Who counts,and is counted,in craft?

In their Introduction to this special issue on ‘Craft Economies and Inequalities’, the editors Karen Patel and Rajinder Dudrah acknowledge the important role of quantitatively informed research in revealing inequalities in access to creative sector employment. This research all too clearly makes visible what many of us can already see, namely that across the Global North creative employment is overwhelmingly dominated by people who are ‘white and relatively privileged’ (Patel and Dudrah, 2021), including in craft (Luckman, 2015; Luckman and Andrew, 2020; Patel, 2020a, 2020c, 2021). While the majority of my own research is qualitative, as someone examining cultural and creative employment it is difficult to completely avoid having to engage with (the limits of) statistics, especially when working with government, industry and community partners imprisoned in policy discourses that can overly privilege the so-called ‘hard’ evidence of numbers.

The kinds of information an organisation or government chooses to collect (or does not) and the form the questions and responses are allowed to take, says a lot about the priorities of any administration including what is deemed acceptable to overlook or exclude – that is, about what they think counts. British colleagues working with UK creative employment data note that the proxy that stands in for class identification is ‘Father’s Occupation’ (Brook et al., 2018). In Australia, it is ‘Local Government Area (LGA) of Residence’, with each LGA apportioned to 1 of the 10 levels in an Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage (IRSD). As proxies for understanding class, both these measures reveal little about the nuance of individual experience, but rather a lot about the cultural and class politics of these respective nations (the lingering British obsession with familial inheritance, and for Australia the national fixation on property ownership, or lack of it).

Certainly one thing such statistics are not really set up to understand is the modern reality of precarious employment. This is important for any discussion of craft and inequality, for much craft income generation occurs of necessity in the cracks between the neat statistical classifications: through self-employment, second (or third, or fourth) jobs, cash-in-hand or volunteer work, and work that can move variously between being understood as amateur or professional. It is in this complex balancing act of multiple income streams that much craft labour is to be found. Given the central role of official data in informing national policy settings, that the reality of increased employment precarity (not just for cultural and creative workers) is not always adequately built into the state’s official capacity to capture employment data really defies understanding. This is especially so given how COVID-19 has revealed as a key faultline in even relatively privileged societies the differences between those with more secure, white collar employment that can be done from home, and those at the casualised coalface of essential, and vulnerable, work. As we know, some are always more privileged than others.

So much like social security systems not being well set-up to account for the ‘feast or famine’ realities of much contract-based creative employment (Morgan and Nelligan, 2018: 137), many data collection frameworks still largely assume a model of Fordist secure employment as the norm. Largely hidden, however, in these statistics is the small, but important and hopefully growing, significance of alternative economic models for craft production: collectives, not-for-profits, social enterprises, volunteering, and/or micro-enterprises based on community networks. The simple reality is that it is difficult, though obviously not impossible, to generate a sustainable primary or main income from craft, yet this is the only model of craft work that is rendered particularly visible in many statistics. The demography of who can ‘afford’ to do this work and manage the risks that creative self-employment generally carries (Neff et al., 2005), when viewed solely through numbers represents a doubling down on the relative invisibility of the majority of craft work and the real diversity of craft practice when the ‘precarious and low-paid nature of most creative work means that those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are less able to survive in the field’ (Morgan and Nelligan, 2018: 4–5).

However, while I have largely dismissed them here, statistics do clearly have a place in informing our, and others’, understandings of craft work. This is something British craft advocates, led by the Crafts Council, are all too aware of, having had to fight for the ongoing inclusion of craft as a defined creative industry which the UK government collect data on (Luckman, 2015: 45–46). Importantly too, as the editors to this special issue note, statistics do lay bare creative employment’s exclusions (Patel and Dudrah, 2021). But on the other side of the same coin, statistics also have the potential to make visible activity not immediately evident, especially to researchers working empirically from within their own often mostly white middle-class networks. For example, despite the limits of the Australian census’ employment questions which only focus on one form of employment – your ‘main job held last week’ – what the last census does reveal is that in the week prior to data collection, 189 people who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) were primarily employed as Visual Artists (ABS, 2018a). To put this perhaps rather low sounding number in perspective, this represents 9.17% of all Australians employed that week in this capacity. With at this time only 3.3% of the total Australian population identifying as ATSI (ABS, 2018b) coupled with ATSI people being traditionally under-represented in all professions, especially those which are particularly desirable and thus hard to break into, this is not insignificant. It is even more notable when viewed next to the more craft-focussed or craft-inclusive figures: ATSI Australians comprised 5 out of 520 Potter and Ceramic Artists (0.96%); 15 out of 608 Sculptors (2.47%); 37 out of 1810 ‘Visual Arts and Crafts Professionals nec’ ¹ (2.04%); and 11 out of 353 ‘Visual Arts and Crafts Professionals nfd’ ² (3.12%).

If we look here to presence as well as absence, the question to be asked is what is happening in the visual arts space that craft-based practice can build upon? The answer (to which I do not have space to do justice here) is complex, but at its heart lies the decades-long success of Aboriginal arts centres which are ideally community owned and run, generally in locations remote from the large urban centres of Australia but within the artists’ own communities, and which collectively provide a means by which to realise economic, social and cultural benefits for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living on country. Increasingly, and offering a model for further growth, some art centres are selling items for sale that draw upon what we can easily identify as more craft-based practice, such as the woven items sold alongside canvas paintings produced by the artists of Bula’bula Arts (Central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory). ³ These hybrid (craft and visual arts) centres operate alongside others focussed more specifically upon on-country craft production, such as the Hermannsberg Pottery ⁴ (Western Arrarnta artists, Central Desert, Northern Territory), Tjanpi Desert Weavers ⁵ (Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council, working with women in the remote Central and Western deserts, Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia) and Ernabella Arts ⁶ (Pukatja Community, north-west South Australia) now producing pottery, but with a history that includes collaboration with the Adelaide city-based JamFactory to produce textiles for exhibition, including rugs.

Recently, craft across the Global North has had something of its own reckoning with its exclusions, especially on the basis of race. While there had been practitioners and other voices championing diversity in craft and drawing attention to absences long before the Black Lives Matter movement’s new levels of visibility and shared outrage in mid-2020 (Patel, 2020a, 2020c), there is now a palpable and genuine desire evident among key craft gatekeepers to do better and be more inclusive in this space (Patel, 2020b). This includes redressing histories of what counts as recognised professional craft practice. Across much of the 20th century, craft advocacy bodies and their memberships sought to align craft more strongly with art, and thus to ‘serious’ professional and accredited creative practice. Such a focus gave rise to multiple exclusions including those circumscribed by gender, class, but most notably of race and ethnicity. In many ways, the fight for credibility and respect for craft practice and knowledge remains just as alive today, but has fractured into a more diverse and inclusive range of voices, opening the door for the inclusion of some craft objects and practices at the highest echelons of creative institutional gatekeeping. As leading craft writer and thinker Tanya Harrod (1999) recently acknowledged, if she were to write The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century today, ‘studio craft would be scaled back and more attention paid to amateurs, to craft in industry, to vernacular rural craft, and to making within the Black and Asian communities’ (Harrod, 2020). In the same recent edition of the British Crafts magazine, Crafts Council Executive Director Rosy Greenlees used her ‘Opinion’ column to specifically address the need to tackle racism and the need to move beyond western European legacies in our understanding of what a craftsperson is. Quoting Jonathan Meuli’s chapter from The Culture of Craft, she notes that many of us across the Global North operate within highly limited understandings of the craftsperson as artist, that is a solitary, original individual (more easily captured in official data), rather than someone operating within a more complex making ecosystem, perhaps collectively and anonymously, and consciously aware of the ways in which their making techniques and aesthetics are part of a longer lineage of making (Greenlees, 2020: 14).

Greenlees’ evocation here of aesthetics reminds us of another key third party mediating ‘who and want counts’ in the craft marketplace – the consumer. While the Aboriginal Arts Centres I positively refer to above are ideally community owned and run, in reality, they tend to be largely managed by non-ATSI staff. As the administrative brokers facilitating the production, distribution and marketing of creative works for a largely non-First Nations consumer, a part of their role is to ensure that the market is educated in an understanding and appreciation of the particular cultural meanings of the work, while simultaneously ensuring production meets the aesthetic demands of this market. While all artworks produced within a centre may be ‘bought’ – that is to say, the artist is paid for their work – not all will ever be sold. ⁷ The issue of the politics of aesthetics – what is acceptable, desirable, in demand, and who gets to choose – remains a key challenge, especially for the more commercial end of the crafts economy. Drawing upon interviews with craft event organisers and promoters in Detroit and Toronto, Dawkins’s (2011) research has highlighted the ways in which aesthetics can operate as a cover for ‘ethnic cleansing’:

While she [the Detroit organiser] denied that the ‘ethnicity’ of the maker influenced their vendor selection process, clearly what she perceived to be signifiers of ethnicity stood out among the seemingly racially unmarked work of white crafters . . . although black crafters have applied to be in their show, ‘their aesthetic doesn’t fit in’ because ‘aesthetically, indie craft is very white.’ . . . According to a Toronto-based craft organizer I interviewed: ‘I think it’s odd when people submit work and they are of a non-white ethnicity, their work tends to mirror their ethnicity somehow’. (p. 268)

Patel’s (2021) research into the crafts in Britain as featured in this special issue similarly draws attention to ‘experiences of racism and microaggressions in craft spaces such as studios or fairs’. Craft’s commercial gatekeepers and consumers need to be made accountable for their behaviours here too, including of the ways otherwise progressive actions can have problematic outcomes (Bush, 2019).

Cultural studies researchers clearly need to remain attentive to the absences and erasures within craft, and cultural and creative practice more generally. But looking to effect change requires not just identifying the problem, it is important too to be on the look-out for the presence of possibility. Such presences not only mark opportunity, skill and ongoing making practice in the face of entrenched barriers but also potentially point to better modes of socio-economic organisation that can benefit us all, or at least those of us who agree that COVID-19 has surely finally made clear that ‘the game is now up on 40 years of neoliberalism’ (Banks, 2020, p. 652). Craft practice is often looked to as a model of ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013); work that is self-actualising, fulfilling, meaningful, in short, enjoyable; and work that leads to tangible, real-world results that are culturally useful and valued. While recently much of the focus in English-language crafts discussion has been on the individual craft worker as artist or micro-entrepreneur, historically much of this is work whose utility and focus have instead been towards community, collectivity and wellbeing. It seems timely to more fully reclaim this broader vision of what craft is and can do, and to make it count.