ABSTRACT
As curator Paul Greenhalgh has observed, 'craft has always been a supremely messy word'. In the most general sense, a craft refers to a professional kind of work or trade or a pastime activity, any of which centrally involves specialised skills. Learning arises in spotting that a mistake has been made, identifying and understanding it as a problem for which a strategy can be devised or a tactic executed to remove, resolve or work around it, and, hopefully, to move on with the knowledge that the experience has afforded. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'problem' has several closely related meanings. The first two define a problem as 'a doubtful or difficult matter requiring a solution' and 'something hard to understand or accomplish or deal with'. Problems may therefore be construed as challenges that call for response – challenges of the kind commonly encountered in craftwork.
