Some thoughts post Nordic 1 visit

Just back from annual leave where I had time to digest thoughts from our trip to Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and to catch up on some reading. It strikes me that craft has never seemed quite so zeitgeisty. You can't pick up a newspaper or magazine without finding another article on knitting etc and the numbers of young (and not so young) artists adopting the vocabulary and materials of craft are growing all the time (I've never seen so much crochet in fine art). And yet, I came back from the three Nordic countries feeling that the category of craft appears to be imploding. Some of my reading confirmed this feeling.

One of the books I read was a series of thought-provoking essays that I bought on our trip - 'Craft in Transition' by Jorunn Veiteberg who is a professor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts and Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She is also editor of 'Kunsthandwerk' and might be a good speaker for one of the seminars we organize. She sees craft in Sweden and Norway as having become a very different sort of practice to craft in Denmark and Finland - more conceptual and closer to the practice in the UK. She also makes the point that it is becoming increasingly difficult to employ fixed, internal criteria for what makes craft craft.