Exhibitions archive
Extreme Crafts
May – August 2007
at SMC/CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania
Co-curator with Catherine Hemelryk.
www.cac.lt
Artists include: Barb Hunt, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Cast Off, Catherine Bertola, Flash Bar / Mirjam Wirz, Garth Johnson, Hilary Jack, Jan Körbes, Julie Jackson, Juneau/Projects/, Juozas Laivys, Lina Ozerkina, Maija Kurševa, Mark Newport, Sabrina Gschwandtner & Knit Knit, Sonya Schönberger, Ulrike Solbrig. Baroness Carrie von Reichardt, Ruth Claxton
Extreme Crafts at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius took the form of an international exhibition, events and catalogue entitled Things to make and do (see publications section) comprising essays, patterns and ideas. The exhibition had several sections, from a rogue‘s gallery showing objects and documentation of work being made by self-organised groups and individuals across the globe, to politicised handmade objects. Subverted ideas of national identity as expressed through regional crafts, sitting side-by-side mutated folk traditions and much more. Crucial to Extreme Crafts was not only the product of craft, but the process of crafting: gallery spaces were activated by different specialist groups invited to demonstrate their activities and skills, and visitors were encouraged to participate and display what they had made.
Handicrafts are increasingly being used by artists and designers as a source of inspiration and method of manufacture. Many crafts are experiencing resurgence in popularity; they are no longer the bastion of elderly ladies, but people from all ages and backgrounds. Punk knitting, origami with an agenda and epic cross-stitch have surged in numbers. In wake of the supposed death of local community, self-organised craft groups such as ‘Stitch and Bitch‘ have flourished in recent times.
Customisation is also experiencing a renaissance. Technology, perceived to be removed and sophisticated, is being re-attached to the user by the democratic ‘anyone-can-make-and-do‘ accessories such as the knitted iPod cover or mobile phone pocket or diamante decoration. And although thrift-store chic is being co-opted by design firms and marketed back to the public, self organised groups of artists and makers are creating forums for people to do it for themselves. This is demonstrated by those at the peripheries of commercial regions, such as the Favelas of Brazil or the weaving centres of Kumasi famed for making Kente cloth in Ghana. Crafts are thriving in these places and represent a valuable cultural yet marketable contribution to the global economy. Often they reflect the modern technological world through the recycling of its detritus. Bowls are made from telephone wires, bicycles made from circuit boards and cans and coffins are carved in the shapes of Coca Cola bottles or cars. Making continues regardless of circumstance.
Craft creates the connotation of the intimate and handmade. It implies working in hand-sized proportions, but many makers are experimenting with scale. Tiny techniques are blown up and new materials are employed to reinterpret traditional skills on a grand scale. Gestures become bold statements through expansion. In a countermotion, many makers are also refining their skills to make ever-smaller constructions. Echoing the developments in engineering and nano-technology, the facture of miniatures has proliferated. Objects and entire environments that could sit on the head of a pin test their makers.
Programmes such as Craft Corner Deathmatch and a proliferation of user-groups dedicated to all kinds of craft interests are booming, but why is this happening now and just what constitutes craft – the often maligned place between the art and design? By taking it to the extreme, finding the vanguard, Extreme Crafts presents just a small selection of possible answers to the question: What can contemporary craft be?
Visit the exhibition’s Flickr photostream...
Make & Meet Festival
March 2007
in Nottingham, Leicester and Derby
Responsible for organising a festival of exchange between artists in 3 East Midlands cities with My House Projects and DOT. The project included exhibitions, talks, events and residencies. www.makeandmeet.co.uk
Artists featured included: Juneau/Projects/, Blue Firth, Tomas Chaffe, Berndnaut Smilde, Greg Cox, Tom Godfrey, Alex Stevenson, Yoke and Zoom, Matt Robinson, Emm Butcher, Sarah Prynne, David Smith, Ruth Spreadborough
Tales from the Grid
March – May 2007
Tales from the Grid was a series of works by Edwin Zwakman at Q Gallery. The large-scale photographs that made up this exhibition were made during the artist’s Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Derby.
The photographs show reconstructed objects and models from the artist’s memories of the Netherlands and make up a narrative distorted by distance and time. The grid mentioned in the title of the exhibition refers not only to the ordered nature of the cityscapes featured in the photographs, but also to the rigid nature of his native Dutch landscape made up of man-made and cultivated land. Compositions comprising apartment blocks and electricity pylons are offset by sublime backgrounds of ominous clouds and the grey skies commonly seen in many northern European cities.
Paying the minutest attention to detail, Zwakman draws only upon his own personal memories of growing up in the Netherlands to make his intricate Gullerverian models. Using any materials to hand and sometimes employing children’s toys as props, the artist carefully constructs a ‘mix and match’ version of reality.
This Year’s Model
April – June 2006
David Garratt, Lori Amor, Joseph Andrew Colley, Yohei Yashi, Pamela Ginn
Combining communication, optimism in human nature and a fantastic sense of humour… this group exhibition presented the best in new graduate work from the Midlands region. All of the artists involved examined everyday events and occurrences, which seemed at first glance unremarkable. Through their observations of how people smile, how we perceive God, how we examine daily news events and how we communicate with other people and primates, these artists presented a sincere and intriguing view of the world over one year.
Gathering Moss
May- June 2005
Elin Wikstrom, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Ivan & Heather Morison, The Owl Project, Sian Stammers
‘The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy.’ – Le Corbusier
Gathering Moss explored the underlying links between modern city dwelling and a human need for a green, organic environment. With off-site projects inhabiting municipal parks in Derby City Centre and a Narnia-like woodland environment being presented in the gallery itself – this exhibition got to the roots of the Romantic ideal of an enchanted forest and showed how pockets of urban wilderness can be as inspirational as the dark, dark woods featured in folktales of long ago.
Gathering Moss took the visitor on a journey, guiding him or her to take note of the naturally occurring minutiae in every drainpipe or breezeblock. The everyday strangeness of urban sites was contrasted with more traditional perceptions of forests or woodlands. Like Gilles Deluze’s ‘weeds through pavement cracks,’ the works in this exhibition reminded visitors of the temporality of man-made structures in comparison to ancient plant-life.
Photographs from Ellis Island
12 March – 23 April 2005
Photographs from the Robert Watchorn Memorial Archive in Alfreton, Derbyshire Pickford’s House, Derby as part of FORMAT 05 Photography festival
I Didn’t Do It
Internship at Hafnarhus, Listasafn Reykjavikur, Iceland
(Contemporary Art Gallery, Reykjavik Art Museum)
Assisting curator Agusta Kristofersdottir with the presentation of I Didn’t Do It! / Ég gerđi Þađ ekki! a Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson Retrospective, 2004
Fantasy Island
Artists’ Assistant, Hallormsstaður Forest in the East of Iceland, 2004
Working with Icelandic artist Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson for Fantasy Island, an off-site group exhibition. With Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, Katrin Sigurðsdottir, Elin Wikström, Hannes Larusson, Björn Roth, Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson.
This much is certain
13 March – 4 April 2004 The Royal College of Art Galleries, London
Miriam Bäckström, Daniel Baker, Gerard Byrne, Dexter Dalwood, Jeremy Deller, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Huang Yongping, Emily Jacir, John Massey, Aernout Mik, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Kirsten Pieroth, Jamie Shovlin, Jeffrey Vallance.
This much is certain consisted of four parts: an exhibition, a film programme, talks and a publication. Together they explored the significance of the document and the documentary in contemporary life and art.
We usually rely on documents to be trustworthy and factual. Political events at the time of the exhibition, the Hutton inquiry, however, make it increasingly difficult to take documents at face value. The documentary, again, has a reputation for offering us the objective and unadulterated truth. Yet it is typically a crafted narrative, permeated by the author’s point of view and the strategies of fiction.
This much is certain presented a full spectrum of how documents and documentaries are used in art, film and text. Rather than enforcing one singular interpretation, the project aimed to approach this subject from a variety of angles, allowing viewers to create their own perspective.
www.cca.rca.ac.uk/thismuchiscertain
Britain Bombs America, America Bombs Britain
October 2003 IBID Projects, London
The Center for Land Use Interpretation www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/v26/v26d.html
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a Los Angeles-based organisation ‘dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the world’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived’. The Center investigates and describes the built landscape that surrounds us, drawing the information for their research from a network of sources including institutions, scientists, geographers and artists. The dissemination of this information takes various forms: exhibitions of photographs and data; lectures; and bus tours to specific locations featured in their research.
In a climate of heightened consciousness of world military activity, MA students from the Curating Contemporary Art Department at the Royal College of Art chose to focus on one particular aspect of CLUI’s work – their ongoing investigation of military land in the US. The exhibition they curated for IBID Projects in East London focused on CLUI’s research into the Nellis Range Complex, Nevada – a military site that is the largest restricted area in the United States. The Nellis Range Complex, an area normally unseen and inaccessible to the general public, includes land used to practise ‘munitions delivery’, testing facilities for nuclear weapons and electronic warfare, highly secure regions whose activities are still unknown, as well as land used for cattle grazing. The exhibition consisted of selected photographs and image projections of the Nellis Range Complex drawn from the CLUI archive.
