Fi Blog

Three days into our“frisky” itinerary (so described by Giancarlo the director of the Museu Da CasaBrasileira… where we gave our presentations on Saturday. The group werefabulous PR for the UK – the range of work and professionalism across the 12organsiations was outstanding. Martina Margetts rounded up the presentations with an insightful profileof the current themes being explored through contemporary craft practice in theUK.

zizi maria is based in Sao Paolo, a knitting and crochet venue and organisation owned and run by Ilzida Maria and her daughter Carolina Araujo. A great example of traditional skills being kept alive. This information and connection came via Dubai! My brother Nathan works with Carolina's brother Orlando. To translate the page into strange english you can put zizimaria into google....http://zizimaria.com.br/

I hope that the Brazil research trip will help to inform the upcomnig Craft Rally programme, perhaps via a talk/presentation of the visit with others in the brazil cohort?  Artquest will be curating and hosting the inaugural Crafts Rally event, part of the Craft Council new Collective initiative.  We're working in association with the Crafts Council, Yorkshire Art Space and independent curator and Maker Helen Carnac (http://helencarnac.wordpress.com) to develop a series of formal and informal talks, presentations and events throghout the

In the beginning of November, I had the opportunity to visit the Lustre market in Nottingham, on invitation from Neil Walker.

The trip involved a lot of travelling time - six hours each way, but it was my first time in UK outside London (which I don´t know well either), and I found the bus ride from Heathrow very interesting. It appeared to me that the countryside is similar to (parts of) Denmark in terms of fauna and morphology, but very different in the way the land is being distributed and used.

Notes on Institutions & Galleries in Norway and Iceland

Forming Ideas is a curatorial development programme that aims to stimulate debate around craft practice for curators working in the UK. It also aims to forge relationships with art and craft professionals in and outside the UK to encourage the display of challenging craft in mainstream arts venues.  

This is a question that will, no doubt, get a wide range of responses from a variety of sectors positive and negative. Some might say that not enough is written and talked about craft; some might respond that what is written and talked about is often too academic and aligned with the visual arts. My view is that their is an abundance of valuable views written and its up to the wider sector to engage with it at all levels from the perspective of the maker as well as the academic and critical theorist.

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.

Notes on Institutions and Galleries in Sweden