Craftspeople and designer makers in the contemporary creative economy

Abstract

Feature Interview 1.1. Jane Scott, CEO, Craft Victoria (Interviewed June 2015) ‘Well one of the interesting things, when I started with the organisa- tion [Craft Victoria], at one of my first openings here I just looked around and noticed there are young men here in the 20 to 30 age bracket. And it was like, I’ve worked in the arts my whole life, this is not a demographic that you get in an art gallery, and I started asking around, going “what’s going on?” And the feedback that I was get- ting from these people was that they’ve grown up on computers, and quite frankly they just want to get their hands dirty. And so there’s this whole new movement of people who resent the fact that they never learnt any skills at school, their parents couldn’t teach them how to do it, it’s like we’ve just been hell bent on removing our- selves from craft practice. And the cooking phenomenon has been one of those things where all of a sudden people are going, “Oh no it’s really [...] fabulous to be able to actually prepare a meal”. And that’s great, but it’s been a bit like that with people [who now] can’t sew a button on a shirt, they’ve got no idea, it’s all been handed over to somebody else, you just don’t do anything [yourself anymore]. There’s all this younger generation going, “Actually I would like to