Sustaining craft practice by teaching and learning through live demonstration

Abstract

Clare Twomey's piece Consciousness/Conscience, exhibited in Approaching Content at the British Crafts Council 2003, immediately and physically engages us in the materiality of clay. As we walk across the constructed tiled floor, we hear the crack of the bone china fracturing underfoot and feel the weight of the heel sinking into the broken hollow tiles. We also experience the unaccustomed freedom of breaking and "destroying" what is normally kept whole and sacrosanct - the brittle fragility of the material.

Equally, the commentary from a series of interviews in the Ceramics Point of View project, in which ten makers and critics handle ceramics from the V&A collections, reflects the sensory process that is involved in experiencing the piece in the hand. Here Emmanuel Cooper begins to put into words his exploration of a Hans Coper pot:

"...this wonderful rim, [this] absolutely beautiful rim, this interchange between the inside and the outside. The inside dark and black and mysterious, the outside this white matt, but the join [is] absolutely wonderfully accomplished"..."This is like a drawing at the top in the way that it
defines the whole thing." (Partington 2001)

Throughout there is a sense of the gradual unfolding of rich and detailed information as it is being gathered both visually and haptically through these direct encounters. The commentaries flag up the underlying relationship that the Crafts hold with the physicality and materiality of the object itself, which is understood both consciously and tacitly through our senses.

This paper reflects, specifically through our research project Teaching and Learning Through Practice (Boyes et al. 2008), on how the physicality and materiality of craft practice are sustained in the learning and teaching of skills through demonstration. In particular we assess the role that non-verbal communication plays in the specific languages used in demonstrating - and thereby in sustaining craft skills. In a world that is moving increasingly towards the virtual, does the physical still retain value and more specifically, could virtual representation replace live demonstration?