ABSTRACT
In his book the Invention of Craft (2013), leading craft curator and scholar Glenn Adamson argues that ‘craft’ as we know it today came into being in the mid-19th century when it was cast as the Industrial Revolution’s ‘Other’, deliberately rupturing links between artisanal making and manufacture; craft and technology. Today still one of the key tensions in play in identity choices and boundary contestations lies between those who seek to identify their craft practice with the art field, and those desiring of, or more comfortable with, an association with the economic field of economic power which tends to be marked by their identification with ‘design’ in some form. In the 20th century, this break was consolidated even further through the greater strategic alignment by many craftspeople of their work with that of the art field, with all the claims to perceived greater value, skill and creative originality this affords. More recently, the very same neo-liberalism which gave rise to the creative industries agenda is now driving art, craft and design education closer together as budget cuts lead to the winding back of expensive studios, workshops and supervised hand-on training in universities. Thus, students of craft spend much of their time in more traditional classrooms, learning a book or screen-centred arts theory syllabus with its at best ambivalent relationship to the market. Drawing upon empirical data from a four-year Australian Research Council funded national study of Australian design craft micro-enterprises, this chapter explores how the historical legacies of the art field today intersect with those of design and craft and the reality of portfolio careers. It finds that contemporary craft practice in Australia today is a splintering field marked by its burgeoning nomenclature: ‘designer’, ‘designer maker’, ‘maker’, ‘artisan’, ‘artist’, ‘craftsperson’, but despite this multiplicity there exists a profound sense of concern that fundamental haptic craft skills are being lost as a result of cut-backs to hands-on studio teaching.
