Marcus Sly - Furniture Making and Design

Is anyone else noticing that the pursuit of the "cutting edge" in the world of art and craft seems increasingly quaint and old fashioned?

Of course it's a good idea to question convention, to push the boundaries of the possible and to discover and invent new things, but human beings also need roots.  We need to feel a sense of connection with the past as well as with the present.

The products of contemporary mass production represent a complete change in terms of how the objects which surround us - from iPods to houses - feel.  For most of human history there was continuity in how the objects of everyday life felt - in spite of changes in style, and the expansion of technical possibilities from one age to another.  This continuity was found in the fact that everything bore, in one way or another, the presence of the human hand.  In modern manufactured objects this presence is missing.  It's absence is a fundamental break with the past.  Surrounded and cocooned by mass-produced things we now live in an age in which, for the first time, it is possible to feel literally disconnected from history.

I don't think it is fanciful to link this disconnect to the current financial crisis.  Somehow many of us started to believe that we were living in a time in which the way life works had changed as fundamentally as the way things which surround us have changed.  People came to believe that it was now somehow possible to create money which wasn't underpinned by the value of real things and continue to prosper on it indefinitely.

I believe in progress, and I like technology, but I think we need to give more thought to the unintended effects that the single-minded pursuit of these things can have - and seek to mitigate them. If there is one useful purpose that contemporary crafts people can serve it may be to bridge the damaging and growing divide between past and the present.  Perhaps it would be worthwhile for more of us to abandon the excitement of the "cutting edge", and seek something which is quieter, less showy, but perhaps more relevant to the problems we face.