Studio Jewellery: Mapping the Absent Body

‘Studio Jewellery: Mapping the Absent Body’ was commissioned by the editor Paul Greenhalgh for a book which examined the state of late 20C craft practice in Europe, America and Japan. My chapter focused on British and European studio jewellers and demonstrated the shift from a practice concerned with the object as autonomous adornment to one that engaged more directly with embodiment.

The chapter has been cited and quoted by Dr Jorunn Veiteberg in Crafts In Transition, Bergen National Academy of the Arts, 2005; by Dr Jivan Astfalk http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/challengingcraft/ChallengingCraft/papers/jivanastfalck/aph03.htm by Fraser Smith in The International Journal of Art & Design Education, vol. 23/1 (Feb. 2004). The chapter was cited in a review of the book in The Journal of Design History vol 17/33, 2004 pp 307-9 by Martina Margetts of the Royal College of Art.

Design and the Modern Magazine (0-7190-7549-1) edited by Professor Jeremy Aynsley, and Katherine Forde, provides a key resource for understanding magazines as designed objects and how their forms and contents are shaped by a variety of decisions and cultural forces from the late 19C onwards. All case studies are based on new and original scholarship. My chapter Crafts for Crafts’ Sake, 1973-1988’, argues, following Bourdieu that the magazine was a site of cultural production for the struggles in the construction of meanings of the term and practice of craft.

Both chapters contribute to debates about craft practice as subject to the discourses of art and culture rather than an autonomous, reactionary practice. This was also explored for the catalogue essay ‘Field Notes’, Urban Field at the Craft Study Centre, Farnham in which Levi-Strauss’ distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur has been used to reframe the collapse of the boundaries of making.
http://www.urbanfield.org.uk/urbanfield--theb.html