Craft Field

The Green Craft Field places the nature and inspirational energy of real education on full and spectacular display, showcasing everything from the flippant and whimsical to unquestionable masterpieces. As much as the main stages, here is a gathering of talent you would be very unlikely to see all held in one place anywhere else.

Just a few recent highlights included a fully functional foundry onsite, a visionary glass blower - working into the night from his two storey wigwam, a van dweller and chainsaw carver extraordinaire producing stunning buzz-sawed three dimensional sculpture, and art and technology combined at the forefront of a genuinely sustainable future in the shape of hand built wind generators. 

Some of the very best craftspeople in the country offer insights into their work along with a taste of the life which fulfils them. Here you can watch and wonder, look and learn, create your own artefacts or go home with something direct from the skilled hands of the demonstrators themselves. The field itself is decorated with many monumental works in wood, stone and turf, making it a precious place to spend some time and be a part of the rebirth of respect and patience in the art of manufacturing.

GREEN CRAFTS FIELD

It can be fluffy and fun or scary and sweaty! The Green Crafts Field wields axes, knives, molten glass and bronze, carved flint, fleece and mud using the raw elemental forces in the hands of Europe’s leading risk takers in contemporary craft practice to show a better way and to share that knowledge with you…

Friday through Sunday, there’s hundreds of workshops, from pottery to metalcraft, textiles to woodworking. You’ll find ceremonial objects from cradle to coffin, survival techniques like fire-lighting by friction and how to build your own shelter. How to make your own everyday objects like wooden plates and furniture, metal trivets and pokers, ceramic cups and bowls; right through to ritualistic objects like chalices, drums, rattles and jewellery.

Green Crafts is a field all about living lightly on the land. It’s full of craftspeople and makers who’ve reduced their own footprint on the planet by living and working sustainably. Many craftspeople on the field grow and harvest their own raw materials (from wood to wool) while others only use locally sourced or carefully traced produce. Greencraft practice has many lessons to offer to society as a whole about environmental performance, bridging the art of ideas, inspiration and philosophy with hard core practicality, graft and commonsense.

From chainsaw carving and glass blowing to bronze casting and raku firing there’s plenty to see and every night, the field becomes a magical fairy kingdom, twinkling with hundreds of candle lanterns. And on Saturday night we’ll have a high-flying fire labyrinth by Fire Spiral and Circus La Fong.

This year’s highlights include daily workshops by Stone Age Potters, who’ll be hosting pottery workshops. The Jewellery Workshop will be making re-cycled jewellery. There will be high energy stonecarving workshops with Stoneycraft and Headstone-Carve-it-up plus Beyond 2000BC holding flint knapping workshops.

There will be people powered wood machinery and bowl carving workshops as well as The Rowans’ workshops in carving traditional Welsh Love Spoons.

Basket making and willow sculpture workshops, textile making, metalwork,

instrument making and papermaking workshops! There will be clay experiences and bike repairs and maintenance workshops with Milly Peds alongside amazing sculpture and workshops in rod, finger and glove puppets as well as Shpup holding shadow puppet workshops.

A 35 ton sand sculpture by Sand in your Eye, Bronze Cow up a Tree sculpture, wooden sculpture, wattle and daub domes, lanterns, willow sculptures, turf drawing, a Love Labyrinth by Green Dragon and plenty of banners by Ruth Bennett.

There will be the field’s legendary daily chainsaw-carving spectacles by  Vandweller Sculptures.