‘The Manipulation of Skill on the Limits of Function’

by Alison Britton

32-Page manuscript book written out in Chinese ink with gouache illustrations on Indian Hemp Cream paper with Ruscombe Mill Ocean Green endpapers, Somerset Toned White card cover with Indian Hemp Beige jacket. Completed December 2022. Held in the Crafts Study Centre collection.

This is an edited extract of an essay first published in the exhibition catalogue to ‘Beyond the Dovetail: Crafts, Skill and Imagination’ held at the Crafts Council from 19 September to 10 November 1991. It was republished in the second edition of Alison Britton’s collected essays, Seeing Things, in 2022.

In the essay, Britton is at pains to eliminate what she sees as the false distinction between skill and ideas, with the former seen as attached to craft and the latter as attached to art. She argues that skill is an attribute common to both endeavours with the basic demand in both areas being excellence. Further, she is at pains to blur the distinction between ‘craft’ and ‘art’: ‘But in reality the manual and the mental are seamlessly combined in the operation of skill, whether you are ploughing a field or painting the Sistine chapel.’ She goes on to suggest that our notion of skill as resulting in a kind of technical perfection is no longer relevant to our times: ‘smoothness suggests conformity and complacency, the hewn may be more apt for this moment than the honed.’

This is another in a series of works that I have made over the years attempting to explore the nature of craft. In this case, I made the work as a kind of tribute when I took over from Alison as Chair of Trustees at the Crafts Study Centre in 2022.