A tribute to Simon Olding, the curator and writer who quietly shaped the craft world

The pleasure of developing a connection with the Crafts Study Centre – a museum for modern crafts at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham – had much to do with its director Simon Olding: his quiet and serious intelligence, and his ambitions for a public and a scholarly recognition of craft.

His background was literary. After an English degree at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge in 1976, Simon completed a PhD in Edinburgh in 1980 on 'The short story in England in the 1890s'. He then transferred his research enquiry to objects. He did an AMA Museums Association Diploma, and worked in museums in Bournemouth, Salisbury and Glasgow, among other posts. He became director of the Crafts Study Centre in 2002, and also a professor of Modern Crafts at UCA Farnham in the following year.

Simon had an influential role in the 2017 ceramics exhibition Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, as one of three curators and editors. The others were Glenn Adamson and Martina Droth, both from Yale. The exhibition made a strong impact, for its expansive scale and a breadth of approaches. It was shown in an American and a British museum, at the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut, and at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The splendid large catalogue accompanying the show, with essays by eight curators and craft writers from the UK and the USA, has ensured the afterlife of the exhibition.

In 2020, Simon edited and contributed to the book Bernard Leach: Discovered Archives, with contributions from two Japanese scholars, making use of newly discovered research material in the CSC archives. These are just two examples of Simon's contribution to craft scholarship, his understanding of its modern history, and his clear and articulate telling of it.

My link with the CSC began when I became a trustee in 2006. It grew when I joined the Acquisitions Committee in 2010. Simon invited me to curate two exhibitions during the past sixteen years of connection: first Three by One in 2009, a collaboration with the Crafts Council and the British Council, featuring craft objects from both collections. Life and Still Life, a personal object collection with a new series of my pots, followed in 2012. Working on these two shows with Simon extended my understanding of craft histories of various kinds – verbal, visual and tactile – and what they convey.

Purchasing trips with Simon were another pleasure, visiting the potter Clive Bowen in his Devon workshop, and leaving with two wonderful slip-decorated red clay pots for the CSC collection under our arms. Or meeting on the Welsh borders to go to Angus Suttie's exhibition at the Ruthin Craft Centre, where we fell for a spectacular piece Suttie made in the early 90s: a tall and exuberantly painted clay sculpture, like a creature with legs. It is a fine example of ‘The New Ceramics’, which was a period of postmodern exuberance in the clay world in the UK.

It was also a great addition to the holdings of the CSC, which have largely represented the modernist decades of re-thinking and innovation in craft. The objects, photographs and documents from the revolutionary ceramic practices of Bernard Leach, Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, for instance, are extensive and inspiring, as are the dye recipe books and textile lengths and samples of Enid Marx, Ethel Mairet, and Barron and Larcher from the same period.

In 2016, Simon embarked on a project with the photographic artist Garry Fabian Miller, who lives in the middle of Dartmoor and experiments with light-sensitive paper, working without a camera. The exhibition Making, Thinking, Living showed how innovative Simon's contribution was to the CSC, while the catalogue Garry designed is a beautiful milestone in art/craft history. It is a discussion of light and colour, made by an artist who is mourning the loss of the photographic paper that he has always worked on. Large Cibachrome photographs commanded the space, but also craft objects from his own collection, such as his lidded jars by Richard Batterham, and many textile samples and lengths from the CSC.

As a research degree supervisor Simon was often working in tandem with his fellow professor in textiles, Lesley Millar. When Simon retired from his job directing the CSC in October 2022, there was still time to celebrate his achievements over the past twenty years with staff and colleagues on campus. But it was not expected that his diagnosis of cancer would end his life so soon. His death on 19 November 2022 was a profound shock. He is greatly missed by many.