I recently had the
honour of presenting the opening speech at the inaugural conference and
exhibition of Studio Woodworkers Australia. SWA is a recently formed group with the aim of becoming the
peak body for Australian men and women who are professional artists, designers
and craftspeople in wood.
I took the opportunity
to be pretty blunt about the state of woodcraft in Australia. The time has
passed when we can be as uncritical and all-encompassing as we have been. As
craft professionals, we must be realistic about the way we are perceived and
what our cultural role is.
From the feedback on
the day, the speech was well received by my peers, despite some of the pretty
strong opinions that I aired. The last two years has seen an unprecedented
decline in the number of professional wood artists able to survive
economically. Those who are still in business are not making money beyond
simple survival.
As a craft, we need to
be clear to the public about who and what we see as “the best” in our field.
Otherwise, how can we guide and educate the public? If we were selecting an
“Australian Woodworking Team” it would have to be done with the same rigor that
the Australian Cricket Team is selected (possibly a poor analogy, given the
current team).
Anyone in Australia
can say they are a wood artist or a furniture designer. There are no formal or
legal qualifications required nor standards that must be met. Anybody can call
their work fine furniture or claim to be a master craftsman. These terms only
have weight if other craftsmen call a
maker or a particular piece these things. The woodcraft movement has a
responsibility to set the standard. The public would probably be pleasantly
surprised to hear how the core of the woodcraft movement sees some of those
individuals and companies that make outrageous claims about their work.
You can’t simply claim
to be on the Australian cricket team; you have to be selected by your peers.
Following is my speech as it was
presented on the day (it has not been edited). It was written to be “spoken”,
so please forgive some elements of the style. When in doubt, read it aloud- it
might flow better.
Inaugural
opening Speech presented at 12am, Saturday 19th 2013 at the Sturt
School for Wood, Mittagong, on behalf of Studio Woodworkers Australia.
“Hello ladies and
gentlemen, and welcome to the inaugural gathering and exhibition of Studio Wood
Workers Australia. As you know, this gathering is all about how to cut a better
dovetail, which glue to use and what the best finish is for red gum. And if any
of you actually believe this, it is time for you to leave now.
We are here for the
sole reason that we are trying to find a commercially viable way to pursue our
passion and talent for woodcraft. At the most basic level, no member of SWA
really needs help with their woodwork. Nor is their primary need an excuse to
give each other a call, or a chat room or a machinery exchange. What we all
need is help finding our own path financially and to promote the industry as a
whole.
Now, we are currently
facing the perfect storm; the retail economy is broken, costs across the board have
skyrocketed and as a group we are woefully out of fashion. Professional craft is out of fashion. Worse,
viewing the craft as a whole, we are in danger of losing sight of what we are actually
all about. Unless we take stock, and critically review our industry, with the
same passion and detail that we would review our dovetailing technique, then we
will crash and burn.
Some of the problems faced by the craft are
beyond our control, while others we must take collective ownership of. And
before I get stuck in, I would like to make clear that my observations and
concerns are far broader than the membership of SWA. SWA has been formed to
combat the difficulties we face. I apologise in advance if I offend any
practicing maker here; that is not my intent. You can rest assured that I am
every bit as guilty as anybody in this room for the many short comings that I
will touch on today. I am simply describing the conditions and difficulties we
face, as I see them (you can throw rocks at me later).
Firstly, we must be
realistic about where we currently are. Do we have an industry, and if so, what
is that industry? Now I’m a little bit precious on this point, but here we go;
I want to see wood crafts people able to make their primary living from fine
wood working; not teaching, writing, demonstrating, or doing more general work
like kitchen making or sash window fabrication. Don’t misunderstand me on this
point; I have absolutely no criticism at all of individuals who, with malice of
forethought, chose these other
career paths, but it feels to me like these options are currently a refuge from
the storm, rather than the result of free choice.
I’m sure that if we all sat down with
some butchers paper and marker pens, we could eventually come up with a list of
the top twenty wood craftspeople in Australia. If we then winnowed out their
incomes from teaching, writing, and doing general work and focused just on the
fine work they make and sell, what would be their gross turnover? Would it be
5m? I doubt it. Would it even be 3m? What if we got really brutal and focused
on net incomes from work done for those top 20? Would it average out much above
40K each?
Look around this room;
How many makers here made a personal taxable income last year of 40k or more
from making and selling their work? Once, the core of our craft was making and
selling, while all the peripheral activities where valuable off-farm income.
Now the peripherals rule the roost.
Now, if we bring back
those teaching, writing and demonstration incomes back into the mix, we start
to look more like an industry; is it the industry to which we aspire? Are we still primarily makers? Are we
living as craftspeople? We facilitate those who sell equipment, tools, timber,
tuition and publications to non-professional enthusiasts. That’s actually a reasonable sized show
that generates a lot of turnover and also generates jobs. What’s more, the
hobby industry needs a few “heros” to help sell all its wares, so we have an
ongoing role. I would suggest that
if you wanted the ear of a politician in the current climate, this is the only
concept of industry that will get any traction with them, given our current
performance.
How has it come to
this? Where is my generation of professional makers? We have had more than 25
years of wood school graduates from a variety of institutions, heaps of grants
and emerging artist programs, national and state bodies purporting to represent
us, but precious few success stories. I know I am not the best maker, designer
of business man in this room; why am I so professionally lonely?
I am 44 years old and
have been a maker since I was 25. Dunstone Design employs 3 highly skilled craftsmen
full time and we have another two other artists who we deal regularly with. We
only make fine furniture. I teach occasionally as an indulgence. This should
not be a success story; this should be a relatively normal story. There should
be ten or more other Dunstone Designs in Australia. Why aren’t there?
I fear that
collectively we don’t think and behave like professionals. We describe
ourselves as professional craftspeople, but we tend to talk about everything
except the business side of our craft. We choose heroes who are not
commercially viable. There is a fear of investment and of taking real commercial
risks. You can do a diploma in fine woodworking and learn nothing about
commercial viability. You can get a certificate 3 in cabinet making and have
never felt the pace of commercial work. There is even a sense within the craft
community that anyone who is commercially successful has somehow sold out.
Sam Maloof, George
Nakashima, Alan Peters, Edward Barnsley, Martin Grierson, John Makepeace,
Wendle Castle, I could go on; Who on this list sold out by being commercially
viable? You could have sat down with any one of these makers and had a frank
discussion about the business of fine woodwork. They would have seen it as
natural to employ craftsmen, to own a workshop full of equipment, to expect a
profit, to look for a return on investment. All of them would have found the
going tough; that’s just the nature of the game we are in. You will never make
any money quickly in fine furniture. If you haven’t got 15 years to get
established, you’re already in trouble.
As a group, we break
the golden rule that a businessman should love the deal more than the product.
We have all, myself included, under-sold our work in order to make something that
we really wanted to make. Just as bad, we have spent far too much time doing
“extra” unpaid work for free, so that an object meets our own standards, rather
than the expectations of our clients. On one level this is hardly surprising,
we are all perfectionists in our own way. We are all driven by the love of
doing and exploring.
But what other
industry does this? How often would a plumber put in an extra week’s labour for
free, even when the client doesn’t value the extra effort? We constantly
over-make for our own indulgence.
Of course sometimes,
especially at the beginning of your career, this underselling is absolutely
required; you are either too slow or not good enough or both. The saying goes
that “the job you are doing now dictates the client you will get next”. We are
all trying to make special work, with each piece building on the success and
knowledge gained from the last. It’s actually a perfectly legitimate decision
to consciously undersell you skills to one client in order to learn a new
technique or develop a design, or develop speed, as long as you can put that
knowledge to paid use later. It is only a failing if you don’t recognise or
accept what you are doing; You must always work ever upwards.
Then there is the
problem of high overheads. Furniture making in particular is very overhead
heavy. I envy wood turners their low overheads. I imagine instrument makers are
similarly blessed. Furniture making requires considerable equipment, space,
expensive materials and insurances. Realistically, these overheads should be divided
among as many workers as possible, but there is a cultural bias amongst craft
woodworkers towards working alone. This makes no economic sense, and is more a
reflection of our collective uncertainty than it is of a problem with hiring the
right people.
Collectively across
the craft, our pricing could only be described as erratic. Because so few
makers, especially “emerging artists”(a term and concept that I detest) have a
realistic acceptance or understanding of their actual costs, combined with a poor
appreciation of commercial pace and little market experience, it’s hardly a
surprise that pricing is such a hit or miss affair. I’m sure we have all been
to exhibitions where we are equally appalled by either the low price of an item
or the high price of an item.
Time is our Bete Noir.
It is largely inevitable that we will be paid for a combination of time taken
plus materials. Very few of us will be able to charge a premium because of our
name. I know I can’t. We therefore
have to appreciate that workshop speed and efficiency is fundamental. There is
basically a balance between speed, quality, artistic merit, materials and
price. As a craft, we are singularly poor at teaching time management. The
biggest criticism we face from the broader furniture industry is that we are
painfully slow to do to the basics. We deserve to be paid for our special
skills; we don’t deserve to be paid to be inefficient at simple tasks.
As a clumsy analogy,
consider the person who has a passion for food and cooking. This person spends
much of their time and energy cooking for family and friends. People admire
what they do and they have a wide network of appreciative supporters. Perhaps
they will enter Master Chef one day. Now consider the life of a professional
chef. Both have a love of food,
but the Chef must bring a completely different attitude to his or her work. Not
less creativity, just a different starting premise. The expectations of friends
eating for free are completely different to the expectations of clients paying
for restaurant meals. The chef, like us, is constrained by real world costs,
responsibilities and expectations. I would argue that in recent years, the
woodcraft movement has been attracting lots of cooks, and precious few chefs.
Fundamentally, we rely
on our work being “better” than the high-street stuff to survive. Most of our
prospective clients will initially approach us with a real-world need; a dining
suite, a cabinet to store something precious, a bed. There is space for
whimsical work, but our core work will have a practical element. We only have a
viable place in the market if our work is better than the high-street, because
it is sure going to be more expensive!
Consider my challenge
as a chairmaker; In terms of performance, it’s hard to beat one of those
ubiquitous plastic garden chairs that you find all over Australia. You know,
the ones that are a plastic interpretation of a Windsor chair. They are light,
flexible, stackable, comfortable and dirt cheap. They even look ok. Bunnings
sells them for next to nothing. For my chairs to sell, they must be at least as
comfortable as a cheap plastic chair. My cheapest chair is $1200. How would I
sell them, if a $20 chair outperforms them ergonomically? All the other stuff,
craftsmanship, timber, aesthetics, can enhance the price from this base point,
but if the primary performance, that is as a tool for sitting, fails, then so
does the design.
We have some musical
instrument makers here, I’m sure. How many $8000 guitars would they sell if
their work didn’t sound at least as good as a generic store bought $400 guitar?
Why are we any different? If our drawers are too small to be used, our chairs
uncomfortable and our beds impractical, or our hall tables wobbly, why do we
deserve to make a living from making them? Who do we expect our audience to be?
Now, I am absolutely not suggesting that members of SWA are guilty of such
failings, or that you will see such work here, but you don’t have to look too
hard within the broader scene to find some shocking examples of underperforming
furniture. Every time a potential client sees a piece of contemporary fine
furniture and thinks that looks uncomfortable, or, what on earth would I do
with that, or, will it break if I use it, then the whole craft suffers.
Clearly there is room
for purely artistic work and sculptural interpretations of furniture, again, I
am not arguing against it, but our core business is usable work. Precious few
of us will pay the bills by making only interpretive work. And remember, we are
trying to be professionals, not amateurs.
Another obstacle we
face is that it is relatively difficult for third parties to make money
directly from our work. Unlike those selling tools, timber and services,
galleries and other outlets selling fine wood work are just as endangered as
the makers themselves. This is not in our interests. It would be far healthier
for the industry if there was more room for third party profits. If a whole
host of allied business were making money from us doing our core work it would
help keep us on the tools. Unfortunately, I know that in my own business, which I know
has an unusual cost structure, I would actually go backwards if I sold more
than 10% of my total productivity at wholesale. Established makers quickly get
trapped into a cost structure that requires them to get paid for selling their
work as well as making it. The reason for this is simple; as a very rough rule
of thumb, a furniture maker needs to sell about $100,000 worth of work a year
in order to pocket about $40,000. A gallery therefore needs to sell $165,000
(including GST) of that maker’s work, for the maker to get his or her $100,000.
Even a combination of galleries from around Australia will struggle to sell
$165,000 of a maker’s work, so it is inevitable that the maker must do at least
some direct marketing. As soon as this marketing starts to work, the cost/benefit
relationship for wholesale declines. Believe me, this is a handicap to our
industry unfortunately I have no answer to this dilemma.
Are we looking at the
right role models when we choose to pursue woodcraft as a living? Who are our
heros, and have we chosen them wisely? James
Krenov, who described his approach as basically that of an amateur, has had a
huge influence in Australia. His third book, published in 1979 was titled The
Impractical Cabinet Maker. It is no coincidence that in riposte, four years
later Alan Peters published Cabinetmaking- The Professional Approach. We can
hardly sight the likes of Krenov as an influence and motivation, and then
complain about a lack of commercial viability. It wouldn’t do us any harm to
focus on those role models who offer us hope of financial stability within the
“doing” side of our craft.
Very oddly, one of our
biggest failings in recent years has been to lose sight of what it means to
design for craft. There is an increasing trend towards industrial design, at
the expense of craft design. I find this frankly perplexing. By definition,
craft design allows for the hand of the maker to be seen. Most of you will be
familiar with a Tony Kenway dining chair. This is a great example of a craft
design. No two chairs will ever look exactly the same, but then no two sets
will look the same either. If Tony’s team makes six chairs in blackwood for one
client, and six in blackwood for another client, you will end up with twelve
distinct chairs, but two distinct sets. This is craft design. We mustn’t lose
sight of our core strengths; it is where our appeal lies.
Now, it is a sad truth
that, with some glittering exceptions, our audience is pretty illiterate.
Australia does not have much of a furniture culture or, for that matter, a fine
wood working culture. We have all experienced clients who really don’t
understand what they are looking at, even when they have paid the big bucks for
something special. There is a danger that we start to see each other as the
audience. The Highstreet retailers understands what Mr and Mrs Average sees in
a piece of furniture and they have responded to it. Disturbingly, the result
has been a race to the bottom, which is frankly not a good sign for us. That
tells us that the broad audience is happy to throw away quality in pursuit of
price. Our audience will always be a very small percentage of the broad
audience, but to date we have so far failed to fight back successfully.
Consider the Matt
Blatt phenomenon. You can buy a really poor reproduction (perhaps approximation
is a better description?) of a classic chair for peanuts through Matt Blatt. We
might jump up and down about this, but we really should attempt to analyse it.
What is the purchaser actually seeing when they buy a dodgy wishbone chair?
Clearly, there is some perceived “value” in the original, or else why bother
approximating it at all? But why don’t more people actually value the merits of
the original? It is hard to imagine that an equally weak copy of a Ferrari would
be so openly and uncritically received by car enthusiasts.
Now, our problem is quite
different with the Ikea phenomenon. Our problem here is that their stuff is
dirt cheap, but also very well designed and made. Unlike the poor rip-off of
the wishbone chair, an Ikea piece actually represents pretty good value for
money, if fitness for purpose and longevity is matched against cost. Ikea
spends a heck of a lot of time, brains and money getting their products right,
and it shows.
Fortunately for us, Ikea
is not fine furniture and never will be. It will not appeal to the wealthier
end of town because it is too uniform and industrial. Nor will it appeal to the
special interest end of town. There is a significant sector of the market out
there who are potentially looking for something more individual. Our challenge
is to meet this need and to carry our audience so that they understand and will
pay for the difference.
This is the same
challenge currently facing most fine art groups in Australia. Live theatre,
opera, ballet, classical music, literature, poetry; all are facing the
challenge of diminishing audiences and less educated audiences (I’m sure
shortening attention spans are involved as well). We have the additional
handicap of beginning from the bottom of the cultural list to start with. For
example, Craft Australia disappeared at the flick of a pen almost without trace
last year. Who was impacted? Really only a small number of practitioners and
vested interests.
I think our sorry
status is reflected in the awards that are available to us (or should I say
unavailable to us). We have no national awards of any significance to the
broader public. In 2012 The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ( a category within the NSW Premier’s literary awards) went to Gig
Ryan for her latest compilation New and Selected Poems. The prize
was $30,000. Imagine a national woodworking prize with that sort of clout. I
have nothing against poets, but it is obvious that they pull a bucket load more
cultural weight than we do. We must do our best to redress this.
I have not really focused in this address on
just how weak the current retail economy is. There is nothing we can do to improve it, so we must simply
tend our owns gardens and wait. As a friend of mine said recently, our current
task is to not lose too much money until things improve. That is the only
advice I can give.
More broadly, we must hope that SWA will be
part of the fightback. I confess that it was a bold move by the board to invite
me as the opening speaker, as I am not even a member yet. I am not a great team
player when it comes to boards. I’ve even thrown a few rocks at SWA in the last
12 months, constructively I hope. In some respects, I would have been comforted
to see this group as a subset of a bigger body; the Furniture Industry
Association of Australia, or perhaps Manufacturing Australia, anything to show
that we see ourselves as chefs not cooks. There is always the danger that such a
group evolves into a club rather than a real industry body, and we need an
industry body.
Our authenticity will be the key to the
future. More and more people will react to the mass market by wanting to find
independent, talented artisans who are lovingly making special things. This will be our place in the sun. And
how lucky are we that, in addition to the normal advertising channels, we now
have the online facilities to explain our work to a much broader audience, in a
way that we can control? I am shockingly inept at all things computer, but I
can see what all the fuss is about and how powerful the online opportunities
are becoming.
We have better tools, better texts to refer
to, our material is better understood and we have the whole history of woodwork
and furniture to refer to. If we fail to capture the public’s imagination with
our work, then that will be our failing, not necessarily their ignorance. The
public will be as ignorant as we allow them to be, because we are the
custodians of the knowledge. It is our flame to keep alive.
I love this craft and I love fine
furniture. If I wasn’t a maker, and therefore impoverished, I would be a
collector. Who wouldn’t want a Matthysen clock or an Adrian Potter or a Neil
Erasmus? And for the first time in a long time, there are some young makers
coming through who look like they might just have the right stuff, although we
constantly loose them to better paying industries. Despite my at times harsh
assessment of the craft, the amazing thing is just how much we Australian
makers punch above our weight, all things considered.
Yes, we are in a perfect storm, much of it
beyond our making, but it’s time to sober up and face the problems rationally. Perhaps
this gathering is the beginning of the recovery process? We need to focus on making really good
work that connects with people on a visceral level. We need to present exhibitions that make the average person
sit up a take notice. We must remind ourselves that we are Chefs, not cooks. We
need to find our voice as a movement and make a clarion call that can’t be
ignored.
Please enjoy the inaugural gathering and
exhibition of Studio Woodworkers Australia. I declare the exhibition and
gathering open.”
