Craft put at the heart of extraordinary art
A NEW exhibition at the Millennium Gallery, Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft, is a display of contemporary art which places the emphasis on traditional skills.
"It's the perfect rejoinder to those people who take an ambivalent view of contemporary art," says Curator of Craft And Design Rowena Hamilton. "The kind of skills people see as fundamental to the nature of creativity are here to see."
Out of the Ordinary brings together the work of eight contemporaryartists from the UK, America, Nigeria, China and Japan who place craft at the heart of their practice.
Employing a range of traditional craft skills, including embroidery, wood carving, lace-making and marquetry, Olu Amoda, Catherine Bertola, Annie Cattrell, Susan Collis, Naomi Filmer, Lu Shengzhong, Yoshihiro Suda and Anne Wilson re-work precious, ephemeral or everyday materials to create new and striking effects.
Sculptor Olu Amoda has produced works of beauty from materials salvaged from the scrapyards and streets of Lagos.
Old nails have been meshed together along with bits of chicken wire and scrap metal to form an intricate screen entitled Queen of the Night.
This exemplifies the artist's fascination with the former lives of the objects he uses and the new meanings they take on when they are brought together.
British artist Susan Collis plays with the old chestnut of cleaners' or workman's equipment in a gallery being mistaken for works of art.
Her installation looks like something the decorators have left behind but on closer inspection the paint marks on dust sheets are actually intricate embroidery and the splatters on a stepladder are inlaid mother of pearl and other semi-precious stones. The Rawlplugs and screws on the wall turn out to be made from diamonds and gold.
The most colourful work come from Chinese artist Lu Shengzhong and features thousands of repeated figures, all meticulously hand-cut with scissors and scalpels from vivid red tissue paper – the colour of good fortune in China.
His giant The Book of Humanity: The Empty Book consists of a tower of Chinese traditionally bound books.
Japanese artist Yoshiro Suda's Magnolia is a replica of the flower carved from magnolia. It took an entire week to sculpt a single petal which encapsulates the dedication, tradition and obsession behind this collection which is indeed Out of the Ordinary.
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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