Timber Workshop Manager / The Exchange

The Exchange is a community-owned arts and crafts organisation, situated in Erith’s Old Library, a couple of minutes walk from the Thames. I’ve managed the Timber Workshop here since April 2024.

The programmes and activities at The Exchange include community participation and learning in our workshops and garden, where volunteer makers create beautiful and useful objects for community use and for sale.

Across the workshops and the garden, the institution has collaborated with some great designers and makers, including Sarah Price, Local Works, Natalia Kasprzycka, Mentsen and Atelier 34.

What I’ve found most striking about craft practice at The Exchange is that through the collaborative nature of the workshops, and iterative design and production process, the authorship of any particular object becomes productively fuzzy in the final act. Many of the workshop’s objects are produced not by an ‘unknown craftsman’, but by networks of craftspeople too expansive to name; craft in the mode of being rather than having.