Does the National Trust support British Crafts?

 A while ago I sent off an Email to the National Trust asking them what their policy was on stocking their shops.  I wanted to know how much of what they sold was imported and mass produced and whether they actively supported British crafts. I didn't receive a reply.

My question was prompted by our visits to National Trust properties. At the end of your tour you are often funneled into 'The Gift Shop'. Sharon and I have never bought anything in these shops first of all because the prices are too high and, secondly, because  much of their contents appears to be imported and mass produced. There does not appear to be much that is locally produced or of a genuinely craft origin. It's shiny, packaged and bears all the hallmarks of slick marketing strategies and all that nasty 'business' approach where the only thing that matters is the bottom line.

The properties owned by the National Trust were built by skilled stonemasons, carpenters and bricklayers. They were filled with and adorned with beautiful furniture, sculpture, porcelain, fabrics and so on. These items had to be made. They  required high levels of skill to be produced. Everything you see in a National Trust property was produced by an individual's hard work and mastery of their craft.

The National Trust spends a great deal of money on preserving the buildings that it owns and the objects they hold. However, does it support the crafts tradition that made these things and encourage it  to flourish and grow?

The National Trust Gift Shop 'Experience' is not encouraging. I suspect that the mindset of those that control National Trust  retailing is formed by the same 'marketing' ethos that has reduced  shopping in England to such a dull, dehumanised level. I suspect that few of them have a ever worked for themselves or made anything with their own hands.

What would we like to see? We would like to see the National Trust actually sell and promote the work of British craft workers.They are part of the tradition that produced the stuff that the National Trust looks after. This tradition needs to be nurtured by the Trust.

It would be nice if the National Trust shops sold a little less twee confectionery and overpriced bead jewellery and more locally made quality crafts.

The biggest problem those of us who are full time craft workers face is the cost of selling what we make. Most of us could never afford to rent a shop, good craft fairs are expensive because hobbyists, who have other sources of income, inflate demand for stalls, with on line selling it's hard to get noticed, and traditional markets [where we sell] are in decline. However good what we make is we have to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to find our way to our customers.They, equally, want to find their way to us and struggle to find somewhere that sells the individually made work they want.

It would be wonderful if the National Trust used it's shops to help solve this problem.

Elephant, cosmic...

We are doing a series of animals enjoying Cosmic Consciousness. A little less expensive than our usual pictures with a lighter frame, which is still wood, though. Each one is still hand done and each one will be different.  Size of frame approximately 11" by 5.5". Price: £35 plus P&P. Alternatively visit our market stalls. To remind you these are:

Lougborough Market: Thursday
Stamford Market: Friday
Grantham Market: Saturday
Cambridge Market: Sunday.

Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Britain and us.

We were delighted to be given two free tickets plus £100 travelling expenses by Tate Britain and Etsy on the basis of the pewter work that we do which they, and us, see as being part of the Arts & Crafts tradition.

We made our visit a couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed it. I love being able to see, at exhibitions, original works of art that you are familiar with from books.  You can see their true scale and appreciate their  surface texture and thus get a real feeling for  how the artist created his work.

Unfortunately it's 'his' when it comes to the Pre-Raffs. Women's role in the movement, was to provide inspiration, be put on pedestals, dressed up in archaic costumes, sit in cold baths -Elizabeth Siddal nearly caught her death of cold posing for Millais's picture of Ophelia-and so on. Not many of them appear to laugh or even smile.

Sharon had to choose  a work to write an entry for the Tate's blog [She hasn't done that yet, but we will put a link to it from here when she does]. She decided on the Kelmscott Chaucer. The capital letters in the text have been an inspiration and basis for many of Sharon's repousse letters. I particularly like the otherworldly, almost Surrealistic, illustrations of the Kelmscott Chaucer by Edward Burne-Jones.

There's a special atmosphere that is evoked by this book which I can't describe but which is tangible in other places. One such is little Moreton Hall which we visited in September. To my mind it would make the perfect location for Pre -Raphaelite figures to swan about in.

Phil

New Work: The Dodo.

I've been looking  at lots of images of Dodo's . No one knows exactly what they looked like so my picture is as much an imaginative production as any other. I particularly like the Dodo beak, their funny little wings and their chunky feathered bulk. I also think the Dodd is symbolic of all the other creatures that have been wiped out in recent centuries and it a good idea to have a n image of one around the house to remind us of what we are doing to the natural world