The Survival of Traditional Polish Crafts Today: An Interview with Zara Huddleston| interview]

The Survival of Traditional Polish Crafts Today: An Interview With Zara Huddleston

11._agata_niwinska_s_woven_textiles.jpg, default, Woven textiles by Agata Niwińska, photo: Zara Huddleston

Immersed in Polish folk crafts since the late 1980s, Zara Huddleston, the British owner of a small company selling Polish traditional crafts, has a unique perspective on Poland’s handicrafts and architecture. Translator Anna Zaranko speaks to her about preserving artistic heritage, demand on the international market, and memorable moments in village homes.

Thumbnail — Zara Huddleston, photo: courtesy of the subject

An interest in ‘folk art’ in Poland can be traced back to the 19th-century fascination with traditional crafts as part of the ‘folk way of life’. At the end of the century, the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement, roughly equivalent to the arts and crafts movement, drew on and appropriated many folk motifs and elements, aiming, in part, to develop a national style, such as the ‘Zakopane style’. In the 1950s, we move on to the products of the state-run cooperative Cepelia, which employed thousands of craftsmen during the Polish People’s Republic, before we move into the political transformation and right down to the 21^st century’s so-called ‘etnodizajn’. But what about the survival of traditional crafts and the individual village maker today?

Those who have stumbled across Zara Huddleston’s Instagram page, @frankandlusia, will be familiar with the colourful images of traditional jugs, baskets, scarves, rugs, wycinanki and slippers, rustic boxes, Christmas crèches, decorations, woven baskets, not to mention the wooden toys and carved birds – some of which appear in the beautiful work of the painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins, one of the many admirers of these lovely artifacts – all hailing from Polish villages and the work of Polish craftsmen and women. But there is more: glimpses of travels through villages and towns and of marvellous collections of postcards, labels, children’s books, to name but a few of the objects that testify to a long interest in Polish traditional crafts. Zara Huddleston travels these villages and seeks out craftspeople in order to make their handicrafts available to the English – and increasingly international – audience who now seem to love Polish folk art.

AZ: Zara, can you tell us, first of all, about how you came to be in Poland?

ZH: In 1986, I met someone from Kraków in a phone box at Auckland airport, we were both trying to ring a youth hostel; amazingly he had managed to leave Poland for a short while. After returning to London, I decided to go and visit him in Kraków in March 1987. It was at the end of winter and very grey, there was of course not much in the shops, very few restaurants and the waiters always seemed to say ‘nie ma’. You were forced by the socialist government to change a certain amount of money for your stay and that’s when I discovered Cepelia. I spent whatever spare cash I had on wooden toys and wycinanki, although even Cepelia was pretty empty in those days. I travelled back and forth to Poland for a few years, then we got married. Józek moved to London but didn’t like it, so I took the plunge and in 1995 we moved to Warsaw, taking my small design business with us. We stayed 16 years.

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A 1920s wooden house still used as a shop, Ryglice, photo: Zara Huddleston

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AZ: You’re back in England now, and you’ve brought your love of the crafts you discovered with you. What sort of response have you had to the handiwork you’ve made available? Has anything proved to be particularly – or surprisingly – popular?

ZH: At first I had market stalls around and about Dorset, then I was able to meet customers and tell them all about Poland and the makers. The wooden birds probably are the most popular and there are so many people who make them, if you look carefully they are all in different styles. I am very choosy about what I buy. It seems that English people like the Polish folk art style and I have customers all over Europe, the States and in Australia. People say that it’s refreshing to see something different, something original, made with love and care and not mass-produced. At first, I found it difficult to distance myself from the Polish things which had become so familiar to me and try to see what English people would like

AZ: Can you tell us something about the makers you’ve met through your business?ZH: I really enjoy meeting Polish craftspeople, I try to get them to open up about the things they make, I ask them if it’s a tradition in their family; it helps that I’m foreign but also speak Polish, someone they don’t often meet. I go to their houses and they are always very hospitable. Sometimes even making me obiad [dinner], homemade cakes and tea, Poles are so welcoming. Once I was at a potter’s house and his wife said hurriedly that the priest was about to arrive, he was on his rounds of the village and was coming to bless their house, so I sat in a corner of the living room feeling very out of place as he said his prayers. Another time at a wood-carver’s house I had bought lots of painted birds and just as I was leaving, he got out his one-man band, strapped it on his back and loudly performed a song.

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Workshop of the potter Jarosław Rodak, photo: Zara Huddleston

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On the whole, the craftspeople are older, I would say over 50 at least. Most of them don’t use emails or even text messages, so often I have to contact their children or grandchildren. It’s not easy to order new things for my shop that way, so when I order birds in a particular style, I send a photo, they say OK and then I get something quite different which is frustrating but sometimes a nice surprise. They are so friendly I don’t like to get irritated, I have to just accept it! I’m happy to give them work and encourage people to keep their crafts going.

AZ: Do these craftspeople produce work that is sold locally too? Or are some things made very much now for a popular / tourist market?

ZH: The crafts are sold locally in jarmarks/markets and in touristy places like the Sukiennice in Kraków. I think most Polish people had sztuka ludowa pushed at them during the times of the Polish People’s Republic and are possibly more attracted to etnodizajn which is neater and cleaner and more functional. Recently, some younger producers have made new products using Polish folk art motifs and sold them through chains of shops and online. Needless to say, this is not what I look for!

AZ: Are there any young people taking up these traditional crafts?

ZH: Yes some, Grzegorz Gordat makes wonderful baskets and does basketry workshops near Puławy. Mateusz and Agata Niwiński are an amazing couple in their mid-30s, they have a band playing traditional folk music, have built themselves a new wooden house in the local style, he makes wooden boxes and toys while Agnieszka weaves. I have met younger people doing traditional embroidery, paper flowers and pająki [‘spiders’, traditional paper decorations] but most of the people I buy from are older.

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Wooden balustrades, Szczawnica, from a collection of salvaged articles, photo: Zara Huddleston

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AZ: In your travels to find new items and stock, you’re also an observer of villages, village architecture and village life in general. You often post pictures of very beautiful wooden cottages. In your experience, are these being restored and maintained in any meaningful way?

ZH: When I married a Pole from a small village outside Kraków in the early 1990s, I was fascinated by the festivals and traditions of village life which my husband took for granted, as he’d lived with it all his life. In his village, I loved walking alongside the procession with the ladies all dressed up in local costumes for Boże Ciało [Corpus Christi], going to weddings in a remiza [a fire depot – where weddings used to be held], watching as huge piles of food were served to already overflowing tables, along with bottles of constantly replenished vodka. Then the obligatory dancing till at least 4am to ‘Disco polo’– all a totally new experience for me back then!

I am a great fan of Polish wooden architecture and I have always taken photographs of it. Unfortunately, I think it’s not appreciated enough by many Poles. I do understand that it’s all tied up with history, centuries of poverty, many years of city folk looking down on people from villages, and they had no means to modernise their houses. After the fall of communism, Poles were delighted to finally earn money and build new houses; turning their backs on vernacular styles. They built new buildings with no particular style when new building products began to flood the market in the mid-1990s. As a result, so many wooden houses and buildings have been pulled down or left to rot. Houses with no character have been built everywhere with no regard for regional styles. A few wooden churches and cerkiews [Orthodox churches or chapels] have been preserved and some wooden houses, but they are often over-zealously renovated, like the Nikifor willa museum in Krynica, to the point where you wouldn’t recognise that it was an old house. In my opinion, the art of restoring an old building is to leave just enough of the original character whilst preserving the building for future generations. This is something I feel very strongly about, what a shame there is nothing like UK’s National Trust. I’m worried the whole identity and vernacular architecture of Poland will be lost and it will become a bland landscape lacking in history and character. I was in the Suwałki region about 15 years ago and we had a map showing which old houses to see in a village, when we got there they had all been pulled down!!!

Something to encourage is the trend amongst a few younger people to buy old empty wooden houses and move them to a new plot. They get a team of local carpenters to number all the planks and rebuild them in a new place; I have a friend who has done that. She even put in a new piec kaflowy [tiled stove] as they still make those tiles.

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Wooden house marked for demolition in Widok, Mazowsze, photo: Zara Huddleston

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I was in Mazowsze last summer and I stopped in a small village to take a photo of a small yellow ochre wooden house. Just as I took a photo, a man ran out of a new house opposite and angrily asked me what I was doing? I told him I love old wooden houses and would like to keep a record of them. He seemed surprised, calmed down and said that it was his mother’s house, he had grown up there and next week it was going to be pulled down in order to build a new one.

I find it odd that people like to visit Skansens, they walk around and marvel at the buildings, have a picnic, buy souvenirs and then go home and pull down the family’s old wooden house. I do understand that wooden houses are hard to maintain and often too costly to rescue from ruin, but there could be government help to keep Poland from losing its architectural heritage.

AZ: Wooden architecture is particularly vulnerable, of course, and there was enormous destruction as a result of the war and pre-war preservation activities were inevitably scaled right back afterwards. It’s understandable, too, that people will be up in arms about being told what they can do to their own property, with priorities often in tension. What some see as the aesthetic preservation of historic ‘layers’, others might see as a system of constraints.

Going back to the crafts that you support – looking at the style of particular pieces – are the makers adhering to local patterns and designs, or do you feel the artifacts are becoming more homogenised? How distinct is the hand of an individual craftsperson in all this?

ZH: I think the makers do adhere to local patterns and each one has their own distinct style, even among wycinanki cutters. I think that is what I love so much about Polish folk art, so many regional crafts have survived where they haven’t in the UK. Reverse painting on glass was a local craft, but nowadays it seems impossible to find a person who can do it; they are often painted badly and the colours are gaudy and fluorescent. Wood carving is very prolific in Poland but apart from wonderful birds of every size and shape most of the carving is of a religious nature, something which does not sell well in the UK. I do notice, for instance, that there are certain types of wooden horses that are churned out by several people just copying a generic style.

There are many proud makers who are members of Stowarzyszenie Twórców Ludowych and organisations like Mazowiecki Szlak Tradycji, izby pamięci which promote Polish history and makers. Serfenta teaches traditional Polish basket making to a younger audience.

I am a firm believer that the UK should have stayed in Europe, it has become very difficult for me to import Polish crafts since January, I have to pay 20% VAT in the UK on anything I bring in from Poland and fill in complicated forms with descriptions and item numbers. Polish couriers have put up their prices for delivery to the UK too. Meanwhile, Covid has destroyed outlets for crafts as there are no markets and no tourists to sell to in Poland.

The amazing thing about Poland is that they have managed to keep so many traditional regional crafts alive. I think being a ‘closed’ country for so many years was a huge ‘help’, compared to the UK, where we have lost so many craftspeople and now people are having to relearn skills in an environment where few of the older people are left to teach; in Poland it’s still very much an everyday thing, whereas here it’s something special or niche, to be written about in country lifestyle magazines.

Zara Huddleston’s Visits to Poland – Image Gallery

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AZ: In other words, making things out of necessity, as a skill handed down within a strong context, a way of life which hasn’t quite slipped away. Part of our fascination with handmade objects that can be traced to a particular place and culture lies in the recognition that this way of rural life is so much further in the past, particularly in the UK. But over 100 years later, with a new set of urgent problems, we are still asking the same questions that the artists of Young Poland were asking, which had to do, among other things, with authenticity, usefulness, aesthetics, identity, sustainability, and they looked to folk art for some of the answers.

As someone who has lived in both countries, what would you say is special about these crafts that survive in Poland?

ZH: I love the way they are made of natural materials and sometimes up-cycled cloth like the rag rugs. The crafts have a certain naive quality, simple shapes and patterns that are beautiful and graphic, often symmetrical. Folk art uses a special mix of bright colours that you wouldn’t necessarily think would go well together but somehow do. Finally, it’s the fact that someone has made something by hand in a tradition that has been handed down for generations.

Interview via email & phone by Anna Zaranko, January 2021

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