Crafting the local: the lived experience of craft production in the Northern Isles of Scotland

Abstract

National creative and cultural industries policy agendas tend to focus on the economic impact of the sector often favouring scalable digital activities based in global clusters, which underpin notions of growth. There has, however, been a re-emergence of craft, which may not be scalable in the same way, into public debate, but which is increasingly recognised as part of a growing industrial sector, with benefits linked to educational, cultural and economic policy agendas. Accordingly, policymakers have begun to view craft as a stimulus to develop local and regional economies, skills and materials in relation to wider networks. Within this push towards craft-driven creative place making and economic growth, it has been argued that more sophisticated understandings of the "local" are needed that go beyond those which are inward and parochial. Based on AHRC-funded empirical research undertaken in the Northern Isles of Scotland with craft practitioners, this article attempts to provide evidence of the place-based nature of craft work highlighting both opportunities as well as constraints linked to contexts that are often referred to as remote and peripheral when contrasted with urban locations. This article argues that there is a dissonance between high-profile creative-economy policies and the political economy of the "lived experience" of craft work in non-metropolitan settings. We argue for future investigation into, what we term, fractal growthgrowth and development that considers multiple dimensionsas being a valid and valuable outcome of creative practice, which cannot be easily scaled.

Cultural and creative work in rural and remote areas: an emerging international conversation

“…In 2017, the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management published a special issue on 'Cultural Entrepreneurship and Regional Innovation' (Ratten and Ferreira 2017). Greater attention to craft-art and artisan work is also evident in literature from Denmark (Prince 2017), Portugal (Bakas, Duxbury, and Castro 2018), the Northern Isles of Scotland (McHattie, Champion, and Johnson 2019), among other regions, often interwoven with rural tourism contexts and concerns.…”

‘Living in a postcard’: creatively exploring cultural heritage with young people living in Scottish island communities

“…Within this, there is a significant focus on the creative industries in the development of community-based cultural heritage activities (HIE 2018). The Scottish Highlands and Islands are renowned for their rich and distinctive cultural heritage and make a significant contribution to Scotland's creative economy (Scot Gov 2016b;McHattie et al 2019).…”

Re-futuring creative economies: beyond bad dreams and the banal imagination

“…In this respect, of course, there are now a whole range of established and incipient 'socially-just', 'inclusive', 'ecological' 'transitional', 'post-growth', 'decolonised' and 'co-operative' forms of cultural industries production that appear to offer different ways of producing the creative economy (e.g. see de Peuter and Cohen, 2015;Fletcher, 2016;Imagine 2020Imagine , 2018McHattie et al, 2019;O'Dair, 2015;Sandoval, 2018;Serafini, forthcoming). These are vital, valuable and worthy of our support, yet they also remain quite marginal, undervalued and outside of the orthodox imaginary of the creative economy.…”