An Endless Rant on Craft

Bangle Silver 2012 Excerpt from Jewellery manifest (2019) “An Endless Rant on Craft impacted on my practice in a way that goes beyond visual aesthetics, to encompass new conceptual and symbolic values, allowing the work to be viewed as both an object and a poem. The intention is for it to be viewed as a form of ‘concrete’ concrete poetry… …the work, and therefore the words, take (verbatim) a pub-centred rant with friends about the value and nature of craft, and where it sits alongside the disciplines of fine art or design. The discussion centred around the opinion that craft holds a certain outsider status when compared with these cousins. It sought to break free of these hierarchies, to fight through the arguments and revel in the sunshine of a fairer democracy, parity or even outright disciplinary anarchy... … whilst still linear like a sentence, the words do not correspond to an orthographic plane: twisting on a three-dimensional axis, they become no more than short snippets of text to be read at a time. Little overheard fragments of dialogue.This singling out of words, phrases, allows them to translate a visualisation, a reflection on how we talk and listen: the overheard and conversational visualised…