Page 204 - Constructing Craft

Davis made it plain that most young people were unprepared to break away from

the infrastructure that had developed around craft.
In the developed countries, we have a rapidly growing body of
young people bent on escaping from the city to find a simpler
way of life. To do this they have to escape their dependence on
sophisticated industrial machines. The revival of crafts is a
conspicuous part of this movement, but the crafts have
descended not directly from pre-industrial village or cottage
industry, but via the revival of that era by romantics who hated
machines. Mostly these young people are ill equipped to cope
because of their urban background which saddles them with
narrow specialization and an ignorance of relevant but forgotten
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technology.

Davis’ grim outlook was probably a minority view, but because of his high profile
and his persistent advocacy of such ideas they were respected, if not followed

faithfully. Davis lived by the strict criteria he set ‒ extracting his own materials and

building his own machinery – and taking his skills to Peru in an attempt to alleviate
the poverty there. His book on the subject, The Potter’s Alternative, was published
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not long after he died in 1986.

Barry Brickell

In New Zealand, one of the most passionate advocates of self-reliance and simple
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working methods was the potter Barry Brickell. Brickell was a regular contributor to
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the New Zealand Potter magazine and also the subject of many articles. In the
first edition of the magazine in 1958 he called on readers to establish a guiding

philosophy of life that was ‘more natural [and] honest’ than that lived by most
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people, which he felt was materialistic, possessive and artificial. He suggested an
approach to work that he would follow religiously throughout his working life. ‘If we

could work for the satisfaction of ourselves rather than be slaves to the “powers that
be”, we would at least be starting a firm fertile tradition. Art [and presumably craft

were] ... no more than the product of honest, good work’. Like Davis, he claimed
that: ‘With prepared, commercial materials, machines and men come between you

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and your work.’ By the mid-1960s he became even more polemical.
I presume to make money one has to work. Men are equipped
with bone, muscle and nerve which enables them to do this, but
they have something else as well. This is the infinite capacity to

Constructing Craft