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organisation to comment on behalf of craftspeople it was left to Peter Gibbs to

comment on the irony of the events. Gibbs, reporting less than three year later,
observed in the New Zealand Listener that the fears of craftspeople had been
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justified. He noted that: ‘Amba [sic] (the Arts Marketing Board of Aotearoa) was
quickly adapted to the prevailing philosophical view, that craft and art should be

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indistinguishable.’ According to Gibbs, much of the money for marketing had been
spent setting up AMBA and the emphasis on the art side of craft art had been to the

detriment of the former.

None of a whole phalanx of people making things with a high
level of skill – potters, furniture makers, carvers, jewellers,
embroiderers, blacksmiths – are now likely to receive arts
council help. The council can say that it supports craft by
pointing to spending on craft art, which is not quite the same
thing.

At the same time, polytechs focus on design, drawing, art
history and creativity, but many claim they don’t have the time
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or expertise to focus on training in skills and material.

Gibbs pointed to the successful 1992 Seville Expo as an example of the level of
expertise that the craft movement had produced, but he feared that the skill of those

craftspeople would not be passed on: ‘The emerging craft artists of the next
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generation have immense creativity, but they don’t have the background skills.’

There was anger within the CCNZ because some Board members believed it could

have traded its way out of the financial crisis, but there was also anger directed at the

CCNZ by former members for its apparent incompetence. Judy Wilson Goode,
describing attempts by a new national craft organisation, Craft Aotearoa, to wind up

the CCNZ’s affairs and gauge what national craft organisations wanted, stated:

‘Nobody could have guessed ... how negative and intransigent the craft community
had become. The Crafts Council had certainly fallen out of favour with many parts of
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the craft community.’ When the anger had subsided, some writers looked back at
the CCNZ to identify characteristics of the organisation that had contributed towards

its failure. Lawrence Ewing, a potter and tutor, recognised that the CCNZ had:
[A]lways been seen as an organisation which somehow brought
together people who either had no other craft organisation to
which they could belong or were more “professional” rather than
recreational in their orientation to the crafts. CCNZ might also

Constructing Craft