ABSTRACT
As Long writes, the marrying of craft production and rural localities pivots on the idea of ‘self provisioning and family enterprise’, portrayed as peculiar social relations of production based near or in the home. In the second half of this chapter, by drawing upon my research with craft makers living and making in west Wales, I hope to catch glimpses into such spaces of (re)production.1 To interleave the first and second sections of the chapter I introduce briefly the term ‘livelihood’. It is a term which conjures up, in part, the relations of that (re) productive space. The makers’ words and works display some of the issues that they face on a day-to-day basis as they struggle to engage in craft-based production from within or near the home in rural west Wales. Theirs is a struggle which contests the conventional spatial and cultural dividing apart of production from reproduction, work from home, while reintroducing the notion of diverse and different forms of production taking place in a landscape commonly portrayed as dominated by agriculture in terms of its productivity (Cloke 1989: 177). With particular, but not exclusive, reference to the words, work and lives of women, I will also examine how craft makers aim both to make from and to
re-create the spaces of (re)production, opening out the idea of ‘family enterprise’ and how it may operate on a day-to-day basis. Although I have often found that within these craft households the use of space is shaped as a reaction against what are for craft makers ‘mainstream’ routines such as ‘going out to work’, this space is also upset by somewhat ironic references back to those segregated mainstream productive and reproductive domains previously rejected. To invoke a sensation of this troubled and in-between space, where I feel craft makers live and work from, I borrow a line or two from a paper by Shurmer-Smith. Although Shurmer-Smith was referring to another author’s experience, that of travelling on an ocean liner, it is her touching of this in-between or liminal space that is important here. She writes:
The space between countries, the transitory community, the removal from the structures generated by work, home, extended kinship, politics-the ship as Utopia. The space of difference between unacceptable worlds…. What I wanted was something between the two, which does not exist either as a word or a recognised condition.
