Makers and critics choose their favourite Crafts Council shows from the last 50 years

To toast the Crafts Council's 50th anniversary, we're taking a journey back through time with a little help from Crafts magazine and a selection of leading creative lights. For Crafts' September/October 2021 issue and for another story celebrating its 250th edition, the magazine invited makers, artists, critics and curators to choose their favourite Crafts Council exhibitions over the last five decades, held in our own gallery or at partner institutions. Read on to discover their picks. Here's to another 50 years!

The Maker’s Eye (1981)
Picked by Tanya Harrod, author, design historian and columnist, for Crafts' September/October 2014 issue:

'Craft entered my consciousness when a new friend, the potter Carol McNicoll, took me to this Crafts Council exhibition. Thirteen makers, covering all generations, had been asked to "define the idea of craft from his or her personal experience". The show looked wonderful but suggested that "craft" had a complicated unstable identity. Was it a lute made by Stephen Gottlieb (chosen by David Pye) or a Triumph Bonneville motorbike (chosen by Emmanuel Cooper)? Was it the trompe l’oeil of Andrew Lord’s Round Grey Shadow coffee set (chosen by Alison Britton) or a humble Sussex trug (chosen by Enid Marx)? Here was unknown territory, a world, if not quite a discipline, a field apparently undecided about itself. The Maker’s Eye led me to try to unravel craft’s mysteries in my book The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century. As protean craft continues to change its identity, the quest goes on.'

Power of Making (2011)
Picked by John Makepeace, designer and educator for Crafts' September/October 2014 issue:

'The Crafts Council’s and V&A’s Power of Making anticipated the growing use of digital manufacture for craft objects. Computer-aided design has been widely adopted by artists and designers. While the transfer of this information to production is relatively straightforward in two dimensions, the making of more organic three-dimensional forms, especially in wood, remains a challenge because the cost of programming and processing is extraordinarily high in comparison with that of hand-work. This echoes the issues confronted a century ago, when innovative designs intended to give visual expression to the new Machine Age were often made by hand. We are on the cusp of another revolution.'

Woman’s Hour Craft Prize (2017)
Picked by Maria Amidu, artist and writer, for Crafts' September/October 2021 issue:

'To celebrate the 70th anniversary of Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4 partnered with the Crafts Council and the V&A to create a national prize for craft. Twelve finalists were chosen from 1,500 submissions, and their work – which spanned willow-weaving to metalwork – showed the relevance of contemporary craft to a wide audience. Ceramic artist Phoebe Cummings won the £10,000 award with Triumph of the Immaterial, her raw clay fountain that slowly dissolved throughout the course of the exhibition, and eroded some of the lines between craft and conceptual art. Little did we know just how prescient the Woman’s Hour series of broadcasts about the importance of craft would be three years on when the pandemic hit and much of the nation resorted to making at home to cope with this unprecedented situation.'

The Jewellery Project (1983)
Picked by Caroline Broadhead, artist, for Crafts' September/October 2021 issue:

'This pivotal event showed the generosity and trust of the New York-based Knapp family, who gave the artist Susanna Heron and photographer David Ward an open brief to purchase a collection of jewellery for them from what they saw as "an exceptionally vigorous phase in the development of jewellery in non-precious materials". Their selection of radical, wearable objects was shown alongside their own work at the Crafts Council's gallery. Ward’s essay in the catalogue examined these pieces within a broad context, making links with ideas in performance art, fashion and photography. The subsequent reviews and letters in Crafts voiced strong opinions about what qualities were expected from craft, and jewellery in particular. It showed how crucial particular boundaries or categories were to some people and how different, or even arbitrary, they were to others.'

The Craftsman’s Art (1973)
Picked by Fiona MacCarthy, writer and historian, for Crafts' September/October 2014 issue:

'I remember The Craftsman’s Art as the defining moment taking the crafts in Britain out of the realms of the well-turned salad bowl into new areas of technical inventiveness, narrative richness, political subversiveness. It altered our concept of what crafts could be. The exhibition was held at the V&A under the auspices of the then newly formed Crafts Advisory Committee, precursor of the present day Crafts Council. The 470 exhibits were emphatically not batch production: these were specials. The exhibition set out to be a "celebration of the craftsman’s art rather than the craftsman’s craft". It introduced new makers to the general public, many of them young, some of them still students. The exhibition represented a radical rethinking, highly controversial in the craft world of the time but defended by the exhibition organisers: "If the space age, as these decades have been called, has destroyed traditional horizons, it has surely enriched not only our techniques but our perception of the beauties of the universe." This was indeed the moment when the crafts started reaching for the moon.'

Virtual Collect art fair (2021)
Picked by Magdalene Odundo, potter, for Crafts' September/October 2021 issue:

'After the pandemic began in early 2020, the rapid rise in use of digital platforms showed the resilience of the craft sector – makers produced work in isolation, which was then exhibited virtually by galleries to people all over the world. Previously, for many practitioners, displaying crafts online seemed futile. It is natural for buyers to want to handle these objects, because it is only through their tactile essence that they can truly relate to them. However, the virtual experience of Collect 2021 introduced us in the craft community to a new world of technological possibilities. Collect 2021 delivered beyond our expectations, and proved that the 17-year-old fair can continue to evolve with the times.'

Jacqui Poncelet: New Ceramics (1981)
Picked by Peter Ting, ceramic artist and co-founder of Ting-Ying Gallery for Crafts' September/October 2021 issue:

'When I visited this exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery, then at 12 Waterloo Place, I was a student at Farnham, and the work I saw there shaped my own first forays into the ceramics world. The entire experience is etched in my mind: the pieces I saw first, those I examined in detail – with their many layers of glazes and rich colours – and that slow but explosive feeling of revelation that "more is more" and that one can have it all. Jacqueline’s groundbreaking show also made me realise that the idea is paramount and that materials and techniques are a way to express it.'

The Glass Show (1993)
Picked by Adrian Sassoon, gallery owner, for Crafts' September/October 2014 issue

'The Crafts Council’s exhibition in Islington was absolutely what a major show should be – an exciting, revealing and pleasurable presentation of the best of the best. The best of British work, to inspire those in this country to admire, collect, trade in, or perhaps make, glass. By 1993 I had seen a great deal of contemporary ceramics but less glass. In that show I saw work by artists I had never heard of before, but I soon made it my business to meet many of them. They were at various stages in their careers, but the exhibition showed accomplished work made through as many glass processes as possible. It inspired me to collect and to deal in the work of many of those artists. In retrospect, I can see that the selection panel included Dan Klein – the nicest, kindest, wisest contemporary glass enthusiast-with-a-commercial-twist of his generation. I haven’t seen any museum exhibition in the capital city of our country of such high-quality on any aspect of British craft objects since this one in 1993 – have you?'