IC:Innovative Craft Blog

Hybrid Vigour - and Aid for Technophobes

Posted Saturday 10 January 2009, 05:15pm

Elizabeth Goring writes:

IC’s New Year has got off to a great start! Despite the winter chill, Gary Breeze’s talk on Wednesday evening was our best attended ‘Thinking through Craft’ event so far (happily we’d brought in extra chairs) and it was good to see so many new faces. Gary’s presentation was absolutely excellent – thoughtful, inspiring, articulate and brilliantly illustrated. The question-and-answer session was particularly lively. Gary told us later it was probably the best audience response he’s ever had. Lots of really interesting issues were raised and we certainly plan to follow some of these up. The convivial quality of the evening spilled over into the galleries afterwards as Gary talked to people directly beside his stunning contribution to the Jerwood Contemporary Makers show.

It was especially heartening to note the ever-increasing mix of people attending our events – amongst this particular audience I spotted architects, sculptors, calligraphers, curators, archaeologists, arts administrators, makers and collectors, as well as one of our youngest attendees so far. Building bridges between those involved in craft and other cultural areas, stimulating intelligent debate and providing opportunities for innovative creative development are among IC’s core aspirations. This coming together of people representing different perspectives and areas of expertise is therefore enormously exciting, and the wonderful Dovecot spaces are proving to be uniquely conducive to such dynamic interaction.

If you missed Gary’s talk, or if you’d like to hear it again, there’s good news! Having done the equivalent of not reading the instruction manual at our first attempts, the technical expertise of Inner Ear’s very calm and patient Dougal Perman enabled us to record Gary’s presentation, and we’re turning it into a podcast which you will be able to download from our website in due course. For the less techie among us, Inner Ear’s website helpfully quotes dictionary.com’s definition: ‘A podcast is a web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed, accessed by subscription over the Internet’. Inner Ear further explains that ‘A podcast is a series of media files distributed via an RSS feed. RSS (really simple syndication) is the XML-powered delivery mechanism for blogs, podcasts, photostreams, news feeds and social networking tools’. (Speaking for myself, I’ve yet to be convinced that any part of this is ‘really simple’; and I have no idea what an XML-powered delivery mechanism is, but I’m sure I’m absolutely alone in this.) Nevertheless, we’re planning to learn how to do this sort of thing completely fearlessly for ourselves – though at least two of us with perhaps a teeny amount of trepidation. Anyway, watch our website as we begin to stretch our about-to-be-newly-unfurled techie wings.

In the meantime, nearly all the available places have been booked for Fran Priest’s intriguing participatory ‘Patterns are Everywhere’ event next week, so we may be looking at some ways of opening the event up to more participants. Do let us know if you want to come along.