Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

Craft in the conventional sense is based on work done by hand rather than produced by industry; work requiring great skill and generally characterized by laborious activity. It leaves room for creative expression by the individual, for the nature of the work and its relation to life in the broadest and not just the utilitarian sense. It is related to a tradition that includes unique knowledge of a community that passes it on from one generation to another, and thus preserves its identity.

The concept of “craft” was implanted as part of the socio-political agenda of the “Arts and Crafts” movement in Europe in the 19^th century. It constituted a reaction against industrial production based on processes of mechanization and automation, which denude the object of all traces of the human, personal, inimitable and unique. The concept of the “new craft,” in contrast, may be seen as a side effect of the post-industrial age, whose expression we can find in a variety of aspects. These originate in the various implications of information technology and the digital revolution, and recognition of the destructive environmental results of industrialization in recent generations. As a result, craft has been transformed into a creative arena undermining the dichotomic partitions imposed by modernism between craftsman and designer, between craftsman and artist and between manufacture and creation, and reexamining the traditional relationships between man and the machine. The new craftsman is he who simultaneously stretches the borders between design and craft, investigates materials and methods of production from the most basic to the most advanced, and promotes renewed thinking about the relationship between man and his physical environment and the objects surrounding him. Unlike the old craft, he proposes to view the machine as a product of computerized technology, a possible source for generating the inimitable and the unique. All this, while giving preference (in certain cases) to mutual dependencies and joint action rather than individual expression.

The exhibition “The New Craft” includes works by local and international artists who continue the long term history of involvement in environmental, cultural and ethical questions. Many of them investigate the sources of the process of manufacture and creation of material and virtual objects, while in part proposing radical substitutes for manual work.