Tradition/Innovation:
Craft and future intangible cultural heritage

Acknowledging that craft practice is often placed within the context of the past, when time was taken to make an object by hand, we will build on this deep relationship between craft and Intangible Cultural Heritage. However, the intention is not to repeat what has gone before. The debate will reflect on the value of past practice through the rediscovery of its future potentials. We wish to create a climate for the resurgence and acknowledgement of the essential importance of Intangible Cultural Heritage as a valuable expression of identity and economic propositions.

The focus of the conference is on the live connectivity between Intangible Cultural Heritage and contemporary craft practice. Our speakers are drawn from an international community of contemporary makers, curators, writers, historians, academics and funders - all of whom recognize the centrality of craft in human growth and development.

Neil MacGregor, in his series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, described recent research, which reveals that the area of the brain activated by working with the hands, making something, overlaps with the area of the brain used to formulate language. He said: “It seems if you can shape a stone, you can shape a sentence.”

2023 is the twentieth anniversary of the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Heritage. In January 2022, the Northern Culture All-Party Parliamentary Group, The Case for Culture' identified the post-Covid period as a “once in a generation opportunity” to establish a “whole new vision...in which investment in the cultural sector is at the heart of plans to supercharge recovery”.

We live in unstable times, therefore it is urgent that we identify and nourish those fundamental and vital aspects that hold our culture and which we wish to pass on to future generations. Through this conference we hope to engender confidence and lay down markers for a future Intangible Cultural Heritage.