Professor Simon Olding, Director of the Crafts Study Centre

We wanted to celebrate the birthday of the Crafts Study Centre by reflecting on its long history through the exhibition Moving Forward: The Crafts Study Centre at 50 and a special birthday lecture given by Alison Britton, Chair of the Crafts Study Centre.

However, as life today finds us, as with so many other cultural organisations, having to postpone our plans and events, we hope this message from the Chair, a short essay and accompanying images and a panorama of the exhibition Moving Forward will suffice until we are able to open our doors and resume our plans. 

I knew in my early twenties, fifty years ago, that I wanted ceramics to be my working life.  My living was supplemented by teaching part-time, writing and giving the odd lecture.

I have, then, run in chronological parallel with the life of the Crafts Study Centre, though my actual connection began in 2006 when Edmund de Waal invited me to join the Acquisitions committee. I later became a trustee.

I developed a deeper engagement with the collection and the intrigues of the archives when I was asked to curate an exhibition in 2009. I chose from the three main UK public craft collections, all originating in the 1970s, for Three by One, including work from the British Council and the Crafts Council. One of the joys was grouping things from all three for a sequence of new photography, of the 'still lives' I had arranged on low plinths, that are the double spreads in the catalogue. This brief encounter of special objects from three sources for public view, gave new depth to my vocabulary of seeing and feeling that I still explore. Particularly with ceramics, I would say, holding them in your hands is half the game.

Chairing the trustees since 2014 has brought another kind of connection, and a reach into different skills.  Working with this gathering of experts and CSC staff I engage more now with other media and histories, and think about collaboration, decisions, and community, in new ways.

Alison Britton, Chair of Trustees, Crafts Study Centre

A BRIEF HISTORY

The Crafts Study Centre was founded as a charity on 1st April 1970 as a research and study collection of modern craft. The declaration of trust made on that day stated that ‘the object of the charity is the advancement of the education of the public in the artistic crafts’ and that this would be achieved by collecting and exhibiting the works of ’artistic’ craftspeople across subject fields which came to be determined as ceramics, textiles, calligraphy and lettering, furniture and wood, as well as archives across all forms.

Located first at the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, the collections transferred to Farnham in 2000 in a partnership with what was to become the University for the Creative Arts. The Crafts Study Centre is now an Incorporated Charitable Organisation and an accredited University Museum of Modern Craft in its own right and continues to fulfil its original objective. 

The seed of an idea for the Crafts Study Centre was sown after the death of hand-block printer Phyllis Barron in 1964. She bequeathed both her own collection of life-works and those of her late partner Dorothy Larcher to the etcher Robin Tanner, knowing ‘he will know what to do with it’ and indeed he did. Robin and his wife Heather curated three memorial exhibitions of their hand-blocked textiles and associated materials in annual succession. These exhibitions made it clear that a permanent home should be found not only for their work, but for quality work by other craftsmen. No small feat in a world pre-Crafts Council, and one that appeared to lack a wider interest in post 1930s or contemporary British Craft. In 1967, a group of friends and colleagues, some of whom later became founding Trustees, including Robin and Heather Tanner and Muriel Rose met to explore the possibilities of collecting, conserving and making freely available modern and contemporary craft for enjoyment and study.

Robin Tanner wrote that the Crafts Study Centre emerged ‘painfully, slowly and with characteristically English altruism and amateurishness . . . as a collection of the best work of the 20th century artist-craftsman. . . not just a museum collection, but one that, augmented by craftsmen’s records, writings and papers, could be handled and seriously studied and enjoyed’. 

The Centre’s founder curator Barley Roscoe MBE, wrote an essay on the history of the Crafts Study Centre which can be read in full on our website.

A BRIEF HISTORY

To celebrate 50 years, the current Trustees of the Crafts Study Centre and members of the Centre’s Acquisitions Committee each selected a group of objects that are of particular interest to them and their fields of study in modern craft and has been curated as Moving Forward: The Crafts Study Centre at 50. 

Objects and archives from across the range of the collections have been selected, including items from Bernard Leach’s source collection, lettering by Ann Hechle and Ewan Clayton, textiles by Mary Restieaux and Peter Collingwood, wooden carved bowls by David Pye and furniture by Alan Peters, as well as ceramics from William Staite Murray to Gillian Lowndes. In all, this creates a symbolic exhibition celebrating 50 years of assiduous collecting, exhibiting, research and writing: establishing a major contribution to craft history and understanding in Britain and internationally. It is a way of looking at the collections from the perspectives of the makers, curators and educationalists who have assembled the archives and objects for research and posterity, and it celebrates the strengths and depths of the Centre’s collections. 

As Alison Britton, the Chair of the Crafts Study Centre has written, the exhibition shows how ‘craft moves forward through its uses of history, looking and comparing, in pursuit of a skilful contemporary relevance’. 

Sir Christopher Frayling on Moving Forward: The Crafts Study Centre at 50

‘The founders of the Crafts Study Centre hoped that it would in time become a three-way resource: for makers, for scholars, and for a much-needed conversation between them; this fiftieth birthday is an opportunity for the CSC to enjoy its real achievements where all three are concerned – and to re-appraise these achievements in the light of a particularly dynamic half century of craft activity and craft thinking.’      

Whilst the exhibition is temporarily closed, we will be featuring some of the items from the collection on our social media channels over the coming weeks and a panoramic film can be viewed here. The publication accompanying the exhibition will be available to purchase as soon as the Centre reopens, but in the mean time, you can view a copy here. 

THE 50th BIRTHDAY LECTURE FOR THE CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE

Chair of the Crafts Study Centre, Alison Britton, was due to give a special lecture celebrating the founding of the CSC. This has been postponed until the Centre is able to be reopened to the public.

SOURCE MATERIAL:

The History of the Crafts Study Centre, Barley Roscoe

Essays for the Opening of the Crafts Study Centre, edited by Simon Olding and Pat Carter, Canterton Books, 2004

Moving Forward: The Crafts Study Centre at 50, Crafts Study Centre, 2020 

Three by One: a selection from three public craft collections by Alison Britton, Crafts Council in partnership with the Crafts Study Centre, 2009

1. Robin Tanner, Double Harness (Impact Books, London, 1987) p.168