Andrea Peach new professor of craft specialising in craft history and theory

Article / Teacher ProfessionalPractice

Published: 18.09.2019

Andrea Peach new professor of craft specialising in craft history and theory.

Author:: Crafts and Design Konstfack University of Arts

Edited by:: Klimt02

Edited at:: Barcelona

Edited on:: 2019

Portrait of Andrea Peach, photo by Jennie Milne.

Andrea Peach has over twenty years of experience teaching contextual and critical studies in UK art schools. Her craft research is internationally recognized and published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Design History, the Journal of Craft Research and the Journal of Modern Craft. As a craft historian and theorist, her particular research emphasis is on the importance of making and materiality, the significance of objects in contemporary culture and their relationship to the past. She has focused on craft as commodity and cultural industry, as well as the construction of national and cultural identity through the craft object.

More recently Andrea Peach has investigated the idea of place and the north, looking at crafting communities and cultural sustainability in remote locations. The relationship with craft, feminist discourse and notions of wholeness and the body has also formed part of recent research. In collaboration with a colleague at Edinburgh College of Art, she is currently investigating community-based charities making knitted breast prostheses for post-mastectomy breast cancer patients, challenging cultural norms in relation to the female body.

It is a great privilege to have the opportunity to share my research expertise in craft history and theory, as part of a team of exceptional colleagues, in an international institution renowned for making. I'm really excited to join the Craft team at Konstfack, says Andrea Peach whose core motivation as an educator is to encourage students to become skilled critical thinkers: to enable them to integrate theory with practice and to interrogate and engage with ideas in the same way as they do materials.

I tell my students that my craft is my writing, and I encourage them to also see writing as a craft. In the same way that it takes time and practice to learn how to throw a pot, so too does writing a good essay or fashioning a cogent argument. Attention to detail, creativity and mindfulness are required to further one’s craft, in whatever form it may take.

Konstfack's Vice-Chancellor Maria Lantz says:
I am excited to welcome Andrea Peach to Konstfack and to Stockholm´s arts, craft and design community. Andrea´s international network paired with her sensitivity for making fit perfectly into our environment. Just as Andrea states, Konstfack does not use theory to withdraw from materiality but rather the opposite: To enhance, develop and communicate what arts, craft and design is to the maker, how it can be understood by others and how it plays out in relation to the economy and daily life locally and globally.

Andrea Peach has an MA in Design History from the Royal College of Art in London, and a PhD in Craft History from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. She is currently the External Examiner for Historical and Critical Studies in Design at Glasgow School of Art, and Honorary Visiting Reader at Robert Gordon University. She is also a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Association.