Georgina Follett – who is the dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and deputy principal of the University of Dundee, as well as being an acclaimed jewellery designer and enameller – said that crafts need to be removed from country fairs and treated in the same way as contemporary art.
Instead of seeing craft practitioners in their traditional homespun and fogeyish light, artists like Grayson Perry – the controversial cross-dressing Turner Prize winning ceramicist – should be the template for the industry.
“We’re getting it wrong,” said Prof Follett. “We don’t explain what the object embodies or what the thought processes are that go into it.
“Craft is a discipline like art and design, it’s just been lost from the lexicon of the visual language. And craft exhibitions are complicit in that. The public see craft as object-based and not about the artist’s thoughts or intentions.”
Prof Follett’s challenge comes as Scotland’s first ever national craft festival was launched in Dundee on Thursday. Starting in May, Craft Festival Scotland aims to challenge current perceptions around craft. The festival is the product of a five-year project on craft, Past Present and Future Craft Practice, at Duncan of Jordanstone.
Prof Follett called on craft exhibitions to “evolve” so as to treat crafts with the intellectual rigour they deserve.
“I have a problem with the craft exhibition ethos,” she said. “You have a series of objects put in cases and you can’t understand where they come from, or where they are going to. It’s a vacuum. You don’t know how to relate to it.”
Prof Follett draws a parallel with contemporary art. By shifting the public’s perception of craft, she said, we would discover that Grayson Perry – whose ceramic pots feature disturbing and comic vignettes of modern life – is “not the exception, but the rule in crafts”.
“We’ve got absolutely brilliant craft practitioners in Scotland, but because we are not valuing their intelligence and rigour they are not acknowledged … We acknowledge them for skilful making. It is the wrong criteria. We’re getting it wrong.”
To coincide with the launch of Craft Festival Scotland, a Future Craft Exposition has opened at Duncan of Jordanstone. Designed to showcase innovative Scottish craft practitioners, it features the work of product artist Geoffrey Mann.
For the display he designed a tea set warped into angry angles by the dinnertime argument between Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening in the film American Beauty.
“If you say the word ‘craft’ you instantly put yourself in the Sunday morning finger-knitting club,” said Mr Mann, who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in ceramics and glass. “But crafts are possibly even more experimental than contemporary art. There is never a wrong answer.
“I see crafts as a lab into which artists and designers can delve. That’s what I can do – I’m trained in ceramics, but I borrow a lot of techniques and ideas from anything – music, film. Craft is more accommodating.”
