Art's less glamorous sister has been slaving away for decades

CULTURE SHOCK:ONE OF THE reasons futurology seldom works is that culture doesn't go in straight lines. The would-be prophet takes current trends and projects them seamlessly into the future. But in the real world, people don't just follow trends. They also react to them. They get fed up with the way things are going and decide to do the opposite.

Thus it is with the idea of craft. Ours is the age of virtual reality, of the blurring of the old idea of a “thing”. Ours is also the age of globalisation, in which the distance between the maker of a commodity and its consumer can be immense. But these very conditions have produced a reaction. People want “things”: handmade physical stuff. And they are increasingly drawn to those things being situated in both place and personality, to the knowledge that a given person made this thing in a given landscape. And within this attraction, there is also the idea that you might yourself be such a person, that you don’t have to be a genius to be fulfilled by making physical things.

This reaction against the pacifying homogeneity of consumer culture can be seen in literature too. The astonishing success of Edmund de Waal’s beautiful family memoir, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, written by an exquisite potter and tied together by Japanese netsuke figurines, is one symptom. Others are Matthew Crawford’s

The Case for Working with your Hands

and Alain de Botton’s

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

. One of the finest thinkers of our time, Richard Sennett, has chipped in with

The Craftsman

, which extends the argument into ethics and politics: “Learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” At the same time, craft is also being recruited into industrial strategies. Ideas of the “creative industries”, which are central to European economic policy, subsume craft and design into “the knowledge economy” as engines for future growth.

On the one side, the idea of craft is associated with individual fulfilment and Enlightenment notions of citizenship. On the other, it is expected to generate growth and jobs and collective prosperity. These widely varying expectations point not only to the increasing importance of craft but to an increasing fuzziness about what it means.

The declaration of 2011 as the Year of Craft, by the Crafts Council of Ireland and Craft Northern Ireland, and this week’s meeting of the World Craft Council in Dublin are timely.

In terms of public prestige, craft is still seen as the plainer, less glamorous sister of art. Craft still  breathes the musty air of shops selling itchy Aran jumpers and ugly mugs. Yet the achievements of Irish crafts-people in recent decades have been every bit as distinguished as those of their more celebrated siblings in the arts. One way to get a brief sense of the revolution that has occurred is to consider Scandinavia.

The impetus for the development of craft and design in Ireland came from a report,

Design in Ireland

, published in 1962. It was written by five senior Scandinavian designers and delivered the shocking message that Irish design was a miserable backwater: “A remarkable feature of Irish life . . . is the

manner in which today’s Irish culture has developed a distinct leaning towards literature, theatre, the spoken word and abstract thinking, rather than creation by hand and machine and the visual arts – the other side of human activity in civilisation.”

By contrast, one of the speakers at Thursday’s crafts conference in Dublin Castle was Brian Keaney, an Irishman who co-founded and manages one of Finland’s leading design companies, Tonfisk. That Keaney is in Finland rather than Ireland raises its own questions about the educational and industrial infrastructure for Irish craft. But, at an individual level, Ireland is certainly producing world-class

crafts-people. To take just a few examples, the wood-turning of Liam Flynn and Roger Bennett, the furniture of the design duo Rebecca Yaffe and Laura Mays, John Lee and Joseph Walsh, Patricia Murphy’s dazzling textiles or Denis Brown’s mesmerising calligraphy are work of the same order as that

of our best visual artists.

Indeed, this work raises the question of whether the distinction between art and craft remains at all useful. In some respects, these crafts-people have to do everything well-regarded artists do – and then a lot more. Brown’s calligraphic images, for instance, function at high levels of abstraction and

spatial complexity. But they also demand a dexterity and finesse that is unimaginable to a Tracey Emin or a Damien Hirst.

There used to be a rough distinction to be made: craft was concerned with the functional – stuff that can be used for a non-aesthetic purpose – and art was not. But this distinction has been eroded at both ends. The modernist mantra that “form follows function” has influenced art. Conversely, much contemporary craft is not at all functional. And in any case this distinction was often rooted in class and gender rather than in practice. As far back as we can go, we find crafts-people – ancient Irish goldsmiths, for example – making things whose beauty far outweighs their practical function.

We find art that has very real practical functions, like maintaining the prestige, and therefore the power, of rulers. And in our consumer societies, where image is everything, the whole idea of function is far from simple.

Perhaps, though, the usefulness of the idea of craft lies in its very fuzziness. It covers a vast range of phenomena, from fixing up old motorbikes to executing the most intricately abstract designs, from knitting a jumper while watching

The Late Late Show

to producing objects of heart-stopping beauty, and from individual self-assertion against the demands of society to large social questions like citizenship and the creative economy. This very bagginess makes it capacious and democratic: there is a continuity between the woman knitting the jumper and Patricia Murphy’s textiles, between the old lad doing DIY in his shed and Flynn’s exquisite wooden bowls. Craft may contain a host of contradictions, but it also connects them.