ABOUT US

Our member makers’ talent and artistic excellence is celebrated and flourishes through the activities of CAA, which include sales of makers’ work; innovative exhibitions; securing significant commissions for our maker members; facilitating acquisitions by major public and private collections; and running meaningful education, outreach and public participation programmes.

CAA does not receive any regular funding. We have no shareholders and all earned income is reinvested in the gallery and our charitable activities. Respected by our peers, our members and others working in the field and beyond, CAA has been influential and remained a beacon of excellence and integrity in the arts for seven decades.

What follows is a brief history of our first 70 years.

In 1953 the Duke of Edinburgh accepted the Presidency of the Centre. He continued to offer his loyal and informed support until his death in 2021. During the 1950s both HM the Queen and the Queen Mother were regular visitors to the Centre.

The first Chairman was the illustrator and wood-engraver John Farleigh who served the centre with passionate commitment for almost twenty years until 1964. The advisory committee included distinguished figures like Roger Powell, bookbinder, M.C. Oliver, calligrapher, Edward Barnsley, furniture maker, Dora Billington, ceramicist, Leslie Durbin, silversmith, Alan Durst, wood carver and Marianne Straub, textile designer. From the late 1950s the role of craft and the Centre were fiercely debated. The Board of Trade via the Council of Industrial Design provided a small grant on the understanding that the crafts demonstrate their role in improving industrial design.

A series of fine exhibitions were staged, mostly group shows with an emphasis on the more traditional crafts of silversmithing, calligraphy and bookbinding. Architects were courted in 1960 in a joint show with the Royal Institute of British Architects – The Creative Craftsman - which was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh who made a plea for individualism in an age of mass culture.

In 1972 the Crafts Centre of Great Britain was renamed the British Crafts Centre. The newly formed Crafts Advisory Committee became its chief funder and, to an extent, a rival organisation. The ceramicists Glenys Barton and Jacqui Poncelet, just graduated from the Royal College of Art, showed in 1973. A fellow ceramicist trained at the Royal College of Art, Elizabeth Fritsch, made piano music part of her show From Earth to Airin 1974

That year also saw the First International Exhibition of Miniature Textiles: ‘The object of the First International Exhibition of Miniature Textilesis to show that the vitality we have come to expect from large textiles could be communicated in the small. The exhibitors were invited to produce work up to 20cm in any direction which is a dimension believed to impose a discipline of scale and space and so encourage the artist to construct a true miniature textile rather than a large textile made small.’ In 1977, the potters Gillian Lowndes and Ian Auld and the textile artists and designers Roger Oates and Fay Morgan had joint shows that anticipated their future careers.

The decade opened with a solo show for the weaver Stella Benjamin. CAA celebrated 25 Years in Covent Garden in 1992, an exhibition selected by the photographer David Cripps, the collector Lady Gibberd, the editor of Crafts magazine Martina Margetts, Victor Margrie, founder director of the Crafts Council, the former director of CAA Tatjana Marsden, the dress designer Jean Muir, Oliver Watson of the Department of Ceramics at the V&A, and Lindsay Wilcox, then chair of CAA. Alison Britton noted in an accompanying leaflet that recent CAA exhibitions had shown ‘unforeseen and hybrid work, pieces that slip between acknowledged categories… the liaison of painting and textiles, jewellery and clothing, the container and sculpture’. In 1994 there was a retrospective of the work of the late Angus Suttie and a move to Percy Street under the directorship of Mary La Trobe Bateman. The 50th anniversary of the founding of ‘this unique institution’ was celebrated in 1998, marked by a series of major exhibitions and an accompanying publication.

In 2013 CAA moved to new premises in Southwark Street at the invitation of the architects Allies & Morrison, on the ground floor of a Victorian building owned and refurbished by the architects. model:making (2013) curated by Brian Kennedy celebrated this new relationship. Christine Lalumia was made Executive Director in late 2013; the following year the potter Emmanuel Cooper had a posthumous retrospective. A Leap into the Unknown (2015), an exhibition exploring happy mistakes and surprises in eight makers’ practices generated discussion and provided a platform for experimentation and growth. Other notable exhibitions included Richard Batterham (2016), an 80th birthday retrospective for this distinguished potter, and Bloomin’ Jewels, guest-curated by Corinne Julius in 2017. Home from Home: Ceramics by international artists working in Britain (2017) was curated by Christine Lalumia, ceramicist Kochevet Bendavid and Clare Maddison. It was accompanied by a short film and a publication bringing the makers’ voices to the fore, focusing on 25 contemporary potters born elsewhere who made Britain their creative home. Matthew Warner: Social Objects (2018) and Adi Toch: Echoes of Process (2018) gave insights into the unusual work of two young makers, a potter and a metalworker.