Page 23 - Constructing Craft

nineteenth century when a perceptible decline in handcraft skills was becoming

evident.

The notion that life for craftspeople in earlier times was, if not idyllic, then at least
tranquil, and that the objects of the past were better in quality, remained strong well

into the twentieth century ‒ largely sustained by the writings of the founders of the
Arts and Crafts movement. The myth of the happy artisan became part of a

romantic reaction against the spread of industrial capitalism.

The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement helped the studio craft movement establish a

philosophical base. As one writer observed, the movement was ‘more remarkable
15
for what it inspired than for what it actually accomplished’. The founders of the
movement wished to provide examples of everyday objects of beauty made by hand

to demonstrate how the working environment could be made more dignified for
working-class craftsmen. The movement linked the apparent deterioration in

people’s lives with the loss of craft skills. These ideas were founded on a romantic
vision of work and life in pre-industrial Britain:

[It] was not an art movement in which artists sought to display
the world in new ways, but one that sought fundamental
changes to the organisation of Victorian society. The masses,
“the people”, must be rescued from sub-human living and
working conditions created by the Industrial Revolution. The
movement developed a golden-tinged view of medieval life as
simple, uncluttered and country-based, with the economy
centred on the household as the dominant production unit.
Handcraft was heralded as the ultimate redemptive mode of
production and the restoration and preservation of medieval
16
handicrafts became a national cause.

The movement was predominantly British but was copied in New Zealand. John
Ruskin was the movement’s philosopher and visionary while William Morris picked

17
up and amplified Ruskin’s ideas and later adapted them to his own socialist ideals.
Morris was a talented designer who believed that hand-made crafts could provide

happiness for both the maker and the user. In 1877 Morris maintained that the

separation of the fine arts from the ‘decorative or lesser crafts’ had been a relatively
recent event and that the decorative arts ‘properly reconstituted ... had a noble

Constructing Craft