Tag Archives: craft

If . . . .

I love the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. I believe that it has a really great list of attributes for a true human being.  Yet Kipling missed something.  Earlier this week life became a little hectic.  On day one of the exhibition in Kew Gardens people were crowding into the aisles to look at all the wonderful things to buy but not many ready to part with much money.  They were, on the other hand, very happy to talk.  One lovely chap was asking about the cost of exhibiting, the time it takes to make each piece and the disconnect between the value and the cost of high quality craft.  Same old, same old.  We agreed that making this kind of work is a lifestyle choice as much as anything and that one cannot expect to be rich on the back of one’s creativity and he came up with a great extra line for Kipling’s poem.  I think it is going to be the way forward for me:

  • If you can keep yourself amused and still have enough for beer and cheese,

Seems like a plan to me!

On the other hand, Kew has been good for me and I am quite hopeful of being able to afford some reasonably exotic cheese as a result.  20161005_110254I began with my stand showing almost exclusively new work.  I wanted to promote my most recent ideas.  I filled my stall with my fragile, thin porcelain vessels which have inclusions of found clay.  It looked good and I was really pleased with it.  The trouble was, and don’t get me wrong, this is a good problem to have, so did the customers.  By the end of Friday it was looking decidedly bare!  So late on Friday evening I made a panic dash to my studio to get some work to fill up the gaps.

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Old work sitting along side the new to plug the gaps.

This meant that I ended up on Saturday with works which would not normally be anywhere close to each other and that fact alone has led to some interesting thoughts and comments.

 

I think the time has come for a bit of a rethink – the contrast is great when I sit one of my really rugged, sculptural pieces beside a fragile one.  How good would it be if I made pairs using the same material?

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Contrasting pieces look so good next to each other.

I need to get beyond the Open Studios first but, after that, it will be time for some serious research!

 

Art versus Craft

Well that is an enormous subject to take on so I am only going to scratch the surface here.  I had the privilege to be at the private show for an exhibition called Twelve Tall Tales this week.  It is a collaboration between the Crafts Council and a group called Women in The City, about which I knew nothing and feel that I need to make it my business to investigate.

Aside from the fact that the gallery space is fantastic and the curation was intriguing and had a definitely ‘crafty’ feel to it – all the works were exhibited on beautifully woven soft blue/grey fabric – it was an extremely interesting idea.  One of the works carried the question ‘Can clay carry stories?’ Well, yes!  That is what I am trying to do all the time with my work!  The story of a building, a mine, an incident for example.

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Food vessels made with soil contaminated by radioactivity. 

Another asked ‘Can craft be contaminated?’ and it was accompanied by a series of food vessels made by soil taken from the rice fields of the last farmer to leave the area after the disaster at the Fukishima Power Plant.  It was a really moving work – for its simplicity and for its story – but it was alone in the exhibition for not demonstrating a particularly high level of skilled craftsmanship.  So was it craft or art?  A third work showed 7 beautiful lacquered bowls and posed the question ‘does the making make the object?’  In Wajima, Japanese they still continue to make bowls using a particular lacquering technique called Urushi which involves seven stages, each done in a particular workshop.

 

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Urushi bowls

The bowls are moved around from one workshop to the next in order to complete the process which has to be carried out by skilled craftsmen and this installation tells their story.  They are beautiful and their rich red interiors positively glow with energy.

The exhibition contained brooms ‘with attitude’, a space suit made from fabric woven in the last mill in Wales and an amazing jacket, shirt and trousers using the styles and logos of many of the most well known fashion houses.  In most of the exhibits the high level of skill involved was very evident; there was clear evidence of craft. Yet the ways in which the various crafts had been interpreted altered them and somehow pushed them towards becoming art: they were no longer functional objects, they were installations which told of humour; disaster; process.  And therein lies the rub – why do we insist on talking of craft and art?  Why do we still consider them as almost separate?  Granted the barriers have come down a bit but, in my mind at least, it is a continuum which is demonstrated particularly well in ceramics, and which is very evident in this exhibition.  If you find yourself anywhere near Covent Garden I comment this exhibition at the Hospital Club until 29th August to you.