Clandestine in a gallery
Being invited to be part of an exhibition at MAKE Southwest was such a treat. I feel like framebuilding broadly sees itself, and indeed is seen from outside, as a part of the manufacturing side of cycling’s industry. And historically, that is the case: high end bicycles were built by framebuilders.
However, the whole industry has shifted on it’s axis, and now bicycles are built in factories, and framebuilding is seen as a manufacturing niche, the fringe, some sort of radical edge. I feel quite strongly that framebuilding sits much closer to the world of craft than it does to mainstream manufacturing nowadays. I’d sooner see framebuilding tie itself to craft than attempt to fight a probably unwinnable battle against corporate mass production.
With MAKE Southwest being quite literally on my doorstep, and Bovey Tracey being something of a hub for craft in the southwest, I’ve been exposed a lot to the contemporary craft scene. It seems to me that that scene shares a lot more with framebuilding than the mainstream cycling industry does. Items designed and made with care by a single person or a small group? Items with a tangible link to historical approaches? Items made with a singular focus on the individual they’re made for? Items made where the nagging demand of a price point is discarded for the striving of mastery? These are the very tenets of craft, and framebuilding.
Many crafts that seemed so close to dying out under the thumb of mass production have actually found new life in the contemporary craft world. I know that craft is such an awkward word for some people, associated with staid old activities irrelevant to modern life. But actually my experience is that most surviving crafts are alive! Alive in the sense that they don’t just try and preserve in aspic traditional approaches, they are not backward looking, and are instead re-examining how their skills can be preserved to apply to the modern world, how techniques can evolve to accomodate that. New aesthetics and approaches grow out of the grounding of historical skill. It’s beautiful and distinctly modern, not old-fashioned. And that sounds a lot like contemporary framebuilding to me. The beauty of that is that these living crafts have reached whole new groups of customers, and been able to increase their economic and social sustainability. Which sounds like something framebuilding could do with!
I’ve wheeled my bike and exploded diagram frame out of MAKE now, but the exhibition they’re showing now seems no less interesting. In collaboration with Heritage Crafts the Staying Alive exhibition showcases some of the south west’s endangered crafts, and highlights how they’ve grown out the south west’s environment, and how relevant they still are today. It’s a powerful exhibition: if you’re in the southwest I’d really recommend it.
