Paul Harper will be our keynote speaker at the Purchase conference. He came to our attention through a paper he delivered at the New Craft, Future Voices conference in Dundee, Scotland, in 2007. The paper was titled “The Poetics of Making.” Paul’s keynote address will be based on this. I asked him if he would send us a brief introduction and preview and he has kindly sent this dispatch.

David Richardson has asked me to write something for the blog, by way of an introduction. This is always a problem for me as, like many people who work in the arts, I have a ‘portfolio career’, in which I do a great variety of things. I frequently find myself in meetings, with a rising sense of panic as we go around the table introducing ourselves. Everybody else seems to be “the director of this” or the “head of that”, or, in other circumstances, they can identify themselves with a particular practice, “I am a Potter”. I always have to struggle to remember what hat I’m wearing today, how best to represent myself.

Perhaps I should reflect on the development of my interest in the “poetics of making”, as it draws on many sources across my various practices as furniture maker, researcher, teacher, arts professional, writer etc. In some ways I was originally attracted to the idea of the crafts before I settled on my particular craft of woodwork. Having met an older generation of craftspeople who impressed me as being fully engaged with the world through their work. These were highly educated and cultured people who placed equal importance on the rightness of a technique or of a gesture in their making as on other forms of knowledge or expression. So, from the start I saw craft as more than a category of object, but as a world of ideas and a mode of being. As a practitioner I found myself in a community of critically engaged makers who were articulate in expressing their fascination with the minutiae of their crafts, and who, through their particular knowledge, found common cause with other specialisms. Their interests were at once specific and wide-ranging and eclectic.

My perception was that there was very little contemporary writing that reflected the discourse of these craft makers. Then, in my postgraduate studies, I encountered a great deal of theoretical writing about craft that had grown over the last 15 years or so. Some of it seemed useful, but in much of it I failed to recognize my own practice or my community. Furthermore, I found a lot of it very hard to read. On the other hand, as I began to organize my own learning and to formalize my reflections I found interesting developments in other disciplines, and other kinds of writing that illuminated my practice and evoked my experience of making.

One part of my work that is very important to me is my role as a director for ALIAS, an organization that provides support for artist-led groups in the southwest. The Arts Council of England, our principal funder recognizes that these groups represent a vital part of the arts infrastructure. ALIAS aims to nurture artist-led activity by providing a critical context, resources and advice to artist led groups through an advisory service, a website – www.aliasarts.org – and a series of seminars. The seminars are driven by the concerns that we encounter in the groups that we work with. Having found that there was a feeling amongst many makers that there was a theoretical discourse about craft that was happening elsewhere, at one remove from their experience and the concerns that were central to their practice I have organized a series of symposia called practice and reflection. The aim of the series has been to create a positive forum for practitioners to engage with current debates in the crafts and to explore ways in which theory could be more closely informed by practice. Whilst other conferences and symposia tend to be led by institutions, the venues are chosen for their association with a particular group of craftspeople rather than with the academic community. There is an aspiration to begin to engender a confident critical community of makers who can contribute their voices to an expanded and enriched discourse about craft.

The presenters speak from different positions, but the emphasis is on practice and several themes have become evident, which have informed the on-going programme. A central theme has been language, the need for a way of talking and writing that fits with practice and experience, that could facilitate a useful dialogue between practitioner and theorist. Such a dialogue is vital to the emergent research culture in schools of art and design.

Practice and reflection has provided me with a forum in which to test the developing ideas about craft that underpin my research and teaching, and indeed all my other work. Through these events I have had access to voices and modes of practice that are still largely absent from other fora.

Although I made furniture for around 20 years, sadly, I no longer have a professional practice as a maker, largely because I have simply found it easier to earn some kind of living in other ways. Nevertheless, my making continues to underpin all of my work. Not simply in the focus of my interests, but in my mode of working, in the way that I find myself assembling the elements of my knowledge and experience; in my habits of reflection, and so on…

So, whilst I cannot in all honesty introduce myself as a furniture maker, I am, at the least, a fellow traveller and very honoured to be associated with your society.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 5:47 am and is filed under FS After Hours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.