At the end of 2019, Shai Akram received the inaugural Crafts Council Curatorial Fellowship, and she has been developing her project in the confines of this pandemic. Her work brings a new language to the categorisation, documentation and understanding of craft through the collection. With her practice as a designer (Studio Alt Shift), Shai has drawn on a different set of criteria and canon of understanding to curating the collection. Her agile approach and creative thinking have been critical when faced with the global spread of Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdown, demanding the project to extend in time, and shift from a gallery exhibition to a purely digital output.

By deconstructing the process by which objects were made, and the systems of museum documentation, Shai is able to bring a new voice and new perspective to the structure and categorisation of the collection. She has created three alternative categories by which works across materials and disciplines could be categorised, based on core production values.

The Crafts Council Collection spans 50 years of making in the UK, providing a snapshot of innovation within contemporary craft from the 1970s to now. The new digital framing of Shai’s project, due to the pandemic, has resulted in a challenging of systems, understanding and reading of collection objects. The project and its research has reinvigorated the Crafts Council team and the frameworks for documentation, narrative and understanding of craft.

The final digital provocations, designed by Shai to interrogate our understanding of how craft is categorised, will be live on the Crafts Council website shortly.

Images by Studio Alt Shift www.studioaltshift.com