A Crafty Network, celebrates its third birthday this month, as Anne James discovers

This month the Craft Network celebrates its third birthday. The network is a collaborative initiative between the O3 Gallery, in the Oxford Castle Quarter, city centre haberdashers Darn it & Stitch and the Pitt Rivers Museum’s VERVE project.

The O3 Gallery is a contemporary, highly attractive circular exhibition space that both plays host to a wide range of art and craft and that provides selling opportunities for artists and crafts people. Darn It & Stitch is a colourful and inspiring shop nestling next to Oxford Town Hall with a range of materials for needlework and textile based craft work.

VERVE at Pitt Rivers includes a programme of exploration of the importance of design and craft skills by using artefacts in its collection and engaging contemporary craft makers to provide expert commentary via workshops and seminars.

Helen Statham O3 Gallery Director explains: “O3 Gallery, Pitt Rivers, Darn it & Stitch may be three quite different organisations, but the key is they inhabit the same applied arts territory. Together we endeavour to put makers, sellers, bloggers, buyers and enthusiasts in touch to discuss work, share skills and interests, meet people who could help them with commercial success and connect them with the rich and inspirational collection at the Pitt Rivers’.

Crafty Networking events are free and open to all to attend. At the most recent the speaker was Barnaby Carder AKA Barn the Spoon. He runs a successful craft business in London’s Little Spoon Shop, sitting in the shop window carving functional spoons of all kinds from fresh, sustainable wood. He talks passionately about being part of a ‘wood culture renaissance’ in which techniques thousands of years old, rarely seen since industrialisation, are making a return. Techniques such as those used to create artefacts in the Pitt Rivers collection.

Oxfordshire Craft Guild member and networker wood turner Richard Shock explains he sees the network as helpful in three ways; firsty as an opportunity to network with crafts people within one’s own discipline, and secondly to mix with practitioners of other crafts. He cites an example from his own work in which some of his wooden bowls have taken on a porcelain-like glazed sheen thanks to his work alongside ceramicists, an outcome he had not consciously planned. Thirdly, it helps craftspeople develop their business and marketing expertise. Illustrated here, is his beautiful platter Ash 21751, made from locally-sourced ash and inlaid with a geometric pattern he describes as ‘satisfying’, drawing on and applying his experience as a scientist when he worked with crystals and other materials, developing a passion for their regular patterns and rhythms.

Another enthusiastic member of the network is Christine Green who describes the network as ‘brilliant’. It has helped her promote herself and her work: paper cutting. She has taken part in craft events across the county, had her work on sale in the O3 Gallery and runs a workshop at the Pitt Rivers next year. As a rurally-based crafts person, she finds that Crafty Networking’s face-to-face opportunities reach beyond social media. At a recent networking event she was approached by a woman who showed her a paper cut of herself as a little girl with the inscription ‘With love from old Lottie’.

Green describes this as a paper cutter’s equivalent of ‘being shown the Crown Jewels!’ As ‘old Lottie’, is better known as Lottie Reiniger, who was the doyenne of 20th-century paper cutting and it was she who had cut this portrait. One example is a birthday card cut by Green, its heart-shaped dimensions, delicate tracery and very personal message making it a unique gift to treasure.

The Craft Network
At each quarterly meeting, a speaker talks about their craft, how they market and promote themselves, or how they have learned techniques and explored subject matters.
The network next meets in December. For more information, email info@O3gallery.co.uk