Heritage Heroes BBC TV

Last October I spent a lot of time advising the team for a new BBC program on potential craftspeople they could visit as part of a series at that time billed as "Heritage at Risk". The program is now airing fronted by John Craven as "Heritage Heroes". They tour the country looking at buildings and traditions at risk and the people keeping those traditions alive. Last week was the Penines, next the border country along the Welsh Marches down to Bristol I think and then the final week will be along the south coast.


Anyway last Thursday was the episode on the Peak district and they visited me and my friends at Portland Works in Sheffield. Here are a couple of screenshots, first of me waxing lyrical about an old bowl made by George Lailey about 70 years ago.

 and here is my mate Stuart Mitchell showing John Craven his knives.

The episode is up on iplayer for a while, probably not available outside the UK I am afraid, this is the link and I am on around 21 mins in.

Both Stuart and I will be speaking about our work as part of the V&A craft conference on 24th March have you booked your tickets yet? early bird discount is still available here

TV is a funny thing, whilst 3 minutes of TV costs a huge amount to produce they very rarely pay the folk they film expecting you to give your time for the fame and glory. Another popular misconception is that a few minutes on TV bring fame and fortune, in reality the normal effect is a bunch of your mates phone and text saying they saw you on the telly but it rarely transfers into orders or increased business. In Fact a good friend Hector Cole who does blacksmithing and used to do a lot of work for Time Team reckoned that it was actually bad for business as most of his customers assumed he would be too busy to want to sell them a few arrowheads. This series does seem to have been better than most with 4 or 5 bowl orders this week mentioning the program and it's always nice when you parents see you on the telly and think you have done good.

can we define what craft is?

Yesterday I was a meeting in London of the steering group for a major piece of government funded research into the state of heritage crafts in England. The first and perhaps most difficult task is to define very precisely what heritage crafts are in such a way as the research company can go away and start counting and measuring.

Crafts consultant Hillary Jennings had prepared us a draft discussion paper which runs to about 15 pages, we hope to be able to make this document public in due course but for now I can share a few of the most important points.

It was felt that heritage craft could be defined as practice which encompassed these points

• Knowledge and use of traditional materials
  

• Skilled use of hand tools and hand operated machinery

• Knowledge and application of traditional, often functional designs

Then this was boiled down into an even more concise version for when we need a one line definition.

"Practices which employ skilled use of hand tools and an understanding of material and have their roots in traditional functional design."


It's not easy to define traditional craft, how would you do it? can you come up with anything better? One thing we were sure about was that heritage is not the same as old, it is more a question of what we value and wish to pass on to future generations.

To make the most of my London trip I also got to meet two people I have been corresponding with for a while. First was Adam Thompson who writes the excellent "manufacture and industry" blog here 
We only had time for a quick coffee and chat but it was good to meet, his blog is well worth following.


Then last thing I visited potter Kate Malone. Folk who know Kate's work may be surprised as she is very much a high end art potter making pieces which sell for thousands of pounds, she does have very strong roots in traditional practice however and believes that it is crucial that ceramicists learn basic craft skills first before considering any sort of innovative self expression. Here is a lovely film of her studio.





I am in London next Tuesday and Wednesday for more meetings including John Hayes skills minister, Martina Milburn CEO of the Princes Trust, the BBC to discuss potential craft TV programs, Baroness Garden at the Lords and I am particularly pleased to be able to meet up with Betsy Greer, craft activist who is over from the US.

craft conference at the V&A "evolving craft communities"

This year's Heritage Crafts Association conference at the V&A has the theme "Evolving Craft Communities"

Since you are reading this on the web and presumably have an interest in craft you are part of an online craft community which did not exist 20 years ago. At the same time many of us are also part of other craft communities whether local, regional or national with a particular craft theme. I am quite involved with the Association of pole lathe turners and greenwoodworkers who have a good online forum here  but also an annual meeting where we all get together to exchange skills and ideas.

We are live in exciting times as we can exchange and source information freely across the web,  how does this change our craft practice and how does it compare to past practices of passing skills?  Is it possible to feel connected to other folk we have never met who live in other continents and what sort of meaning does that bring to our lives? How do we make the best use of changes that are happening and new opportunities available to us?

Speakers at the conference will include Professor Richard Sennett, talking about "Making and thinking". Richard is author of the well-received book The Craftsman, and professor of sociology at  New York University and LSE. He popularised the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master a craft skill, he also talks from personal experience of hand skills having put those hours in training as a cellist.

Lida Kindersley runs the highly successful Cardozo Kindersley Workshop in  Cambridge. Lida was trained by David Kindersley who was himself trained by Eric Gill. She wrote a nice book on apprenticeship  Her workshop practices solidly "old school" with apprentices learning letter-cutting alongside the team of experienced craftspeople.


Ele Carpenter is a curator, artist and researcher working within the field of visual arts and new media. She will talk about the open source embroidered digital commons

Stuart Mitchell's apprenticeship in the Sheffield cutlery industry was very traditional. He started at the bottom and worked all hours until eventually even his father took pride in the knives that he built. His workshop, and indeed work ethic, is still steeped in the traditions of Sheffield of old, but things have changed.

And then I will be talking about how I feel to be part of a global online woodworking community but how I still value physical get togethers and particularly working on craft projects together alongside other people whether sharing my knowledge through courses or learning from others.



Here is the full program, you can book here and this year we are offering an £5 early bird discount to save us having the stress of last minute bookings. It will be a great day, hope you can join us.

• 10.15am - Registration in the Lecture Theatre.
• 10.45am - Conference starts. Welcome from Patricia Lovett, Vice-Chair of the HCA.
• 10.55am - Professor Richard Sennett - 'Making and Thinking'.
• 11.55am - Lida Kindersley, lettercutter in stone - 'Learning by Doing'
• 1.00pm - HCA Annual General Meeting - all welcome.
• 2.30pm - Afternoon session begins. Patricia Lovett.
• 2.35pm - Presentation of Marsh Awards for trainer and volunteer in Heritage Crafts by Alex Langlands
• 3.00pm - Ele Carpenter, 'Open Source Embroidery Project - the embroidered digital commons'
• 3.25pm - Robin Wood, wood turner and Chair of the HCA - 'Bringing Craft out of the Woods'
• 3.50pm - Stuart Mitchell, knifemaker - 'Web Mester'
• 4.15pm - Closing remarks and HCA updates
• 4.30pm - Conference ends

lettercarving in stone

Memorial Arts are a charity set up to help folk find artists making memorials, particularly letter-cutting in stone. They promote excellence in lettercarving in various ways including running a successful apprentice scheme. They are affiliated members of HCA. Whether you are looking for a special piece of artwork or just interested in the craft their website is well worth a visit also see their linked website Memorials by Artists.

Crisp beautiful letters take time to produce by hand, this video shows the process start to finish in real time.
http://media.memorialartscharity.org.uk/video/letter-carving.ogv

and lets finish with some lovely pics of lettercutting from their site.

Steve Jobs

 These inspirational quotes from Steve Jobs were put together by Mike Press for his great blog here the most craft related ones are at the end but I think they are all great.


“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

“Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.”

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

And whilst looking back at Mike's old blog archive I came across this remarkable post from 2007. It seems quite visionary now showing the way handmade crafts using web 2 software, blogs, etsy etc are in a position to grow rapidly, comment, and be far more proactive in addressing issues about the way we make, work and consume in the 21st century.



"Craft 2.0 is the true inheritor of the Morris legacy. Unlike the professionalised 'art school' educated craft makers it has an ideological position which, while largely ill-defined and diverse, represents a constructive reaction to the inequities and politics of the market economy. It is clearly using the market economy as a means of developing sustainable livelihoods, but is bringing economic and cultural innovation to it. Above all it is dealing with the politics of work and consumption in ways that the professionalised sector cannot."

life is a gym for head, hand and heart.

It seems to me that the life many people aspire to at the moment involves spending the working day in important meetings or at a computer or doing similar cerebral work, then in the morning or evening jogging or pumping iron at the gym to get that perfect body.

These gyms seem bizarre places to me, I have walked past them in London full of folk pounding away like so many hamsters on wheels. The bizarre thing is that all those machines are consuming electricity, I'd like to see a gym that generated electricity or better see those folk out carrying shopping for old ladies or some  other useful physical activity. Besides that I struggle with the idea of pounding away just to get the current trendy body shape. I think far better to live a balanced life that involves a mix of cerebral and physical activity. At the moment I am converting my ex village police station into a holiday cottage, there is a lot of hard labouring work which a hard nosed business annalist would say I should pay a labourer £50 a day to do whilst I got on with more lucrative work. I earn an average of £80 a day so I can't argue with the economics but there is something more important than economics to me. By doing the labouring myself I get a feeling of empowerment, and also a good workout which would cost my cerebral friends a hefty gym fee. Here I am starting to demolish the old wall separating the old garage from the police station office, I reckon you could charge for this it was such fun.

Why is it that doing this stuff as part of the working day is looked down upon whilst paying to sweat in the gym is viewed as a good thing? This is all part of my philosophy of living a balanced life with work involving hand, head and heart. Past posts on the subject here

traditional craft in a music video

Often folk picture heritage and traditional crafts as being backward looking, and having nothing to say today. Whilst the modern art of the craft spectrum is seen as "innovative" and "cutting edge". This is a misunderstanding, today in times of global financial adversity people tend to reassess their priorities and question what good work and a good life means, what is of value and what is not. The traditional crafts have always been closely linked with the politics of work, from William Morris to Eric Gill to Mahatma Gandhi craft, work, philosophy, politics all together. 

Craft is still relevant today and far from being backward looking the Heritage Crafts Association are at the cutting edge of debate about what is good work today. Music sometimes also carries political messages and one of my favourite young punk bands are the King Blues. This is their new video shot on a very cold day last spring and you might notice a clip of me in the workshop.



It was quite an eye opener being part of the video, we had an afternoon in the workshop them most of the day starting at 8am in Manchester and it was cold....
This quick clip taken on my pocket camera gives an idea of how it was made.



and a few stills