Page 140 - Constructing Craft

tenuous. After nine years away from New Zealand he suggested in a 1968 speech

that the growth of the craft movement was not an isolated event.

It would be too much to claim that this renaissance has been
due mainly to the work of Gordon Tovey and his associates a
quarter of a century ago, but I cannot believe their efforts were
without influence beyond the school walls. Not a few of our
artists and craftsmen once worked in the Education service,
and the most flourishing of New Zealand’s modern handicraft,
pottery and weaving, are the very ones we concentrated on in
the primary schools. Whether or not the work in schools
uncovered and stimulated future practitioners is uncertain …
But I am completely convinced that the schools have helped to
produce a generation of people who appreciate painting and the
crafts through having practised them, however humbly, in their
childhood, and who have first-hand understanding of the
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satisfaction of creating things of beauty.

Beeby was being modest as he knew that by 1968, as an unintended result of ‘art in
education’, many of the students and tutors who had been a part of the programme

were making a living from their art or craft. He also believed that the same
programme might have provided an audience for their work: ‘And, on a more

material level, [those who experienced the new art and craft programme] are willing
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to buy them [arts and craft] and to see a fraction of their taxes spent on them.’ The
art programme in schools was intended to improve education across the curriculum

but it had also sown the seeds of the studio craft movement both in terms of
practitioners and (Beeby hoped) consumers. The close association of craft with art,

rather than the trades, also encouraged the middle-class to embrace it.

Craft Education for Adults

Craft education at the secondary and tertiary level did not progress as rapidly as it
had in primary schools. Secondary schools remained locked into examination

schedules that restricted the experimentation that had permitted a considerable
degree of freedom in primary schools. Furthermore, the art/craft divide seemed to

produce an insurmountable cultural barrier within secondary schools. There also

seemed to be no clear pathway between secondary school and later training.
Apprenticeships in studio craft did not exist and through to the mid-1970s most craft

Constructing Craft