Despite the barriers to engaging in CPD as a mid-career or established maker / artist, the benefits are significant, if the opportunity presented offers something compelling and stimulating. CinBA facilitated a series of opportunities for makers / artists to engage with the Bronze Age: visits to archaeological sites, European museums, object handling sessions, provision of reading lists, participation in conferences, and the opportunity to discuss on a one-to-one basis with academics.
Makers within the project, for example 'Wright and Teague', were given complete freedom in terms of the extent to which they took advantage of the opportunities offered by CinBA; what activities they attended, how much time and resources they committed to CinBA, and how they directed their own creative practice and responses. The outcomes of the engagement with archaeology were deliberately set up as open-ended. The archaeologists in the project did not act as a filter or arbiter (as is often traditionally the case) but rather as discussants for the makers’ practice based research. Thus any new contemporary craft objects produced as a result of the response to the Bronze Age were not interpretations or narratives about the past, but the individual maker’s reaction to them. The project did not fund commissions from the makers / artists involved; this would have presupposed a creative outcome and might have led to participants falling back on established practices or genres in order to fulfil obligations.
