Page 173 - Constructing Craft

It was appropriate that this first important exhibition of craft in
New Zealand should deal with fundamentals. The collection
represented, primarily, good workmanship and the unconscious
beauty that results from the use of natural materials worked
with sympathetic skill and understanding in the production of
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useful objects.

The title of the review, ‘Rural Crafts in Retrospect’, and the use of words such as
‘fundamentals’, ‘good workmanship’, ‘unconscious beauty’, ‘natural materials’,

‘sympathetic skill’ and ‘useful objects’ all suggested that the best craft in Britain was

functional and rural. The review appeared to be giving guidance to the emerging
craft movement in New Zealand.

Craftspeople also listened to visiting craftspeople and those who settled
permanently in New Zealand. During the 1950s and 1960s there was a flood of

immigrants into New Zealand. Many were drawn by the policy of the New Zealand
government to pay most of their costs but others were probably attracted by the

belief that New Zealand was essentially a rural society ‒ Britain as it once had
been. By the end of the 1960s, even though the rural population was declining

proportionately and absolutely, there remained a strong belief that New Zealand still

retained its frontier qualities and remained rural in character. Harry and May Davis,
and another English couple, Jack and Peggy Laird, arrived with thoughts of

establishing craft workshops in a rural situation despite, in the case of the Davises,
being subjected to promotional films at New Zealand House in London that depicted

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New Zealand as a modern industrial nation. The Davises and the Lairds were
already experienced craftspeople and had informed their thinking about the role of

craft in a modern society over many years in England. They were practical people

who were not locked into the romantic ideas about the type of pre-industrial
paradise discussed earlier. They did not fear machinery; indeed, Harry Davis wrote

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a book on how potters could build their own machinery. Nevertheless, they saw
value in some aspects of the post-war craft movement that called on Arts and Crafts
ideas about locating craft workshops in rural settings.

Constructing Craft