heritage and rural crafts often fit comfortably into a narrative of sustainability, especially where that narrative resists the processes of modernity. Sustainability is a social and political initiative that puts forward the view that there is an imperative to meet the basic needs of all humans, without compromising the needs of those in the future. Studio crafts have a rather tangential relationship with sustainability. The women’s crafts strand meets sustainability through craftivism. This movement builds on many of the ideals inherent in the Arts and Crafts Movement, which began in England in the 1880s.
