arts and crafts

ARTS and CRAFTS

For those interested in exploring arts and crafts, there are numerous resources available, including books, online tutorials, and local workshops. Engaging in crafts can be a fulfilling way to express creativity and connect with traditional techniques. Whether it's woodworking, pottery, or textile arts, the possibilities are vast and rewarding.
By understanding the history and principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, individuals can appreciate the value of craftsmanship and the beauty of handmade objects in their own creative endeavors.

ARTS and CRAFTS Exhibition Society

The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society mounted its first annual exhibition in 1888, showing examples of work it hoped would help raise both the social and intellectual status of crafts including ceramics, textiles, metalwork and furniture. Its members publicly rejected the excessive ornamentation and ignorance of materials, which many objects in the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been criticised for. For many years in Britain exhibitions mounted by the Society were the only public platform for the decorative arts, and were critical in changing the way people looked at manufactured objects.

MORRIS

Morris only became actively involved with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society a number of years after it was set up (between 1891 and his death in 1896), but his ideas were hugely influential to the generation of decorative artists whose work it helped publicise. Morris believed passionately in the importance of creating beautiful, well-made objects that could be used in everyday life, and that were produced in a way that allowed their makers to remain connected both with their product and with other people. Looking to the past, particularly the medieval period, for simpler and better models for both living and production, Morris argued for the return to a system of manufacture based on small-scale workshops.

Although the Arts and Crafts movement evolved in the city, at its heart was nostalgia for rural traditions and 'the simple life', which meant that living and working in the countryside was the ideal to which many of its artists aspired. Increasingly, many left the city to establish new ways of living and working, with workshops set up across Britain in locations including the Cotswolds, the Lake District, Sussex and Cornwall. All these places offered picturesque landscapes, an existing culture of craft skills and, importantly, rail links for access to patrons and the London market.

Arts and Crafts makers based in rural communities both revived craft traditions and created employment for local people. This kind of development meant that the Movement endured longer in the countryside than in the city, and had a more significant impact on the rural than the urban economy. Significantly, the Arts and Crafts community was open to the efforts of non-professionals, encouraging the involvement of amateurs and students through organisations such as the Home Arts and Industries Association. And it also created an environment in which, for the first time, women as well as men could begin to take an active role in developing new forms of design, both as makers and consumers.