The annual online journal brings Art History, Curating and Visual Studies staff and students together with public collections across the Midlands.
Norman Cherry, Strillo, 2022, sterling silver, copper, steel knife blades, steel chain, vintage police whistle, largest piece 160 x 20 x 15mm. Photo Luke Unsworth, 2023. ©Swords into Ploughshares CIC, 2026.
Midlands Art Papers 9 (2026), curated by Dr Claire Jones, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies has now launched. It brings together curators, jewellers, artists, and art historians to explore what craft and the decorative arts mean today, and what they mean for the Midlands in particular.
The Midlands has a rich and complex relationship with craft and industry: ceramics in Stoke, metalworking in Birmingham, glassmaking in Stourbridge, carpets in Kidderminster. Yet the two have often been treated as opposites, separated in museum and academic categories. This issue sets out to challenge those divisions, holding craft, decorative art, and industry in dialogue, and asking what is lost when they are kept separate.
Contributors explore a wide range of objects, makers, and practices: from knives transformed by international jewellers into works of art, to Victorian ceramic reliefs traced across sites of production and display; from nineteenth-century Italian collections and their influence on Birmingham's industries, to quilts, tourist ware, tattoo traditions, and the overlooked queer networks behind a modernist vase. Together, the essays demonstrate how thinking across categories, and across the Midlands, can open up new histories of craft.
The issue also includes a manifesto for craft and the decorative arts, drawn together from ideas raised in the journal and Dr Jones’ research, calling for museums and academia to:
1. Embrace the multiple
Display objects in groups and with their contexts.
2. Embrace makers
Historically, curators were often artists. Today, how might makers be more fully integrated into museums and academia - not as hired hands for workshops, although there is enormous value in that - but as integral, equal members of a research community?
3. Embrace industry
The critique of industry in relation to capitalism has also, inadvertently, diminished human endeavour and creativity in industrial production. What makers, practices and concepts are sidelined if industry is excluded from histories and experiences of making?
4. Challenge owner-centred narratives
Rather than prioritising ownership and reinforcing class distinctions through upstairs-downstairs narratives, what if we reclaimed decorative spaces, such as country houses and churches, as spaces of making, even if the names of those makers are largely unrecorded?
5. Embrace elite objects
Objects such as hand-painted porcelain plates might be disregarded as unnecessary luxuries for the global rich. Yet they are created by exceptionally skilled makers who have developed their practice and medium through years of repetition and experimentation.
6. Embrace the division of labour and repetition
The division of labour is negatively associated with alienation. Yet even in craft, practices of specialisation and repetition are often central to production, whether in throwing pots or in creating multi-material and multi-authored objects.
7. Avoid static lighting
Most objects were not designed for the unremittingly uniform light favoured by museums and galleries. Consider creative lighting that allows historic objects to be experienced as intended; even animate these hermetic spaces by evoking daily and seasonal changes.
8. Embrace visitor knowledge
Museum and gallery visitors come with experience of creating and using similar objects, particularly in a region with such a legacy of makers. Create opportunities for creative practice and research that values visitor skills and knowledge.
9. Embrace the joy
Decorative art (unlike craft) is often viewed as superficial and superfluous. But negating or diminishing it also negates and diminishes its related qualities. What if comfort, humour, make-believe and excess were taken seriously – what then for the decorative arts?
Midlands Art Papers 9 is available to read for free on the University of Birmingham website.
Associate Professor in History of Art
Biographical and contact information for Dr Claire Jones, Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of Birmingham.
