Biography
Martina Margetts is Senior Tutor in Critical & Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art in London and a leading international specialist in craft. Her research interests concern the meanings and practices of contemporary craft and design in global and social contexts.
Martina Margetts read History at Bristol University, followed by a Diploma year at the Study Centre for the Fine and Decorative Arts at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a Certificate in Periodical Journalism at the London College of Printing. She was Editor of Crafts magazine for nine years and a senior member of staff at the Crafts Council during the 1980s. Her books include International Crafts (Thames and Hudson, 1991), Michael Rowe (Lund Humphries, 2003) and Tord Boontje (Rizzoli USA, 2007). She has curated major international touring exhibitions including The Raw and the Cooked: New Work in Clay in Britain (MOMA, Oxford and Barbican, London, 1993; with Alison Britton); Objects of Our Time (Crafts Council, 1996) and Only Human (Crafts Council, 1999). She was a crafts adviser to Arts Council England from 1999 to 2007 and is on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Modern Craft and of Craft Research.
She lectures, curates and writes internationally and was a judge and conference speaker at the 2009 International Crafts Biennale in South Korea. In 2010 she undertook her first research visit to Brazil, which resulted in the major conference at the RCA in January 2011 entitled Brazil – The Cultural Contemporary. She curated Time Machines: Daniel Weil and the art of design for the Design Museum in 2014 and continues to contribute widely to international conferences and research seminars.
Recent keynote lectures in London include the 2013 Peter Dormer Lecture at the Royal College of Art, the Crafts Council’s Make:Shift conference 2014, the University of Westminster’s Craft in the Expanded Field conference 2014 and Post-Craft at the ICA 2015. Chapters will be published in two ceramics anthologies in 2016.
