The Power of Making

The recent exhibitions at the V&A and the British Museum (the Power of Making and Grayson Perry) got me thinking about 'making', how we value you it and the place it has or could have in our culture and economy...

The recent Power of Making exhibition at the V&A offered a snapshot of 'making in our time' and showed how traditional skills like crochet and knitting can be re-imagined as crochet bears (Shauna Richardson) or Sandra Backlund's futuristic knitted dress.

The lesson of these objects seems to be - "making doesn't have to be just useful, it can also be fanciful and out of this world."

Which is great and inspirational but in the end making (and it was interesting how the exhibition used this word rather than the more loaded 'crafting') does have a purpose; and sometimes when making fails to follow these rules it can come unstuck. I know from personal experience that the ceramic eye patch must be extremely uncomfortable to wear and that as a maker you would be most unlikely to persuade the RNIB to stock it.

And that brings us to the central failure of the show for me: it's positioning of making as art, which of course it is in many ways but it does also have to be useful and this is nothing to be ashamed of.

This kind of 'arty craft' reflects a more widespread lack of confidence and malaise in UK making and manufacturing more generally; it's as if we feel that at some level our making is just not good enough to stand up for itself and has to masquerade as arty, one off pieces. To put it more crudely, something like, "We're not good enough to be industrial manufacturers and compete with world class producers, so lets just take up crochet and become a nation of amateur makers."
This theme continues with Grayson Perry's show at the British Museum, where he has made his own versions of objects he has chosen from the BM archive. But rather than having the confidence to just let the pieces speak for themselves, he covers them with information and text so that I feel that their own intrinsic meaning is crowded out: there is certainly little space left for the viewer's thoughts and interpretation.

Where single pieces, like the turtle shell bonnet or the black knitted dress from Greece are allowed to just be themselves I found them very powerful.

My question, having seen these two shows is: could 'making' help establish a new democracy of makers (one of the aims of the V&A exhibition) while at the same time make a real contribution to UK manufacturing, inspiring more Emma Bridgewaters and generating new jobs at the same time.

An idea for another show, perhaps....