‘I want to be judged on my work,I don’t want to be judged as a person’: Inequality,expertise and cultural value in UK craft

Introduction

Nearly anyone can become a good craftsman. The proposal is controversial because modern society sorts people along a strict gradient of ability. The better you are at something, the fewer of you there are. [. . .] Craftsmanship doesn’t fit into this framework. (Sennett, 2008: 268)

In this quote from The Craftsman, Richard Sennett (2008) argues that almost anyone can become good at craft. This, he says, is because the routine of craft and its relationship with materials draws on the basic principles of childhood play, and ‘almost all children play well’ (p. 68). While this may be true, certain types of crafts, and certain types of makers, are valued more highly than others in the Western context. I explore the lived experience of these hierarchies through interviews with 18 women makers from ethnically diverse backgrounds based in the United Kingdom. All of the interviewees are working as professional makers either full-time, or part-time alongside other craft- or arts-related work. Their accounts provide an insight into the experience of inequality in UK professional craft. I understand craft as the creation of three-dimensional (3D) objects using materials. Examples include jewellery, textiles, woodwork and ceramics, which are the areas the interviewees primarily work in.

The irony in Sennett’s quote at the beginning of this article, of ‘anyone’ becoming a good ‘craftsman’, is not lost on me here. The figures demonstrate that indeed not everyone can come to be regarded as a good craftsperson, otherwise the UK professional craft sector would ostensibly be more representative of the British population. According to the Crafts Council’s (2020) Market for Craft report, ‘the sector has to go further to ensure craft is an inclusive space for all ethnicities and genders, with the proportion of black and minority ethnic (BAME) makers remaining unchanged compared to 2006 at 2-4%’ (p. 8). In their book on inequalities in the UK creative and cultural industries, Orian Brook et al. (2020) show that of those working in secure craft occupations, just 22 percent are women, and 92 percent are white (pp. 63–66). Susan Luckman and Jane Andrew, in their work on the craft economy in Australia, note how contemporary craft is ‘marked by its whiteness’ (Luckman and Andrew, 2020: 18).

Why are there inequalities in crafts, and how can they be addressed? As highlighted in the introduction to this special issue, while there has been a significant uptake in research which highlights inequalities in the creative industries, much of this work has focused on the media industries and the arts, with relatively little focus on professional craft. In this article, I focus on how the prevailing conditions of inequality in craft are shaped by social and cultural structures which determine what, and who, is of value. The work of Janet Wolff (1981, 2006) highlights how aesthetic standards are socially constructed, determined by patriarchal judgement criteria that exclude women and people of colour. These aesthetic standards are produced and reproduced within capitalist structures where whiteness is ideological (Skeggs, 2019; Virdee, 2019) and shapes how certain groups of people are deemed to be more valuable than others. I argue that it is especially difficult for makers from marginalised groups to be regarded as experts in their craft, not because of their perceived aesthetic knowledge or practical capabilities, but mostly because of their gender, class and the colour of their skin. This ‘snarling vine’ (Skeggs, 2019) of race, class and gender entraps anyone who is not white, and in the context of craft, these value hierarchies reproduce the inequalities and whiteness of the sector.

In previous published work, I have discussed the idea of the expert in cultural work (Patel, 2020), where I have argued that expertise is inherently linked to power and that these power relations shape the conditions of cultural production and reception, contributing to inequalities within the creative and cultural industries. In that work, I focused primarily on professional artists, who often did not self-identify as experts, mostly because expertise as a term is generally associated with rationality and bureaucracy (Prince, 2014). As such, the figure of the expert is at odds with the figure of the ‘genius’ artist (Patel, 2020). However, I suggest that the concept of expertise can help us to rethink how cultural objects – and their producers – are valued. In this article, I apply this thinking to issues of cultural value and inequality in craft, in conjunction with Janet Wolff’s (2006) work on community evaluation. I argue that judgements about expertise and cultural value in craft need to be located within specific communities, and be reflexive and contingent. A consideration of craft expertise, of the skill and mastery in creation of a craft object, can help to inform contextualised evaluative judgements and attempt to detach them from exclusionary aesthetic criteria. Such an approach can help us to think about how inequalities can be addressed, rather than simply highlighting that inequalities exist.

The structure of the article is as follows: in the next section, I outline the theoretical work which informs how craft expertise is conceptualised in this research. I then introduce the methods used, before going on to discuss the experiences of the women interviewed. I analyse their experiences in relation to the social and cultural conditions which preserve existing hierarchies in craft. Finally, I discuss Wolff’s concept of community evaluation as a potential way to address these inequalities, by doing away with restrictive and prejudiced value judgements, focusing on the craft expertise of the producer.

Expertise and inequalities in craft

The concept of expertise is of interest here because it can help us take into account both the material conditions of craft and the makers involved in this research, and the wider power structures at play in determining who, or what, is of value in craft. As I have argued elsewhere, the idea of the expert as a powerful, authoritative, and mostly white and male figure helps to reinforce hierarchies within cultural work (Patel, 2020). This is because much research on expertise in creative and cultural work focuses on policymakers (see Prince, 2014), or critics and intermediaries (see Nixon and du Gay, 2002; O’Connor, 2015; Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2014) and not the creators. Such work affirms the cultural expert as a powerful authority figure, with the social and cultural capital to determine the career pathway of an artist or creator. This process is detailed in The Rules of Art by Pierre Bourdieu (1996), who described how the success of an artist is determined by external forces: ‘the ensemble of agents and institutions which participate in the production of the value of the work via the production of the belief in the value of art in general and in the distinctive value of this or that work of art’ (p. 229). For Bourdieu, artists and works of art are produced within the cultural field, which has a set of rules about what types of art and artists are to be consecrated. The intermediary is responsible for unearthing and promoting the work of the artist. Thus, Bourdieu’s account places the creator as subject to external forces, with little room for resistance or potential change (Born, 2010). In this article, I suggest that more attention should also be paid to the practical, aesthetic expertise of professional makers. I conceptualise aesthetic expertise as a knowledge of aesthetic codes and classifications, as well as skill in mastering the techniques to produce a work of aesthetic value that is recognised and legitimated (Patel, 2020). This definition of aesthetic expertise can arguably inform an understanding of craft expertise too, as it also involves practical skill and aesthetic knowledge, and recognition and legitimation by others in the craft sector, including craft organisations, commissioners, galleries and collectors.

The figure of the expert in judgement became increasingly prominent in craft during the latter part of the 20th century, when craft was increasingly aligned to fine art aesthetics during the Arts and Crafts movement and the work of William Morris in the early 20th century and the work of the Crafts Council later on (Luckman, 2015). As such, professional craft practice in the United Kingdom became highly valued and associated with fine art. ‘Master craftsmanship’ became a marker of excellence, skill and expertise. Although anyone can seemingly develop craft expertise, as mentioned in the quote by Sennett at the beginning of this article, very few ostensibly ‘make it’ as a ‘master’ of their craft, as it requires not only practical skill but also knowledge of aesthetic conventions (Pye, 2010). In professionalised craft, the expertise of the maker needs to be recognised and valorised by the relevant ‘experts’ in the field, but such value judgements are often exclusionary, based on criteria and conventions which are racialised, gendered and classed. These hierarchies of value reproduce inequalities in professional craft, leaving the craft expertise of marginalised groups undervalued and misrecognised.

Such hierarchies are evidenced in Annapurna Mamidipudi’s (2019) work on handloom weavers in South India. Mamidipudi highlights the ‘innovative practices’ (p. 241) of the weavers, describing their skills and expertise which thrive despite existing hierarchies which ‘keep millions of handloom weavers and craftspeople in the global South at the bottom of the financial, social and epistemic pyramids’ (p. 241). For her, handloom weavers ‘stand in the shadow of deep divisions – science/craft; modern/traditional; educated expert/illiterate labourer’. Handloom weaving is associated with the past, rather than the future. These divisions are further entrenched when ‘knowledge owned by dominant social groups is privileged over others’ knowledge, thus reinforcing existing hierarchies’ (p. 246). Mamidipudi argues that for handloom weavers, the explication of their tacit knowledge is important to challenge entrenched notions of handloom weaving being a traditional and less valuable form of practice, because their tacit knowledge is not adequately recognised. Handloom weaving is considered to be a ‘lesser’ form of craft, as are many forms of craft which are traditionally associated with women and the domestic environment, such as knitting, crochet and embroidery. Roziska Parker (2010) discusses the cultural downgrading of textile crafts which occurred during the Arts and Crafts movement. During that time, the split between art and craft had associated gender and class connotations which ascribed art to middle-class practice, and craft to working-class practices which mostly took place in the home and by women. In the contemporary context, Susan Luckman (2015) notes how such forms of textile craft have gained popularity during the 2010s as part of what she describes as the ‘post-Etsy handmade economy’ (p. 12), but the dominant image of this newer ‘maker movement’ is mostly white, middle class and originating in the Global North.

The literature highlights how craft made by women and people of colour is considered to be ‘lesser’, but there is little empirical evidence of the lived experiences of these hierarchies and even less consideration of how these hierarchies could be addressed. In the following sections, I discuss these experiences using the interview data from participants in this research, before drawing on the work of Janet Wolff to explore how craft expertise and value judgements can be reframed.

Method

The focus in this article is the UK professional craft sector, because this is where the research project which informed this article is situated. I carried out semi-structured interviews with 18 women makers from ethnically diverse backgrounds, whose ages ranged from their early 20s to mid-60s. All of the interviewees were British and have family origins outside of the United Kingdom, predominantly from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. The women were based in various locations including London, Birmingham and Newcastle, and most of them were either working full-time in a studio or doing part-time jobs such as teaching and consultancy alongside their craft. Most of them had some sort of formal training in art and craft, mostly through University courses, with some completing practical craft courses at college. The types of craft practice the interviewees were involved in included textiles, jewellery, ceramics, leather and craft art. The interviews were carried out throughout 2019 and 2020, were semi-structured and lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours. Participants were asked about their journey into professional craft and their specific experiences as women of colour in the sector. Interviews carried out before the COVID-19 pandemic were face to face, so I visited the participants’ places of work or studios. After the pandemic, they were carried out online via Microsoft Teams and recorded. Pseudonyms are used for all participants, who provided written consent. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed, and I used NVivo software to organise common themes running throughout the interviews. The methodology was informed by a cultural studies approach, whereby the methods are designed to get a sense of the lived experience of making culture, the relationships and ‘complex material conditions’ (Gray, 2003: 12) which determine who makes culture and who determines its value. The excerpts from the interviews used in the following sections were chosen as they best represented the two major themes which emerged from the analysis: racism and microaggressions, and how the work of the participants is judged.

Inequalities and cultural value in UK craft

Expertise has some relation to cultural value – for example, a craft object created by someone considered to be a ‘master’ or ‘expert’ craftsperson is likely to be deemed more valuable than a coaster crocheted by a hobbyist friend. However, the criteria by which judgements of expertise and cultural value are made often favour privileged groups (O’Brien and Oakley, 2015). Eleonora Belfiore (2020) notes that in the United Kingdom, cultural value is ‘shaped by the power relations predominant at any one time, and is a site for struggles over meaning, representation and recognition’ (p. 384). For the women interviewed in this research, such power relations are often experienced as intersectional oppression – overlapping systems of prejudice and discrimination (Crenshaw, 1989), which can affect how their work is judged by others in the craft sector.

Discussion: expertise and community evaluation

Georgina Born (2010) argues that many accounts of cultural production do not pay enough attention to the cultural object. Although my account so far has focused on how persons are discriminated against and in relation to the cultural valuing of the objects they produce, it is important to consider how certain craft techniques and aesthetics are valued and hierarchized, feeding into the evaluative moment (Stewart, 2013). I have already alluded to this in the previous section when I discussed the whiteness of the British craft aesthetic, part of a hierarchical capitalist system where whiteness is a wage, a form of value related to respectability (Skeggs, 2019). Skeggs’ (2011) work on personhood helps us understand how people and the objects they produce are legitimated:

Ideas of European personhood, used to legitimate colonialism, extended models of possessive individualism by equating civilisation with a particular model of commodity exchange. This process involved the denigration of other ways of relating to people and objects – a form of personhood premised upon disinterest in the objects/subjects of exchange, but interest in the profit that can be made from exchange itself. (p. 500)

Skeggs discussed how these processes produced regimes of value, which underpin ideas about who and what matters. These regimes of value produce the conditions and criteria through which expertise is judged and objects are valued. Cultural objects can move between regimes of value and transform, as explored by Fred Myers (2005). Myers shows how the production of Aboriginal art takes place within communities, incorporating ancestral knowledges and rituals. Aboriginal art is not the product of one ‘genius’ person, and it is not created with the market in mind. It is created within a certain regime of value among the Aboriginal community from which it arises, which Myers calls the ‘revelatory regime of value’ (p. 97). Yet as these objects are shifted into the Western ‘art culture system’, their original qualities and potentialities cannot be assimilated into the new system, thus a ‘reorganization of value’ takes place (p. 89). In other words, there are specific knowledges and forms of expertise which are lost when the work of Indigenous Australian artists is moved into the Western regime of value. The same can be said of the handloom weavers in Mamidipudi’s (2019) research – their particular forms of expertise and knowledge are not judged on their own terms, the qualities and the properties of the objects they produce are lost once the objects move into a new regime of value.

The women in this research are inculcated within this Western, Eurocentric regime of value – they would have been educated through it and are embedded within it. The issue is that this regime of value originated through a system of capitalism which privileges whiteness, and through a set of aesthetic codes and classifications which were created by mostly white, privileged men. This is why, as Anita described, she is in a ‘lose-lose’ situation where within this system, her ethnicity leads others to believe she is not supposed to create work within this framework; a framework which values the aesthetics of whiteness and at times, actively excludes marginalised groups.

Janet Wolff (2006) highlights how theories of post-colonialism, race and gender have ‘exposed the myth of objectivity in Western art history’ (p. 148). Wolff acknowledges that there are both aesthetic and ‘extra-aesthetic’ value judgements at play which exclude women, people of colour and non-Western artists from the canon. In an attempt to address this, Wolff developed an approach which recognises aesthetic criteria as ‘grounded in community’, where criteria for the judgement of works of art is a result of reflexive discussion within ‘communities of interpretation’ (p. 152) located within a specific culture and its values. Wolff’s aim here is to avoid universalising or relativist judgements about the value of cultural objects. When thinking about how craft objects created by the women in this research are judged and valued, Wolff’s work indicates that one possible way of addressing this is that judgements need to be made reflexively within communities, rather than against the current hierarchical standards. Wolff uses the example of the artist Kathleen McEnery, whose work she rediscovered and curated for an exhibition. Wolff wondered on what grounds she thought McEnery’s work was ‘any good’ (p. 145), as McEnery was marginalised once she moved away from New York, and her work seemingly became ‘more provincial’ (as stated by Wolff) and increasingly associated with amateurism. The social and historical context of McEnery’s marginalisation, for Wolff, allows her then to address the question of whether her work was ‘any good’. Wolff found that McEnery’s ‘credentials’, such as high-profile exhibitions she was previously involved in, as well as Wolff’s own judgement of the work based on criteria she learned from discourses on aesthetics – ‘questions of form, colour and composition’ (p. 154) assisted her judgement. The context of the marginalisation of the artist revealed gendered hierarchies at play, and the ‘complex intersection of the aesthetic and the political’. Wolff shows that aesthetic judgements need to be fully contextualised and ideally ‘as the reasoned outcome of dialogue and communication on the basis of community’ (Wolff, 2006).

In the case of the makers featured in this research, who are involved in the UK professional craft sector, I have shown how the cultural objects they produce have been judged and valued, and I have shown how they, as people, have been judged and valued. What has been described here has taken place on a largely interpersonal level, which can somewhat be explained by matters of personal preference and cultural proximity (Childress and Nault, 2019) but is also contextualised by wider mechanisms of regimes of value where certain types of craft, and maker, are implicitly valued more than others. Community evaluation of course cannot address the wider structural racism which is embedded in UK society, but in professional craft, some steps can be taken to move towards mechanisms of judgement and representation which are more transparent, reflexive and grounded in community (Wolff, 2006). This can involve including a greater variety of people from different backgrounds and craft traditions in decision making and evaluation processes in professional craft, such as show selection panels, funding panels and interview panels, so that these areas of professional craft are more inclusive.

Furthermore, I want to refer back to the discussion of expertise at the beginning of this article and propose that communities of craft evaluation should also consider craft expertise. This means that while criteria will include contextualised aesthetic judgements, it should also include judgements made on the ‘skill in mastering the tools and techniques to produce a work of aesthetic value’ (Patel, 2020: 2) within a particular context. Such an approach would help to not only appreciate the effort and skill of the creator (see also Wohl, 2021, on the creative processes of artists) but also to evaluate the qualities of the object produced. It would help to foster ‘objective respect’, in other words ‘to respect cultural objects and practices, by evaluating them in terms of their own objective qualities, as well as their subjective apprehension and value’ (Banks, 2017: 146). Expertise can be difficult to judge, but it could be based on an appraisal of the craft techniques and knowledge exhibited by the maker and manifest in the object. This approach can attempt to take a little more focus away from the outward appearance of the person doing the work, and towards the object itself and how it was created. As one of the interviewees, Olivia, a craft artist of West African heritage based in London said,

When I’m in spaces like that [professional studios and craft fairs], I do always look at the work first. Obviously I notice if there are no ethnic minorities there but I always look at the work first because I think that’s what, if anything, it should be judged on.

That’s what I want to be judged on, my work. I don’t want to be judged as a person.

Conclusion

In this article, I have discussed how the conditions of the UK professional craft sector can make it especially difficult for women makers of colour to make a career in craft and have their craft expertise recognised as such. The interviews reveal some of the stark and shocking experiences the participants have had, demonstrating that institutional racism is still very much alive in the United Kingdom, despite what its current government may claim to the contrary (Walker et al., 2021).

I have suggested that the inherent whiteness of the craft sector is linked to perceptions about the types of craft which are deemed valuable. The dominant regime of value in UK professional craft, characterised by high art aesthetics, orders and excludes certain makers along the lines of gender, race and sometimes class, and is undergirded by patriarchal capitalist notions of expertise and value. To begin to address these issues, I have proposed a more contexualised approach to evaluative judgements, based on Janet Wolff’s idea of community evaluation. Such an approach would require professional craft organisations to revisit their evaluation criteria, address the lack of diversity on their leadership and judgement panels, and broaden their attention beyond the exclusionary, high art aesthetic which is marked by its whiteness. Instead, judgements should be contextualised and grounded in reflexive communities (Wolff, 2006), rather than made against universalised criteria which exclude any makers or work which does not fall into the dominant category. They should also consider craft expertise – how techniques and tools are mastered, and how that craft skill and knowledge is manifest in the cultural object itself. Evaluations about work should be carried out in dialogue and transparently, including a wider variety of people from around the professional craft sector, from divergent traditions and backgrounds. Only then can we begin to diversify the types of craft which are valued and championed, and people who are thinking about a career in professional craft, who may not think it is for them, will start to see themselves represented.

Of course, many of the incidents of racism described in this article are interpersonal, often with other studio holders, suppliers or with potential customers, and are a separate yet linked issue, related to the types of people and objects which are valued in society. Addressing the wider matter of representation and value through community evaluation will not necessarily trickle down to change individual perceptions and prejudices on a day-to-day basis. People working across all areas of craft, from suppliers, to craft education, to studios, need to actively engage with and educate themselves about the experiences of people of colour in the industry.

This article has provided some empirical evidence of the experiences of women makers of colour in UK professional craft, while also providing a conceptual framework to think through expertise and hierarchies of value in the sector. Further research could build on the ideas presented here and explore in greater depth how craft expertise is developed by makers from marginalised social and cultural groups. Such work could also explore craft practice beyond the formal professionalised sector, in community groups and social enterprises, for example. Within the United Kingdom and beyond, there is scope to analyse the material conditions within which craft expertise is developed by individuals and how this expertise is manifest in craft objects. Such an approach responds to calls for the need to focus on the cultural object in cultural labour (see Banks, 2017; Born, 2010) while helping to broaden our understanding of what craft expertise is.