Page 242 - Constructing Craft

Sponsorship

By the late-1970s Crown Lynn’s role in the field of corporate support of the arts

shifted away from supporting studio pottery. The company quietly discarded the
design awards – including the ceramic award – despite Crown Lynn’s continuing

dominance in ceramics. The gap was filled by the Fletcher Brownbuilt Pottery
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Award which had started in 1977 with sponsorship from Fletcher Holdings. The
formation of the award was an example of the importance of social networking for

the studio craft movement and the value that influential supporters could bring to the
movement. The award emerged from a conversation in 1975 between Trevor Hunt,

the General Manager of Fletcher Brownbuilt, his wife Ailsa and their friends, the

potter, Ruth Court and her husband Ralph while they were all on holiday in Fiji. Ruth
Court hoped the award might generate income to finance premises and a teaching

facility for the Auckland Studio Potters group. The first exhibition was not well
supported and later comments reflected the wariness with which potters

approached such corporate sponsorship. Warwick Lidgard, the President of the
Auckland Studio Potters, the organisers of the exhibition, hoped ‘that next year

[1978] potters will put aside their personal reservations towards sponsorship and

enter into the spirit of presenting to the public a high standard of exhibition pottery,
and at the same time support a potters cause initiated so generously by a business
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firm.’ Lidgard’s plea received a positive response. The awards continued and grew
into one of the most valuable, in terms of prizes, and most prestigious ceramic

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awards in the world.

Threats to Crown Lynn

In the late 1980s the lifting of protection brought to an end many of the economic
advantages Crown Lynn had enjoyed. Unlike studio potters, however, change had

been more difficult for Crown Lynn because of its size and structure. Over the

preceding ten years changing fashions; the saturation of the New Zealand market
by its own tableware; the inflation-induced deterioration in the spending power of

many New Zealanders; and the imbalances in the economy that Horace Belshaw
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had warned about had all contributed to a decline in profits.

Constructing Craft