Looking with fresh eyes: designer Shai Akram proposes ways to reclassify a craft collection
13 August 2021
Shai Akram. Photo by Kat Green
What happens when you categorise crafted objects by the actions involved in their making? That was one of the questions that designer Shai Akram asked herself when delving into the Crafts Council Collections to shed new light on the relationship between man and machine. ‘Making is an enduringly complex verb,’ says the co-founder of Studio Alt Shift, a design and research studio for spaces, furniture and lighting. ‘It defies the categorisations or segregations of being craft or industrial.’
We gave Akram unlimited access to the Crafts Council Collections over a six-month period, as part of her Artisa Curatorial Fellowship with our organisation. As she began thinking about illuminating new ways to categorise the works – collected over 50-year period – it quickly became clear to her that a fresh language was needed to understand the sequence of actions that transform a material into an object, rather than just the traditional museum classifications for craft objects, of material and discipline. This would help give us a new notion of the interconnections between craft and industry.
‘The outcomes of either can be identically repeated en-masse or as one-offs, they can be enormous or tiny, the materials can be local or from a thousand miles away,’ Akram explains. ‘Instead of looking at differences and definitions, I propose to look at characteristics that could unite and enhance the understanding of the making of objects and work from there.’
Focusing primarily on single-material objects, Shai began classifying over thirty items by three themes. ‘Variations on a blank’ is about repetition, featuring items that share a starting point or a common and uniform repeated part. Examples include two jugs and a bowl made in 1998 by Gwyn Hannsen-Pigott – objects that started with the same elements, but became different typologies by the addition or omission of a simple action, like creating a spout in the rim. Meanwhile ‘disrupting a process’ incorporates items that show mind and machine working together or a deviation from the rules to challenge the limits of tools and technology. She cites the experimental work of Peter Collingwood from the 1980s.
Lastly, ‘Off-plinth’ includes items or making techniques removed from their expected birthplaces (a factory floor or foundry workshop, for example) into new environments that shift the focus from outcome to process. Among them is Shin and Tomoko Amuzi’s Wire Frame Reversible Bench, 2006, which takes cues from the manufacturing processes used to make shopping baskets and trolleys, and Jane Atfield’s 1992 Felt Chair and Footstool, which harnesses the cushioning qualities of industrial felt – usually used to buffer impact between moving parts of machines – in the context of furniture.
Akram’s research and selection of objects – which would have formed an exhibition at our Pentonville Road gallery had COVID-19 restrictions not delayed its opening – are now presented online. Her classifications are less about making distinctions and more about identifying characteristics that show the cross-pollination between man and machine, craft and industry – and how they’re inextricably linked. ‘We’ve travelled through a period of fascination with machines and then a rejection in favour of hand-made craft that celebrates flaws, but now there’s a splicing of humans and machines, a melding together,’ she adds, referencing the iconic film character of Edward Scissorhands. ‘You are the making – there’s no separation between yourself, your tools and your art.’
“Instead of looking at differences and definitions, I propose to look at characteristics that could unite and enhance the understanding of the making of objects and work from there”
The Curatorial Fellowship is a partnership between Crafts Council and Artisa Foundation, which incubates creative and professional development in the arts. The fellowship aims to offer a mid-career curator the chance to challenge their practice and perceptions about making, and re-contextualise the Craft Council Collections. Adds Annabelle Campbell, our curator of creative partnerships and programmes: ‘It’s been refreshing to see a different outcome - partly enforced by COVID-19 but also informed by Shai’s research and the need for an ongoing, provocative debate that presents new possibilities. Exhibitions are a point in time, they are a moment, whereas this curatorial research will embed in ways we don’t even know yet.’
Since co-founding Studio Alt Shift with Andrew Haythornthwaite in 2006, Akram has taken an interrogative approach to materials, processes and contexts through projects such as furniture collections, interiors for The Chin Chin Laboratories in London and research for Corian DuPont. We look forward to seeing the influence of her Artisa fellowship on her own work in future.
