Craft and the decorative in the Midlands: introduction and manifesto

This special issue brings together researchers from the Midlands Art Papers community to reflect on what craft and the decorative arts mean to them. Through contributions from curators, jewellers, artists and art historians, it raises the following questions:

1. What happens when craft, the decorative arts and industry are held in dialogue rather than as separate academic and museum categories?
2. How can we better engage makers in museum and academic practices?
3. How might Midlands Art Papers reflect on the Midlands’ rich and complex history of making, and support contemporary practice?

Bringing craft and the decorative arts together disrupts the hierarchies and divisions that are ingrained in museum and academic practice. It exposes how the ideas attached to objects shift from place to place, context to context, period to period, hand to hand. Whether categorised as craft, decorative art, or industrial art, makers, curators, academics, and manufacturers have consistently reactivated objects, materials, and making in new, inspiring, challenging, and uncomfortable ways.

These are fluid, changing concepts, and are all the richer for it. That is not to say that categories are meaningless or interchangeable. Each term imbues a maker or object with distinct associations, positioning them within a particular history or paradigm. To identify something as craft, rather than as decorative art, changes our perception of it and its makers. Place, too, is crucial. The Midlands have a particularly complex connection to craft, industry, and the decorative arts. The following reflects on this context, then introduces the contributions to this special issue, and offers a manifesto of sorts on curating craft and the decorative arts.

The Midlands: craft vs industry

Craft and industry are central to the history, economy and culture of the Midlands: ceramics in Stoke, metalworking in Birmingham, glassmaking in Stourbridge, carpets in Kidderminster, to name but a few. Yet craft and industry have been separated by a somewhat unhelpful and reductive binary: craft as handmade, ethical, and ecological vs industry as machine-made, capitalist, and extractive. This binary was initially promoted by writers associated with the Arts and Crafts, such as William Morris, and has had surprising longevity. That is not to say it is entirely untrue, but, like all binaries, complexity is lost when the spaces in between are avoided. This special issue seeks to trouble such assumptions and demonstrate how thinking across craft and industry, where so many decorative arts are conceived and produced, can reveal interconnected practices of making, art education, collecting and research [1].

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Made in Birmingham gallery explicitly exposes the craft vs industry binary by juxtaposing a bejewelled monstrance by Hardman & Co. (1874) with a pressure-relief spring by Brandauer & Co. (2008-12). The adjacent panel asks, ‘Which one of these two is the most impressive?’ before explaining that both are products of Birmingham’s highly skilled metalworkers, and encouraging visitors to view these apparently dissimilar objects as part of a wider ecosystem of specialist makers – and one that is very much alive, despite the post-industrial epithets attached to the Midlands. This curatorial approach is, however, rare, as museum collections tend to separate objects into fine art, decorative/applied art, science, natural history, ethnography, etc., obscuring the fluidity and interconnections between them. Birmingham Museums, unusually, still holds science and art collections, enabling curators and the public to study both together.

Factory production and contemporary art are also held apart, despite their historical proximity. A rare exception is the Dion Kitson: Silver Lining exhibition in 2024, which took place across the Ikon Gallery and the former J.W. Evans silver factory in the Jewellery Quarter, now managed by English Heritage. Dion’s multiple mugs, with their digestive biscuits moving to the factory’s beat, spoke to labour, rest and community, making the former workers visible in the silenced factory. The visitor route followed the production journey, visualising making in ways that are impossible for most curators, who must attempt to communicate making through an object captured in a glass case.

The decline of once-large industries has, in part, enabled contemporary art spaces to develop, as in Digbeth, but all these activities remain under constant threat, endangered by government cuts to the arts, the cost of electricity, changes in consumer behaviour, and access to skills, materials and spaces. Denby, rescued from administration in 2009, called in administrators in March 2026, putting the 217-year-old pottery at risk of closure with the loss of almost 600 jobs and the associated skills, knowledge, and community [2]. The Red List of Endangered Crafts identifies extinct, critically endangered, and endangered crafts in the UK, including gold beating, canal art, boat painting, and engine-turned engraving; all skills we might associate with the Midlands [3].

Yet the Midlands, with its extensive heritage and contemporary practice, is fighting back. One approach has been to embrace craft without negating industry. In the nineteenth century, the term ‘industrial art’ generated funding and support for museums and art schools. Today, craft is the more current term. Stoke-on-Trent and Birmingham have successfully applied for World Craft City status: for Ceramic (2024) and Jewellery and Allied Trades (2025) respectively, two of only nine such cities in Europe [4]. This status reflects the sustained efforts of the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) in Stoke-on-Trent, which, since 2009, has delivered a year-round programme and a biennial featuring international artists across the city [5]. In May 2027, Birmingham will host the first Birmingham Jewellery Biennial [6]. Both cities also support TV series The Great Pottery Throwdown (2015) and All That Glitters: Britain’s Next Jewellery Star (2021), filmed at a pottery, pottery museum, and jewellery school, respectively [7]. All these projects bridge craft and industry, heritage and contemporary making, and centre on people and place in the Midlands, attracting a coalition of makers, manufacturers, universities, councils, and national funders to support what is increasingly being grouped in economic terms, as creative industries.

A key champion of contemporary craft in the Midlands is Birmingham-based Craftspace, which has supported local and international makers since 1986 through exhibitions, workshops and training. Their recent 40-year celebration at Midlands Art Centre generated significant figures: Craftspace has ‘curated and commissioned work by 2,500 artists in over 500 exhibitions viewed by 2.8million people … as well as getting around 265,000 people making and engaging in meaningful craft interactions’ [8]. Museums and galleries are also increasingly supporting craft, as the porosity across fine art and craft in contemporary art is reflected in curatorial practice [9]. The Ikon Gallery’s recent trilogy of exhibitions, Start the Press!, Thread the Loom, and Break the Mould (2024-26), explored the ‘dynamic intersection between heritage crafts and contemporary art practice’ [10]. Artists were at work in the galleries – a practice that sits uncomfortably with histories of humans on display but speaks to contemporary interests in experiencing the handmade. BMAG’s exhibition, Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement (2023), engaged closely with the decorative arts, reflecting these artists’ attitudes towards ‘the value of handmade versus machine production, and the search for beauty in an age of industry’, thus maintaining the separation of craft and industry [11].

These issues of craft, decorative art, industry, place, (re)making, and mobility reflect the histories and contemporary concerns of craft and the decorative arts in the Midlands and are explored throughout this issue’s essays. The essays are briefly set out below.

The essays

Dauvit Alexander and Norman Cherry reflect on their multi-strand project, Swords into Ploughshares: Knives into Jewels, which recrafts knives taken by West Midlands Police as a form of resistance to knife crime. Transformed by international jewellery and metals artists, the original knives remain visible, situated between potential harm and crafted care, and signalling change. The essay also offers a roadmap for sustaining a concept across multiple strands, including a ‘museum in a suitcase’ for prompting conversations in schools.

Maddie Hewitson focuses on a terracotta relief by the ceramic artist George Tinworth, The Overthrow of Pharaoh and his Host in the Red Sea (1892), now at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Hewitson traces its movement across distinct sites of production and display, from Doulton’s London showroom to a hospital chapel in Stoke-on-Trent, and its reproduction, demonstrating how craft can hold distinct resonances: as fine art, as a critique of enforced labour, and as a form of domestic religious consumption.

Inês Jorge examines questions of mobility and reproduction further in relation to tourist ware and sets: nine Portuguese baskets at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Rather than privileging the ‘unique’ object or named maker, Jorge takes seriously their origins as tourist ware, their diminutive scale, and their seriality, analysing them as individual and interrelated (but not interchangeable) objects. This approach further complicates craft and the decorative through associations with folk art, tourist ware, and ethnographic collections.

Lily Crowther offers an intergenerational study of the émigré Jahn family, active in the Potteries, who developed multi-strand careers as makers, collectors and curators, including foundational roles in museums at Hanley, Wolverhampton and Leamington Spa. Crowther’s study reveals a mobility across industry, art education and museum practice that seems increasingly impossible today, given many museums’ emphasis on academic achievement as entry routes, and the separation of technical and historical knowledge in museum practice.

Maialen Maugars further examines the intersection of industry, art education, and museums in a study of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s early modern Italian collection and its impact on late-nineteenth-century training and industry in the Midlands, as the collection circulated across BMAG and the adjacent Municipal Art School, influencing the glass and metalware industries. I encourage BMAG and Birmingham City University to work with Maugars to reconnect art education, industry and collections for contemporary Birmingham.

Rebecca Unsworth reinterprets Birmingham Museum’s seventeenth-century decorative arts as material culture. Previous interpretations primarily foregrounded style, making and technique. Unsworth reframes the collections for contemporary audiences, prompting questions about political and social power and the connections between memory and place, which resonate with the wider collections. Unsworth is Curator of Decorative Arts with responsibility for at least 30,000 objects of all kinds; a role unimaginable in the fine arts [12].

Matthew Bliss explores a vase by Birmingham architect Stanley Sellers, displayed in BMAG’s Made in Birmingham gallery as the work of a local architect and ceramic hobbyist. Bliss questions this reading, revealing Sellers as a significant collector of modernist ceramics whose connections to artists at St Ives informed his architectural practice, and whose mobility across several regional queer scenes shaped his interest in contemporary craft [13].

Bharti Parmar reflects on the traditional practice of Trajva – tattoos created by women in rural Gujarat – exploring their cultural meanings and their resonances with Parmar’s own creative practice. The essay highlights the longevity and interconnectedness of research across seemingly disparate art forms: Trajva, Gujarati embroidery, Victorian sentimental hair jewellery and Parmar’s piercings through Khadi paper, creating and disrupting connections across place, time, tradition and identity.

Ruth Warhurst explores quilts by Dinah Prentice in the University of Birmingham’s collections through an essay and our first film for MAP, revealing how traditional quilt-making and artistic innovation converge in Prentice’s work. Warhurst also reflects on how memories of her own grandmother quilting enable an embodied, empathetic understanding of craft, centred on slow making, slow looking, patience, and problem-solving.

A manifesto of sorts for curating craft and the decorative arts 

The following gathers some of the ideas generated by this special issue and my own research, to present a manifesto of sorts for curating craft and the decorative arts:

1. Embrace the multiple

Pairs of objects (Staffordshire figures, candelabra), sets of things (furniture, tea sets, jewellery), reproductions (photographs, electroplate); displays of multiple examples (667 cow cream jugs at the Potteries Museum) [14].

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?

Launch of CADMAP: Craft and the Decorative Midlands Art Papers network 

This special issue also launches a new informal regional network intended to generate collaborative research on craft and the decorative arts. CADMAP seeks to build capacity across MAP by fostering relationships across partners and creating opportunities for more regular reflection, discussion, and collaboration. Members of MAP and contributors to this special issue are invited to join and extend it through existing networks. If you are interested in joining, please email Claire at c.jones.4@bham.ac.uk

Claire Jones is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham 

Acknowledgements

I am deeply thankful to all the contributors for engaging so generously and thoughtfully with the theme of this special issue and for making it such a joyful project. I would also like to thank Jonathan Laidlow, Digital Marketing and Communications Manager, for design; Sophie Hatchwell for guidance and support; Jack Tsai for his skills as a research assistant; and colleagues from Midlands Art Papers and in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies for conversations and feedback.

Notes

[1] An example of this porosity across craft and industry can be seen in two short ‘Wedgwood Pottery’ British Pathé films from 1966 foregrounding craft and the handmade over mechanisation, https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/38075/ and https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/37971/ both accessed 9 June 2026.

[2] In response, Neil Brownsword, for example, apprenticed at Wedgwood in the mid-1980s, has developed a research practice that reactivates post-industrial spaces and endangered industrial crafts. Recent innovations that offer hope for the ceramics industry include Dekiln, which ‘makes ceramic-like tiles from waste without needing an energy-hungry kiln’. It has teamed up with Johnson Tiles to set up a trial manufacturing site in Stoke-on-Trent. Julia Kollewe, ‘Kiln-free recycled tile startup agrees pilot deal with major UK supplier’, The Guardian, 27 May 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/27/recycled-tile-startup-pilot-deal-dekiln-johnson-tiles accessed 2 June 2026.

[3] The Heritage Crafts Red List, at https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/categories-of-risk/ accessed 2 June 2026.

[4] The World Craft Council’s-World Craft City Programme was launched in 2014; see https://www.wccinternational.org/craft-cities accessed 2 June 2026.

[5] See the British Ceramics Biennial website, https://www.britishceramicsbiennial.com/ accessed 2 June 2026.

[6] See the Birmingham Jewellery Biennial’s website, https://birminghamjewellerybiennial.com/ accessed 2 June 2026.

[7] Middleport Pottery, Gladstone Pottery Museum and Birmingham School of Jewellery.

[8] See Craftspace’s website, https://craftspace.co.uk/about/ accessed 2 June 2026.

[9] An example is the work of Su Richardson, who works with crochet, soft sculpture, assemblage, print and collage. BMAG has recently acquired Richardson’s Out of the Bag: self portrait, aged 75 (2022), through the Contemporary Art Society Fine Art Award (rather than the dedicated craft award), https://contemporaryartsociety.org/objects/out-bag-self-portrait-aged-75-2022. This work was shown at Ikon’s Thread the Loom exhibition in 2025. In 2025 Midlands Art Centre (MAC) curated the retrospective Su Richardson: In Stitches, https://macbirmingham.co.uk/exhibition-archive/su-richardson accessed 9 June 2026.

[10] On this trilogy at Ikon, see https://www.ikon-gallery.org/event/clay-yarn-and-ink-the-interplay-between-heritage-crafts-and-contemporary-art accessed 2 June 2026.

[11] For the catalogue to Victorian Radicals, see https://shop.birminghammuseums.org.uk/products/victorian-radicals-from-the-pre-raphaelites-to-the-arts-crafts-movement?srsltid=AfmBOoo9yRpZYPTqYN3gpZBdVEfL6K-k-s4FnNwYRgk-ce0NIclSUNdm accessed 2 June 2026.

[12] This number is an estimate, as the collection is not fully catalogued. An archive of designs by John Hardman & Co. alone numbers thousands of additional objects.

[13] Sellers bequeathed a substantial collection of modernist ceramics to the city, including works by Bernard Leach and Lucie Rie, some of which were displayed at BMAG from 2015 to 2020.

[14] The 667 cow cream jugs were presented to the City of Stoke-on-Trent Museum & Art Gallery in 1962 by Mrs. Gabrielle M. Keiller. A condition of the gift stipulated that a minimum of two-thirds of the collection should be on permanent exhibition - the remainder available for study by appointment. See https://www.stokemuseums.org.uk/pmag/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/Cow-creamers.pdf accessed 2 June 2026.