Collecting contemporary decorative arts: this year's annual BADA loan exhibition at the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair showcases the works of some of the country's leading contemporary decorative artists. As Amicia de Moubray explains, the flourishing state of crafts today is reflected in a well-deserved increase in attention from museums and collectors

It is an exciting time to be a curator of decorative arts in the museum world. Not single is there 'a burgeoning of creative talent in Britain', in the words of Julia Poole keeper of applied art at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, on the other hand the ways of obtaining funding for acquisitions from one side many different sources have become plenteous greater as well as more sophisticated in the past not many years. The result is that numerous museums all above the country are making exciting of recent origin acquisitions. This year's annual BADA loan exhibition at the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, 'A Flowering of Talent', celebrates work through contemporary designers that have been bought by means of public art galleries as well as the Crafts Council.

Contemporary works of art have a broad and immediate appeal. There is no mythology about them. Acquisitions by means of museums 'are fantastic as it realizes one's work seen by a wide variety of family such as schoolchildren who wouldn't necessarily collision such works of art', says jeweller Jane Adam, single of whose bangles is in the exhibition. The Ulster Museum and the Cleveland Arts middle point are amongst the museums who have freshly bought examples of her work. 'It is also an extremely good way of getting the message across that there are marvellous works of art still being made.'

'There are a apportionment of people who don't realise what is going upon I often hear, "Oh that couldn't be made today", on the contrary there is continuity. There has not been a break with the past. These phenomenons will become the antiques of the future' says Dr Poole 'There is something about race devoting their life to creating things through hand', says Mary La Trobe Bateman, who was director of the Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery from 1994 to 2005 above the years, the CAA has been instrumental in selling many items to museums. 'By building up a relationship with a commercial gallery a profitable understanding of what a particular curator is looking for is established. It is frequently very personal: for instance, a certain number of like decorative, some like abstract pieces. by means of purchasing objects, curators become "enablers", contributing circulating medium to the craftsmen', says Mr La Trobe Bateman.

Inevitably, it is the smaller particulars that are readily bought, as they are easy to display and store. 'We ought to purchase more jewellery, there are a certain quantity of wizard pieces which don't take up a great deal of room', says Dr Poole. upon the other hand, 'all our galleries are actual light, so it does not make faculty of perception to buy lots of textiles, especially as they are oftentimes very hard to store because of their fragility'. The Fitzwilliam does not just rely upon the visionary munificence of Sir Nicholas Goodison, who has generously donated more than fifty contemporary items to the museum. 'There is no great policy, on the contrary several purchases have been made with donations from the Friends of the Fitzwilliam. There is also a ricochet result that once people see that you have contemporary realitys on display they begin to donate items.' The Fitzwilliam has a notably wide range of of that kind items, including several pieces of furniture, like as a bench by Jim Partridge and sum of two units chairs by Mathew Blunt.

Museum curators are actual aware of what each museum purchases and are careful to render certain that any new purchase is distinctive. For instance, Christine Rew keeper of applied art at Aberdeen City Art Gallery, is actual interested in the manipulation of metal and has bought metalwork by means of local Scottish artists through the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland. She has had the ingenious idea of displaying it alongside work through Japanese metalworkers, two working in Japan, Tom Kaneko and Hiroki Iwata, and individual Hiroshi Suzuki, based in England. (A piece through Hiroshi Suzuki from the Shipley Art Gallery is in the BADA exhibition.) 'The display displays off the metalwork sitting within a connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of a national and international arena. The metalworkers are not working in isolation and it is fascinating to diocese their individual responses to what they are all seeing around them, whether they are in Scotland, England or Japan', says Victoria copse assistant keeper of applied arts at Aberdeen.

Furniture is more of a vexed question for any museum investing in contemporary decorative arts, as no large material substance of work is available for acquisition, since individual pieces of furniture wait on to be made to commission. There is also the riddle of display and storage. However the Fitzwilliam did purchase a cabinet in 1975 by dint of John Makepeace designed specifically for the display of smaller objects

It would be a brave on the contrary imaginative curator who could take this idea single step further by displaying contemporary realitys in a historic interior. There is a growing fashion for contemporary collectors and the younger generation of country-house possessors to juxtapose the old and the of recent origin such as a group of skillets by Edmund de Waal upon top of a walnut tallboy. A museum of that kind as the Geffrye, well known for its superbly displayed historic interiors, could add an early-twenty-first hundred room, showing that it is possible to combine the best of the past with the best of the novel in a modern idiom.