With these hands: Laing exhibition celebrates the art of craft
The new ticketed exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle focuses on the significance of craft - the art of making and mending - and how it’s represented in paintings, drawings and prints.
Images dating from 1750 onwards reflect societal changes – the growth of industry, the reorganisation of working methods and workplaces, the changing status of women and the pressures of wartime, all of which impacted on the value placed on manual skills.
The exhibition brings together paintings and objects – quilts, embroidery, metalwork, wood carvings, ceramics and basketry – to explore traditional and contemporary techniques, making connections across time.
There’s a focus on women’s lives. While stitching and embroidery kept women in their place for centuries, it could also be a vital means of self-expression.
The exhibition also explores the relationship between craft and community, showing men working together at the forge, the carpenter’s workshop or the sail loft. Such communal working was idealised in the late 19th Century as a symbol of continuity in a fragmenting society.
And you’ll get a whiff of nostalgia for craft skills which artists perceived as almost lost – to industrialisation, urbanisation, wartime bombing and changing systems of art education.
Some have sought to record and preserve declining country crafts but With These Hands shows how craft adapts and evolves.
You will see paintings and prints by artists including Mary Cassatt, GF Watts, Stanhope Forbes, Harold Knight, Evelyn Dunbar and Ralph Hedley, and objects by makers such as CR Ashbee, Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew and North East quilter Amy Emms.
Julie Milne, chief curator of art galleries at North East Museums, said: “With crafting enjoying a resurgence and making by hand becoming more appreciated and valued in a digital age, this thoughtful and compelling exhibition explores the meanings these representations of craft hold.
“From personal and communal identity to leisure, work, tradition and progress, these images help us understand our complex attitudes to craft.
“I am delighted that this excellent exhibition draws on the strengths of the North East Museums art and craft collections along with loans from Tate, V&A, Royal Academy of Arts, Government Art Collection, Imperial War Museums and regional galleries.”
More information on the website.
Sounds like a fascinating exhibition