Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the larger context within which Australian craftspeople and designer makers, like their colleagues elsewhere across the Global North, operate. On the consumer side demand for the handmade or artisanal and increasing interest in making processes themselves, is, we argue, part of a wider pushback against the impositions of the digital into our everyday lives, that is an attempt at a correction or seeking out of balance now that we are a generation into the normalisation of digital communication and other technologies. The chapter introduces the research project the book’s findings are based on including the research design, methods and data that inform the discussions to come. It also briefly outlines the strength of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander craft and designer maker activity.

FormalPara Feature Interview 1.1. Jane Scott, CEO, Craft Victoria (Interviewed June 2015)

‘Well one of the interesting things, when I started with the organisation [Craft Victoria], at one of my first openings here I just looked around and noticed there are young men here in the 20 to 30 age bracket. And it was like, I’ve worked in the arts my whole life, this is not a demographic that you get in an art gallery, and I started asking around, going “what’s going on?” And the feedback that I was getting from these people was that they’ve grown up on computers, and quite frankly they just want to get their hands dirty. And so there’s this whole new movement of people who resent the fact that they never learnt any skills at school, their parents couldn’t teach them how to do it, it’s like we’ve just been hell bent on removing ourselves from craft practice. And the cooking phenomenon has been one of those things where all of a sudden people are going, “Oh no it’s really […] fabulous to be able to actually prepare a meal”. And that’s great, but it’s been a bit like that with people [who now] can’t sew a button on a shirt, they’ve got no idea, it’s all been handed over to somebody else, you just don’t do anything [yourself anymore]. There’s all this younger generation going, “Actually I would like to know how to do stuff”. One of the workshops we ran over Christmas [was] on how to make a dress, from cutting out the fabric to hand-stitching the whole garment […] and there was all of this young group who were desperate to do that workshop because they’ve never actually picked up needle and cotton. […] they were desperate to learn how to do that and pick up those skills and the sense of achievement that these guys had that you can actually make your own clothes, who would have thought it! So it’s cyclical what people are interested in […] who would have thought that whittling wood would be back in vogue? There’s a whole lot of guys who are doing woodwork again and that’s a very interesting edgy area. People just want to actually be a bit more in tune with materials and their environment and taking some pride and not just be in this cash culture, throw away world. And that’s a good thing and a big part of that of course is just the attitude towards sustainability which is really prevalent in younger people and they’re just taking it through to the objects around them. So I think that’s part of the push.’

Craft and Making Today: The Rise of Craft and Design Across the Global North

This book is the culmination of four years of research undertaken across Australia into the experience of running a craft or design craft microenterprise. In many ways it, and the study it is based on, is the logical follow-up to the earlier book Craft and the Creative Economy (Luckman 2015a), which sought to capture and understand on a more theoretical level why we were witnessing rising interest across the Global North in craft and the handmade and what is at stake in terms of craft’s location within larger debates around what counts in the cultural and creative industries. Within this larger scholarly and practice context, that book also started to ask questions about what kinds of new work patterns and identities were emerging for creative workers—craftspeople in particular—in the face of the perfect storm of increasing casualisation, expectations of self-enterprise, portfolio careers, the rise of social media and internet ‘long tail’ distribution and desires for ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). However, this earlier discussion was based largely on an exploration of the publicly visible aspects of online self-marketing and performativity and a critical analysis of what was being sold via these sites, namely, lifestyles and idealised identities, as much as products. Drawing upon four years of field research and interviews, this book now puts flesh on those theoretical bones.

While large-scale manufacturing is increasingly moving to cheaper labour markets, making things—physical, material things—is re-gaining popularity. It is also important to acknowledge that this is largely but by no means exclusively a middle-class activity. The same is true of buying unique handmade items. The demand for bespoke, handmade ‘design’ (often used to denote a distinction from ‘twee’ or ‘old-fashioned’) craft is clear in the growing number of designer maker markets across the country and the exponential growth of online marketplaces for the handmade. This book presents findings from a major study of contemporary craftspeople and designermakers in Australia. Across this study, the idea repeatedly arose that people prefer to buy something handmade rather than mass-produced and available from shops around the globe—as an antidote to unsustainable globalisation, as a way to access unique and interesting items or at least in order to support local economies to which they can meaningfully belong (Fig. 1.1). Especially among those with a stronger identification with craft, a recurring motif was that people appreciate things that are not mass-produced and that they can have a more meaningful relationship with. The latter point was clearly supported by their interactions with customers. In an age of fast fashion, craft and well-designed objects are part of a rejection of disposability, of changing everything every six months. So, too, rare or heritage trades are experiencing renewed popularity and profile. They offer a sense of a larger story of making and connection to history, community and family. Similarly, repaircollectives and practices are on the rise, alongside increasing emphasis on the second-hand market as a more sustainable form of consumption. Nevertheless, it is again important to acknowledge that the issue of class location is important here; wearing or carrying an item featuring visible repair, for example, may feel less comfortable depending upon your experience of being able to choose, rather than being forced to do so out of necessity.

Fig. 1.1

Karen Warren (https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/tootsiehandmade) at work. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

This research project arose at a time of renewed interest in craft and making. In the context of the Global North, this current renaissance is being referred to as a ‘third wave’ (Luckman 2015a, 18). The first such wave appeared in the late nineteenth century in response to the Industrial Revolution, with the emergence of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. It was something of a counter-aesthetic and economic model, which then gave rise to local manifestations around the English-speaking diaspora and also in the Nordic countries. More recently, we need only look back to the 1960s and 1970s and the heady countercultural hippie days to craft’s last moment of growth and mainstream interest—the second wave. Consequently, paralleling the four years of the project has been the rise of a discussion, especially in the UK but elsewhere as well, on the ongoing value of even referring to ‘craft’ when references to ‘handcrafted’ and the artisanal are at near saturation point, used to sell everything from potato crisps to Christmas (Gibson 2014, 3).

Craft’s third wave has also been accompanied by an explosion in realitytelevision programming’s foregrounding of craft and making practices. Building upon successful (and generally relatively cheap) formats, the different programmes can appeal to a breadth of markets representing everything from—following the broad Ocejo-inspired (2017) definition of ‘craft’—whole-animal butchery to knifemaking, glass blowing, pottery and sewing. A non-exhaustive list of some of the current offerings includes The Great British Sewing Bee (UK, BBC 2013–), The Great Pottery Throw Down (UK, BBC 2015–2017, Channel 4 2019–), Blown Away (USA, Netflix 2019–), MAKE! Craft Britain (UK, BBC), Made in Great Britain (UK, BBC 2018–), Bespoke (Australia, ABC), Forged in Fire (USA, History Channel 2015–), The Butcher (USA, History Channel 2019–), The Repair Shop (UK, BBC 2017–), Making It (USA, NBC 2018–), The Wonderful World of Crafting (UK, Channel 5 2019–) and Craft Master (Ireland, RTE 2011–2013). Today, with many of us more distant than we have ever been from the actual everyday processes of making as a result of the offshoring of manufacturing and growth of white collar or ‘no collar’ digital/office employment, the appeal of watching people produce something from scratch taps into complex deep human drives, as well as contemporary anxieties.

Clearly, even what we know as contemporary craft practice has, in most incarnations, a long (often millennia long) and deep history and will continue well after the current zeitgeist appeal of craft and the handmade wanes. But it is important to acknowledge this larger contemporary context for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because the current popularity leads to market demand and hence, hopefully, greater opportunities for more craftspeople and designer makers to sustain a livelihood through their work, or at least make a decent side or top-up income (Fig. 1.2). Beyond the economic impacts, what is also significant here is the larger cultural context around what might be driving this interest and demand, and what this reveals about contemporary life and values, at least as experienced in Australia and similar industrialised and relatively rich countries. In this way, the findings from this study are relevant beyond just this geographic location. Indeed, while conducting the research, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to speak about it in a number of international contexts. With the exception of a couple of unique points of difference, the experiences of the makers we spoke to, and the wider marketplace of values and aesthetics within which they operate, largely reflect trends across the Global North and it is important to locate the study within this larger setting (the notable exceptions are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander craft and design and the specific economics of distance versus cost of living in Australia, which has impacted the significance of international Etsy-style online marketplaces as a game-changing distribution opportunity).

Fig. 1.2

Kath Inglis (https://www.kathinglis.com/) in her studio. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

Recently, a number of books have sought to capture what may be at stake here with the rise of interest in craft, the artisanal and handmaking generally. These titles tend to build upon themes first explored in some of the earlier iconic writing on not only the practice but also the poetics of craft and making. These earlier titles include David Pye’s ([1968] 1995) iconic The Nature and Art of Workmanship and its articulation of the ongoing implicit value of handmaking skills and deep materials understanding. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ([1990] 2008) study, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, explores why humans love being in what some may call ‘the zone’—that immersive space where the task at hand is both challenging enough to be interesting and rewarding and not so challenging as to be frustrating or unachievable. While not specifically about making, it also informs more recent thinking about immersion in, and as, a rewarding activity. Like those two works, although some of these more recent titles may be written by academics, they are also aimed more widely at an interested and increasingly educated audience who are clearly open to the ideas they present. That there is a broader market for such scholarly work at all is evidence of their timeliness and of a wider acceptance of the reality of, and search for answers to, the malaise with contemporary work and life they variously capture. Clearly then, for many, even beyond the community of craft and designer makers themselves, part of the answer to at least some of the problems of contemporary life is the idea of getting back to respecting ‘from scratch’ making and doing skills.

But perhaps the book that many first read that captures the essence of these subsequent titles at a practical, embodied level is one that was not written in any kind of scholarly context at all. Quite the contrary. Robert Pirsig’s ([1974] 1982) classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values offers an iconic fictionalised auto-ethnographic account of reconnecting with meaning, value and self through a physical journey that is profoundly and positively impacted through the self-sufficiency of being able to (re)build and repair his own means of transportation—his older-style and thus ‘knowable’ motor bike. For Pirsig’s protagonist, the privatised, corporate landscape of large-scale industrial production was the closed-off, de-humanising and de-skilling nemesis of meaning and quality, blocking people increasingly from the satisfaction that comes from do-it-yourself making. As he writes:

That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, ‘Get out.’ You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. ([1974] 1982, 15)

It is salutary to revisit this writing in the context of current concerns and anxieties around the impact of digital technologies. The production of the desirable technological gadgets most of us across the Global North and beyond take for granted today has been sent offshore to places such as China, where the exploitation of low-skilled labour and the environmental and human impacts of production are not so easily ‘happened upon’ by us.¹ However, the company headquarters (‘campuses’) that dominate locations such as Silicon Valley have much the same kind of presence, ‘whose purpose is unknown and whose masters you will never see’ (Pirsig ([1974] 1982,15). Certainly, the feelings of alienation and estrangement, of feeling like an ‘ant’ serving some larger, invisible master, remain powerful discourses reflecting the working lives of many people, even in the post-Fordist era. Today this situation is magnified through the incredibly speedy and profound changes in both our working and wider lives that have been brought by digital technologies over the past few decades. Today we still need cultural analysis and reflection upon the ways in which ‘All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land’, even despite digital technology’s strong early links to the US West Coast hippy dropout culture of the Whole Earth ′Lectronic Link (WELL).² In this context it is not surprising that participatory activities such as classes and making retreats are a growing part of the contemporary craft consumer landscape and an important additional income-generating activity for many contemporary craftspeople and designer makers. That the black and white boxes that are our smart phones, computers and other gadgets are by design and warranty restrictions made to be untinkerable, and that the inner workings are off limits and unknowable to us, is salient here. In post-industrial societies, so much of what is now central to our daily lives effectively possesses its own ‘NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT’ warning. Is it any wonder then that so many people—makers and consumers both—are seeking to reconnect with craft and making?

Arguably, the first book of the more contemporary moment to speak to the current zeitgeist was Richard Sennett’s (2008) The Craftsman. Here, Sennett takes up Pye’s concerns with the relationship between quantity and quality, between uniformity and irregularity. He situates the writings of leading British Arts and Crafts Movement thinker John Ruskin in the context of the relatively new challenge for the Victorians of an abundance of material goods, which itself led to a challenge that remains all too pressing today: ‘waste’ (to be discussed in greater length in Chap. 7). Referring to the wasteful practice of replacing (‘upgrading’) older items that are still operating as designed, such as cars and computers, Sennett (2008) writes:

One explanation for such waste is that consumers buy the potential power of new objects rather than power they actually use; the new automobile can speed a hundred miles per hour, even if though the driver is usually stuck in traffic. Another explanation of modern waste is that consumers are more aroused by anticipation than by operation; getting the latest thing is more important than then making durable use of it. Either way, being able so easily to dispose of things desensitises us to the actual objects we hold in hand. (110)

But he is more optimistic about the potential of the handmade, handcrafted object that certainly offers the maker, but even the purchaser, a particular ‘potential power’. Aspects of what this might be emerge in his later discussion of the writings of American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, some of whose key works, he notes, started being released just after Ruskin’s death. He recounts Veblen’s ‘characteristically ornate prose’: ‘The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted for marks of superiority, of serviceability, or both’ (Veblen quoted in Sennett 2008, 117). He paraphrases a further insight of Veblen’s that would ring true for many for the makers we interviewed for this project: ‘The good craftsman is a poor salesman, absorbed in doing something well, unable to explain the value of what he or she is doing’ (Sennett 2008, 117). In this age of social media the ongoing challenges of needing to market not only what one does and produces but also one’s very self are aspects of the contemporary craft and designer maker experience that we will be exploring in greater detail in Chap. 8.

Pirsig’s evocation of being able in some way to control or be master of one’s own destiny through having the tools and skills necessary to meaningfully and impactfully interact with one’s own immediate environment and the objects needed to sustain life in it clearly resonates with the current wider cultural appeal of craft as a verb as well as a noun, even if it is not obviously about what we may see as capital ‘C’ craft. It also connects to another key contemporary text, Richard Ocejo’sMasters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (2017). A wider and similarly male-dominated study of ‘craft’ practices in New York, it explores the contemporary urban landscape of cocktail bartenders, craft distilleries, men’s barbers and whole-animal butchers that are all themselves experiencing significant growth as part of the wider trend towards demand for the artisanal. This includes both its final products and—interestingly and more profoundly—the rekindling of interest in and knowledge about the required skills and processes underpinning such making. Indeed, a particularly valuable line of discussion in his book concerns how, in an environment where skilled manual knowledge around many kinds of craft practices is becoming scarcer but their products increasingly valued, trades previously identified largely as male working-class employment options are being recast as desirable middle-class career trajectories:

Today’s expanded service sector has not just segmented in terms of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ tiers, with high-skilled knowledge-based jobs in one and unskilled manual labor-based jobs in the other. The picture is more complicated. Good versions of typically low-status, manual jobs also exist in small segments, or niches, within service and manufacturing industries. The jobs in this book have been recoded as ‘cool,’ creative ones, with opportunities for young workers to shape tastes, innovate, and achieve higher status. They seek out these jobs as careers instead of other jobs in the new economy with higher profiles. For them, these jobs are vocations, or callings, providing meaning through materially oriented, craft-based manual labor, in front of knowing peers and an accepting public. (Ocejo 2017, 18)

All these activities occur and derive their value within a growing wider field of what Ocejo refers to as an ‘artisan economy’ of small-scale manufacturing; the businesses ‘in the artisan economy, such as craft brewers, coffee roasters, and knitters, are based on shared understandings of quality, authenticity, and the importance of “localness”’ (Ocejo 2017, 20).

The evocative attraction and rewards of ‘working with one’s hands’ are also at the heart of Matthew Crawford’s 2009bookShop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. (The 2011 European edition was released in the UK under the title The Case for Working with Your Hands, Or, Why Office Work Is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good.) With both editions notably but in different ways featuring a motorcycle on the cover, echoing Pirsig’s earlier book (Crawford takes pride in being a practising mechanic as well as philosopher) Crawford situates a rekindling of interest in making practices as a form of frugality. This emphasis occurs partly because he was writing in the early days of the Global Financial Crisis, but as he goes on to make clear, there is much more to this rise in interest at this time in history than just making do in hard times:

Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy. (8, emphasis added)

It is in access to information about making processes that the complicated enabling status of digital technology in all of this starts to reveal itself; the current moment of widespread interest in and access to analogue making processes is profoundly enabled by digital technology. In Making Is Connecting, David Gauntlett (2011) valuably connects the upsurge of interest in analogue making to the easier availability of ‘how-to’ instructional materials and information-sharing and problem-solving communities made possible by digital communication. He attributes the shift from a ‘“sit back and be told” culture towards more of a “making and doing” culture’ to the growth of Web 2.0 technologies (8). This is important, for it acknowledges that the digital is far from being material making’s ‘other’. Though handmaking may be valued for the ways in which it embodies non-digital skills and the values of traditional craftsmanship, it is nonetheless now completely enmeshed with the potentialities of the digital at virtually all levels of production and consumption. One of the more notable findings emerging from this study was the degree to which even professional makers upskill, diversify their practice and/or refresh their techniques through online advice and instruction, rather than looking to formal education or face-to-face instruction. This finding offers opportunities but also challenges to traditional providers of such education and support. It also leads to potentially greater democratisation of access to craft and design expertise, with the capacity to be able to commit to formal study provided by a public or private education provider less of an essential prerequisite for entry into many kinds of making. On many levels, this is clearly a good thing. But as those who operate in it know and as we shall see across the pages of this book, the contemporary craft and designer maker market is an increasingly crowded one, rendering making a sustainable income from creative practice more and more challenging.

Crafting Selves Today: The Project and Data Informing This Book

The Project

The ‘Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-economy (Crafting Self)’ research was funded through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project funding scheme (project number DP150100485). Focused on the contemporary craft and designer maker micro-economy, the core focus of the project was to explore the changing nature of contemporary creative work. Given the strong presence of women in the craft and design craft sector, the project sought explicitly to offer a feminist analysis of how the growth of entrepreneurial modes of self-employment is experienced by different creative workers, including notably how growing numbers of primary caregivers negotiate what is often home-based paid work alongside their unpaid responsibilities. In this way, we sought to contribute to a growing body of valuable feminist social scientific scholarship into creative work that takes up McRobbie’s (2016) call for us to ‘re-think the sociology of employment to engage more fully with entrepreneurial culture and with the self-employment ethos now a necessity for survival’ (4) (Fig. 1.3).

Fig. 1.3

Pip Kruger (http://www.pipkruger.com/) and friend folding tea towels for sale. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

The primary aim of the project was to determine how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a creative microenterprise and, with it, the larger relationship between public and private spheres. A key research question was: what are the ‘self-making’ skills required to succeed in this competitive environment? Specifically, the research sought to:

• identify the attitudes, knowledge and skills required to develop and run a sustainable creative microenterprise, including the acquisition of making/production skills, business skills and acumen, personal capacities and decision-making around self-marketing;

• analyse the spatial and temporal negotiations necessary to run an online creative microenterprise, including the ways in which divisions of labour are gendered; and

• examine how the contemporary creative economy contributes to growing ethics-based microeconomic consumer and producer relationships that privilege small-scale production, environmentally sustainable making practices and the idea of buying direct from the maker.

Although people who identified as craft practitioners were a core focus of the project, we also chose to include self-identified designer makers in the study in order to build a picture of how some people seek to grow their making business. Certainly, ‘designer maker’ is a term increasingly employed in the contemporary craft and design marketplace, especially among those looking to make a full-time living from their practice. It marks those makers who may undertake original design and prototyping themselves, but who, in order to scale-up their production in ways not always possible for a solo hand maker, outsource some or all subsequent aspects of production to other makers or machine-assisted manufacturing processes. In reality, as we have written in other contexts (e.g. Luckman 2018), while we did find and speak with a number of designer makers as part of the study and some of their stories will be featured here, we definitely encountered more artists, craftspeople and makers who were just as happy not to grow their business or practice ‘too big’ for a number of personal and professional reasons. These included:

• a lack of identification with the idea of entrepreneurialism, its promotional requirements and its assumptions that all economic growth is good;

• the desire to focus on handmaking and the natural limits to business growth this imposes, as part of maintaining what, for them, is a healthy work–life balance where running a creative business does not become overwhelming;

• stage of life-related reasons for starting a creative business, such as taking up or resuming creative work as part of retirement planning or as part of a larger lifestyle ‘downshifting’ into artisanal work;

• a commitment to quality handmaking as an environmentally sympathetic response to a world of ‘too much stuff’ and climate crisis; and

• making as doing ‘what they love’, and what they love is not running a business—many makers are still fundamentally artists at heart (see Luckman (2018)).

As is already evident, in this project it was important to recognise that not all handmade micro-entrepreneurs are at the same stage of their career or have the same origin story. Therefore, the qualitative, mixed-methods approach underpinning the project consisted of three parallel data collection activities: semi-structured interviews with established makers; an interview monitoring arts, design and craft graduates each year for three years, as they sought to establish their making careers; and a historical overview of the support mechanisms available to Australian handmade producers. Across the four years of the project, we undertook one-off interviews with 20 peak body and industry organisations and 81 established makers, and followed the progress of an initial 32 emerging makers as they sought to establish their careers (32 interviews in Year 1, 27 follow-up interviews in Year 2 and 19 follow-up interviews in Year 3—a total of 70 interviews).³ These makers represent a range of craft practices (see Table 1.1) and a range of ages (see Tables 1.2 and 1.3). The study was explicitly national, and we spoke to makers and peak organisations in every state and territory (Fig. 1.4).

Table 1.1 Area or object of making practice of interviewees (established and emerging makers)

Table 1.2 Age range of established maker research participants

Table 1.3 Age range of emerging maker research participants (as of last interview)

Fig. 1.4

Bella Head (http://bellatextiles.com.au/) at her loom. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

A number of sampling approaches were employed. Underpinning the selection criteria was the need to capture as large a diversity of people and experience as possible, across geography (urban, suburban, regional, rural, remote); practice and business model; age; race and ethnicity; and gender. We make no claims that the sample was completely representative, but in its scale and scope, it does capture an incredible variety of stories and knowledge. Indeed, all up, the 179 professionally transcribed interviews have generated more than 150,000 words, which has been both a boon and, well, certainly not a curse, but definitely a challenge in writing this book as there are so many valuable stories to tell and so much richness of experience to share. Not all of it is positive; the challenges of running a creative business were rarely far from the surface for even the seemingly most successful maker. Balancing work and other aspects of life, especially giving the time people wanted to children and partners, as well as the frequent financial and other impositions upon family necessary to get a creative business up and running, are real challenges facing most makers. But across these pages, there is also much joy, fulfilment and pride in work well done.

We identified potential emerging maker participants through 2014 graduate exhibition catalogues from art, design and craft higher education programmes around the country. These were sourced either from publicly accessible sections of university websites or directly from the university involved, following disclosure of how they were to be used. Where graduates provided contact details as a part of an exhibition catalogue, these details were included in our database. Where graduates had not provided this information, contact details were obtained through a public internet search using Google. Initially, we mistakenly presumed that most of the recent graduates would be young, but what was immediately striking was how many craft returners there were, that is, people returning to their love of making in mid-life, having had other jobs and/or brought up children. Established makers (generally those with five years or more of making and selling experience) were identified on peak organisation websites or through dialogue with them, via Etsy and other online retail outlets (including sometimes their own websites), as stall holders in designcraft markets, or through snowball recommendation by previous interviewees. They were then cold-called. Through the peak body and industry organisations, we approached all the Australian Craft and Design Centre (ACDC) members across Australia, as well as other iconic craft and design organisations such as the JamFactory, Sturt, Australian Tapestry Workshop and Tjanpi Desert Weavers. We also sought to include representative examples of some of the newer retail designer maker and craft market operators, such as Bowerbird and Finders Keepers.

In presenting this interview material we have honoured the approved Human Research Ethics protocols and consents the project was conducted under. Given the personal nature of much of the discussion, we have erred further on the side of caution and sought to de-identify participants when discussing what we as fellow human beings see as potentially sensitive content, even where permission to identify the speaker was granted as part of the interview process. We hope that this is accepted by our incredibly valued participants in the spirit in which it was done, namely, by continually asking ourselves the question, ‘Would we be comfortable having this quoted and discussed academically in our name?’ One of the key reasons we sought to trace graduates along their path to creative employment was to capture the full breadth of experience. Unfortunately, as we know, this includes moments of failure as well as success. Although rich and unique insights are available from talking to established makers who are well into their journey and still on it, they are not always the full picture, and this approach certainly does not capture the experiences of people who have had to give up their dreams, at least for the time being. But many tensions and personal crises were revealed even among the established maker cohort, hence the decision, in whole sections of this book, to anonymise the speakers.

Race, Ethnicity and the Contemporary Craft and Designer Maker Sector in Australia

The project sought to involve as wide a cross-section of the Australian craft and designer maker community as possible. Nevertheless, it largely ended up replicating the racial profile of the scene which, as commented upon elsewhere both in Australia (Luckman 2015a) and in other national contexts (e.g. the USA [Dawkins 2011] and UK [Patel 2019]), is dominated primarily by people from Anglo-European origins. Despite the social and environmental awareness underpinning contemporary craft cultures, the contemporary craft and designer maker economy in particular remains marked by its whiteness. For example, a 2012 report into the UK commercial craft sector found that it was markedly unrepresentative of the contemporary national racial and ethnic population mix, with 93.4 per cent of its respondents identifying as white, while only 3.5 per cent ‘were from black, Asian, mixed and Other backgrounds’ (BOP Consulting 2012, 7). While makers of colour are highly visible in craft microenterprise emerging out of foreign aid, microcredit and other strategies for economic sustainability, within the Global North across all levels of the craft and designer maker continuum, the picture of making is predominately a white one. This is true, too, not only of the demographics of the makers but also of a majority of the buyers and thus the very aesthetics of the goods.

However, this is not to dismiss or erase the presence of makers of colour in the Australian craft and design craft sector. It is important to acknowledge that in the making stories of those from beyond Anglo-European origins, connections to family and cultural histories of making (e.g. of ceramics in China) remain significant. So, too, and connected to this is the role of family endorsement of the choice to pursue a creative career. However, an element of rebellion against familial cultural expectations was also present, in particular among those recent graduates who had come to Australia to pursue university study and found themselves still living in Australia and away from direct family influence.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Craft and Designer Making

Alas, although the project explicitly set out to be truly national and to represent a mix of urban, regional and remote experience, none of the makers interviewed were of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background. This is not to say we did not approach more makers and organisations about possible involvement, but for a mixture of reasons, as can be seen in Table 1.4, none of the makers we spoke to identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. We did interview Michelle Young, manager at Tjanpi Desert Weavers, an enterprise of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, and we drove the beautiful stretch over 100 kilometres west from Alice Springs to Hermannsburg to speak with the Hermannsburg Potters, but that interview could not proceed because of a bereavement in the wider community. In their different ways, both these organisations speak to the strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander craft and designer making at present. Makers from both groups are represented in the collections and exhibitions of some of the country’s most iconic arts and cultural institutions, while work by other makers from the groups is available for sale in the gift shop of these same establishments. The scaling-up across a range of gallery-centred as well as commercial practice possibilities through these mostly community-run art centres is a classic crafts studio model that can meld fairly seamlessly with the art centre’s social enterprise focus. For Tjanpi Desert Weavers, this even extends to being able to provide financial support in return for work for women who, for various reasons, find themselves in town (Alice Springs) and want to get back to country. Some of the works that arrive in the Alice Springs office are not yet ready for retail sale in the urban coastal centres. Additional employment can be provided to women who can work to refine these items to prepare them for sale, saving them from having to find other means to make their way home.

Table 1.4 Established and emerging maker responses to ‘ethnicity (self-described)’

It is in this sector, too, that the decentralised geographies of international online craft and design retail are being realised more fully in Australia via online sales, including on sites such as Etsy. An extension of the art centre model for creative production in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities has enabled artists to make a living while staying on their (frequently remote) country. In our project we have identified more than 50 social enterprise art centres with at least some engagement with craft and design. For example, in the Central Desert there are Ernabella Arts, Hermannsburg Potters—Aranda Artists of Central Australia, Yarrenyty Arltere Artists and Maruku Arts. The Tiwi Islands of Northern Australia has Manupi Arts, Bima Wear and Tiwi Arts. In Arnhem Land, also in Northern Australia, there are Maningrida Arts & Culture, Elcho Island Arts, Bula’bula Arts and Bábbarra Women’s Centre. In the Kimberley Region of North West Australia, there are Waringarri Aboriginal Arts and Nagula Jarndu (Saltwater Woman) Design. In Torres Strait, North-eastern Australia, there are the Gab Titui Cultural Centre and Moa Arts. Working across a spectrum of creative practice and price points, what unites this work is that it is globally unique. Printing unique local designs onto fabric which is sold either as raw fabric or sewn into clothing, accessories or household items is the focus of a number of these organisations and this kind of item has the additional advantage of being relatively lightweight and easy to post. The expenses associated with distance in this context become not only something to be expected but indeed part of the whole experience of purchasing work from these makers, based as they are in their own unique geographies, which are significant to the product. Similarly, whether it be in the maker’s stories that they represent, the design elements employed, or the actual materials used in their production, these products tell a distinct story of place and send this out to the world.

Chapter Overview

In many ways, Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy is the companion book to the final public report on the project, released in early 2019: Crafting Self: Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-economy (Luckman et al. 2019). As a result of our own sectoral, institutional and funding requirements, this is written as an academic book, but one we sincerely hope remains usefully accessible to a wider audience. It is able to offer more depth and nuance to the findings introduced in the Crafting Self report, having the space, especially, to present a lot more of the words of practitioners themselves. For this reason, a feature of this book is the extended interview excerpts that elaborate the discussion through the voices of participating makers and other key sector stakeholders themselves.

Following this introductory chapter, Chaps. 1 and 2 will explore the motivations and inspirations, as well as stage of life-related opportunities behind why people seek to pursue a making-based creative career or small business. It considers the importance of early positive exposure to working with one’s hands (including at school), as well as the value systems giving rise to increased support for small-scale artisanal economies today. Chapter 3 will provide a brief historical overview of the models of training available to support skills development for the applied arts in Australia, from colonial cottage industries to the educational experiences of the contemporary craftspeople and designer makers who participated in this study. Chapter 4 examines how our research participants viewed, described, structured and funded their making enterprise. Building on this, Chap. 5 explores attitudes towards handmaking versus other forms of production, including outsourcing and the use of digitaltools.

Chapter 6 explores the marketplace for craft and designer maker goods sold in Australia; where are people selling and how, and what does this reveal about contemporary socio-economic relationships? Chapter 7 focuses on maker’s concerns over the impact of their practice on the environment and thus the strategies they put in place to minimise this. It looks at upcycling and other materials supply chains that aim to minimise waste, as well as how crafted items and skills have a role to play in minimising the amount of consumption people potentially engage in—quality not quantity and the importance of repair. The final chapter acknowledges the game changing role of the internet, and social media in particular, in broadly enabling the growth not just in Australia but elsewhere of the craft and designer maker sector. Specifically, in the Australian context, it acknowledges the role of Instagram as a key communicative and marketing platform and the more ambiguous status of Etsy, as well as the additional labour burden online marketing and networkingplaces on craftspeople and designer makers. It finishes on a final note acknowledging, but also problematising, the ongoing role of locality-based support organisations in the digital age.

Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy is broad but also deep. This said, there may be some topics we have excluded or touched upon only lightly because we have written on them previously in a number of other scholarly outputs (see, e.g., Luckman 2020a, b, in print, 2013, 2015a, b, 2018; Luckman and Andrew 2018a, b, 2019). But in the chapters to follow, we seek to outline key findings, acknowledge the divergent experiences and the breadth of craft and designer maker creative enterprise nationally and situate them in terms of the local contexts and international trends and forces that variously inflect the Australian making landscape.