As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered much of the family fortune he had inherited, aged five, on supporting struggling surrealists (he commissioned the Mae West lips sofa and lobster telephone from a scuffling Dali) and on backing shows starring his actress girlfriends (‘very wealth-consuming,’ he admitted, ‘because invariably they flopped’) then creating an 80-acre sculpture garden in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico, the man described as ‘the last of the great eccentrics’ decided in his late fifties to invest his remaining money in something more sensible. So in 1964 he founded the Edward James Foundation and signed over the cod-baronial family pile, West Dean House in West Sussex, for the creation of a college teaching craft skills.
When West Dean College opened in 1971, all did not go according to its founder’s plan. In competition with state-funded art schools, it failed to attract sufficient students to the full-time courses in stone carving, wood carving and ironwork as James had envisaged, and fell back on craft courses aimed at amateurs. ‘I gave my money to help humanity,’ he grumbled in a 1978 documentary made by his friend George Melly. ‘I didn’t give it to help elderly middle-class couples who are bored of watching television learn how to make corn dollies or bobbin lace.’
Our hands are capable of so much more than tapping at electronic keys, it’s a sin not to use them
Today, along with stone and wood carving and metal work, West Dean College runs degree and diploma courses in clock-making, musical instrument making, ceramics, tapestry, conservation, interior and garden design and fine art. ‘You name it, we do it,’ says principal Francine Norris. The fact that students all have to pay for higher education has levelled the playing field. ‘I feel our time has come,’ says Norris. ‘Over the last few years, the student cohorts have been getting younger and more diverse.’ The closure of craft courses at art schools around the country – at the very moment when craft is enjoying a boom – has not only refreshed the student body, but attracted tutors famous in their fields who have found themselves out of a job.
Building on its success, West Dean has now opened a London branch offering a taster menu of short courses (until 28 July) before its full and part-time degree and diploma courses start in September. The Bloomsbury campus’s airy premises in the modernist Dilke House, up the road from Rada, are in stark contrast to the wood-panelled, leaded-windowed interiors of West Dean House, hung with 17th-century Flemish tapestries, pikestaffs, armorial bearings and a giraffe’s head trophy. The Harry Potter generation compares it to Hogwarts, but it reminded me of the set of a Hammer Horror.
If there were anxieties about the demise of traditional crafts in the 1960s, they’ve multiplied since the arrival of computer-assisted design (CAD), 3-D printing and AI. At the same time, something peculiar is happening. Just as the vinyl revival is defying streaming because people want albums they can hold in their hands with sleeves they can read, so a growing fashion for the handmade and tactile appears to be swimming against the digital-media stream. Art schools may be ignoring it, but galleries aren’t. The Lakeside façade of the Barbican is currently swathed in 2,000sqm of cloth handwoven and stitched by Ghanaian women for Ibrahim Mahama’s installation ‘Purple Hibiscus’ – a testament, says the Barbican’s head of visual arts Shanay Jhaveri, ‘to the incredible capabilities and capacity of the human hand’. In our shiny digital image-saturated world, we’re starting to crave the tangible and the handmade.
Tim Bolton, head of the School of Arts at West Dean College, collates this desire with the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi – the association of beauty with imperfections that endow things with individuality. This is something AI is now being taught to fake. Bolton has colleagues working with glitch programming in the hopes of humanising the machine-made by making it look less perfect and more ‘authentic’. Will it work? I’ll believe it when I see it. ‘Machines break down when they lose control, whereas people make discoveries, stumble on happy accidents,’ writes Richard Sennett in the hand-maker’s bible, The Craftsman.
While it’s true that most modern crafts use machinery, it’s in the human partnership with the machine that happy accidents happen. To allow for them – to invoke wabi-sabi – a maker must be on first-name terms with a machine and able to predict its behaviour. A machine the maker knows like the back of his hand won’t throw a random design spanner into the works, like a glitch programme. The relationship is a collaborative one – as is the relationship, in a skilled craftsperson, between the hand and the head. ‘When the head and the hand are separate,’ says Sennett, quoting overreliance on CAD as an example, ‘it is the head that suffers.’
Handmaking is at the heart of the West Dean ethos. In the specialist furniture workshop equipped with a panoply of hand and power tools, tutor Daniel Pateman explains that students spend their first year learning accuracy with the former before being let loose on the latter. In the light-filled space, which smells of the shellac used in French polishing, I meet second year foundation student Fin Allen, an escapee from a white-collar job: the subject he studied at university was marketing. Did he swap marketing for marquetry? Quite literally: he shows me a marquetry panda he has made for his brother. Allen has no illusions about the difficulty of making a living from his chosen craft; now that almost everything is sold as ‘artisan’, genuine craft-makers are in competition with firms that use automated processes yet present their products as handmade. ‘It’s bending the truth,’ Allen says – yes, it’s known as marketing – but he insists that ‘it doesn’t change the joy of making; the question is whether people are prepared to pay the cost of what it takes.’ I ask how many hours went into the production of the pristine little cabinet he’s been working on. ‘I wouldn’t like to think.’ So why does he do it? ‘I love it.’
Time moves at a different pace at West Dean, perhaps because the man responsible for winding the estate’s clocks has been keeping it since Edward James’s day. Projects are measured in months and tutors stay for generations. Ceramics tutor Alison Sandeman has been in post since 1974; tapestry tutor Philip Sanderson, leader of a busy working studio that has interpreted designs for Henry Moore, Howard Hodgkin and Tracey Emin, has been around for more than 30. Tapestry is another tactile craft enjoying a renaissance: two new hangings designed by Eva Rothschild for Sadler’s Wells East are rolled up on the floor awaiting collection.
West Dean’s short craft courses still appeal to pensioners, but they also attract professionals in other disciplines who want to try their hands at something different: Kirsten Ramsay, a West Dean alumna who is the ceramic conservation expert on The Repair Shop, has signed up for a short tapestry course in London. Others are designed as refreshers. At the launch of the Bloomsbury campus, Anna Marlen-Summers was promoting her short course ‘Drawing: How to Grow Ideas’, overlaying rough-cut stencils of different shapes over collages made of chopped up drawings with the speed and dexterity of a ‘Find the Lady’ trickster: ‘Have I just designed a building? Have I designed a rug?’ Her course is popular with artists who have skills but lack inspiration. Could AI do something similar? ‘No!’ she says firmly. ‘It doesn’t know why I like this design better than that. AI could generate lots and lots of ideas but it’s the choice that makes the art.’
It all sounds wonderful, but where does it lead? Allen has a job lined up in restoration work on old buildings and will continue making furniture for the love of it. I’m sure there are geeks out there as selflessly devoted to AI – with a quarter of three- to four-year-olds already owning a smartphone, we’re breeding a generation of them. But what is it doing to their heads? Our hands are capable of so much more than tapping at electronic keys, it’s a sin not to use them. Frankly, the very idea of glitch programming gives me a headache. Pace Edward James, buried in West Dean’s arboretum, I’d rather make a crap corn dolly. There may soon be a premium on human error.
A range of short courses in arts, crafts, design and conservation are on offer at West Dean College’s Bloomsbury campus until 28 July. Its full- and part-time couses start in September.
