Home Crafts in Britain 1975-2002.

The aim of this project is to investigate the cultural significance of home craft in contemporary Britain, both as an activity and an object. Central to this discussion are amateur needlecrafts, because they are accessible, requiring little equipment, materials and cover the spectrum of skill level, i.e. from the very basic, ‘easy’ pieces to the highly skilled and complex. These crafts are also widely available in kit form and their popularity is marked by a large number of monthly magazines and journal dedicated to them. From a critical perspective, these crafts have fundamentally been discussed as part of a ‘hidden’ example of female creative practice and as indicative of domestic leisure activities. Initially the thesis aims to establish the very familiar objects of home craft within a critical framework. Indeed, these objects are so easily recognisable within popular culture that cultural historians have frequently overlooked them. When addressed, these objects have been situated in such a way as to represent the polar opposite of normative cultural production, i.e. the ‘kitsch’ or ‘bad taste’, ‘women’s work’, ‘old fashioned’, and so on. To discuss these objects in this way however seemingly negates their proliferation, their normality. These objects are not ‘oppositional’ within everyday life, they are familiar, ordinary and everyday, yet they exist outside of the framework of design history, and based on taste and connoisseurship, these objects are very much outside the remits of the discipline. One could say then, that these objects are so ordinary, so easily recognisable that they ‘merge’ into the background of cultural discourse. This is to say that they exist as understandable items, unworthy of discussion within the world of goods and thus remain mute.