The significance of the book Thinking Through Craft is that it presents new research, much of it archival, on key historical episodes and intersections of art, craft and architectural history, which have a bearing on the development of contemporary craft practice. In an apparently post-disciplinary era, the book reasserts the significance of craft, its theory as well as practice.

The originality of the research lay in its synthesising approach, fully integrating history, theory and criticism in a single methodology and focusing on five interrelated themes – supplementarity, materiality, skill, the pastoral and the amateur – in order to reassess craft within modern culture. Twenty case studies were researched and shaped to interrogate key thematic chapters, such as jewellery and ceramics of the mid-twentieth century; postmodern architectural theory; the Progressive education movement; feminist art in the 1970s; and the works of selected contemporary artists relevant to craft: Mike Kelley, Tracey Emin, Simon Starling and Gijs Bakker. The rigour of the analysis, testing the concept of craft as a negative image of art, uncoils from Theodor Adorno's legendary phrase: 'Because art is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain'.