Page 16 - Constructing Craft

craftspeople. Few authors have shown more than just a passing interest in the

social, cultural, political and economic aspects of the studio craft movement.
Peter Cape alone was prepared to offer a comprehensive explanation as to why

the interest in craft in New Zealand grew so dramatically after the Second World
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War. His first book, Artists and Craftsmen in New Zealand, published in 1969,
contained a standard format by featuring twenty three well known craftspeople
but also included Cape’s analysis of the craft movement. He suggested that the

craft movement, along with developments in art, followed the world-wide revival

of interest in craft ‘logically as part of our process of development’. He approved
of the renewed interest in the crafts and made a prediction: ‘As we grow from the

relative simplicities of post-pioneer living into a more complex and sophisticated

society, and as we grow more positively aware of our national identity, we will
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become more willing to accept the expression of these things in the arts.’ His
statement demonstrated his certainty, as early as 1969, that he was writing
about an ‘art’ form and foreshadowed the debate that entranced and irritated

craft writers in the 1980s and 1990s.

By 1973 Cape was suggesting that some crafts had a role to play in defining the

national character, or even an epoch in New Zealand’s history.
[T]he poet Allen Curnow was reported as saying: “The good
poem is something we may in time come to recognise New
Zealand by, not something in which we need to recognise
obvious traces of New Zealand we know.” This may have been
Curnow’s hope for New Zealand poetry in the 1940s but in the
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1970s it has been realised in New Zealand pots.

Cape’s second book on craft, Please Touch: A Survey of the Three-Dimensional

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Arts in New Zealand, demonstrated in its title that the author was very
confident that his earlier claims that craft was an art form were proven. In the

first chapter of the new book he reflected on his comments ten years earlier

when he believed that during the 1960s the crafts had ‘offered a convenient
duality which meant that their purpose could be justified on either functional or
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aesthetic grounds.’ Cape was convinced that the gap between art and craft
had almost disappeared because of ‘the greater certainty in taste which has

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developed among the viewing and buying public.’ Cape died in 1979, just
before his book was published. His writings on craft demonstrate, however, his

Constructing Craft