) ; & ) VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON 13 NOVEMBER 2007 – 17 FEBRUARY 2008 Out of the Ordinary kicks off in the afterglow of the outrageous Dale Chihuly chandelier suspended from the central rotunda of the Victoria and Albert’s foyer, all streamers and baubles. For an exhibition that claims to explore the commonplace, there is already a sense that there is craft, and then there is craft. To begin, Anne Wilson’s Topologies, 2007–08, presents lace scraps, threads, knots and pins laid out in various configurations on a long plinth. The ant-sized bits and pieces toy with our anthropocentric tendencies as we see in them reflections of our own behaviour: congregation, collaboration, isolation and activity. The work dialogues with Olu Amoda’s This is Lagos, 2002, another miniature landscape of found objects, this time scrap-metal salvaged from the streets of Amoda’s hometown of Lagos, Nigeria. The overlapping odd shapes evoke the contours of a city, appropriately spirited, chaotic and grubby, while embodying a remnant of the place it came from. Naomi Filmer reappraises that most familiar of things, the human body. Using props such as a spherical lens, she explores its forgotten corners – a shoulder, an elbow, a heel – and renders them in hologram, sculpture, or through sound or video. Her collection prompted a sense of unease, of ghostly, dismembered presences of the very intimate rendered very strange. Annie Cattrel echoes Filmer’s fascination with anatomy with Capacity, 2007, a pair of extraordinary glass lungs, their mesh of bronchi crafted with stunning delicacy. The work transforms the spongy, dark, cavernous internal organs into a crystalline, lacey spectacle, displaying and preserving the hidden and ephemeral. SUSAN COLLIS, CURSED WITH A SOUL (INSTALLATION DETAIL), 2007 Š V&A IMAGES
Conversely, Yoshihiro Suda’s work is more about what it disguises than reveals. With mindboggling craftsmanship, Suda replicates botanical forms in wood so perfectly that the only clue as to their artificiality is their location – secreted in unexpected crannies of the museum like weeds. Susan Collis also conceals her toil, exemplified by her puzzling presentation of a paint-spattered table and drop-sheet. Closer inspection proves the flecks, drops and rivulets to be nothing short of meticulously inlaid pearl, agate, coral or opal, and the drop-sheet’s spatters are, in fact, detailed embroidery. Thus the worthless appearance camouflages its opposite: the precious and meticulously wrought. Lu Shenzhong, however, harnesses a certain ‘wow factor’ in his paper-cut installations. The Book of Humanity: The Empty Book, 2007, is comprised of three books of red paper, suspended aloft, each hollowed and spewing a river of red streamers and paper dolls in a waterfall to the floor. Every hand-cut human figure is slightly unique, representing fragile and insignificant individuals in the sea of humanity. In concert, the seven artists gather themes such as simulacra, re-invention, dislocation, transformation, and inverting the ordinary. None are decisively craftspeople, but all employ a certain ‘craft sensibility’. As curator Laurie Britton Newell puts it in her catalogue introduction: ‘craft is not a separate category but an ingredient, a process.’ As the first in a series of triennial partnerships between the V&A and the British Crafts Council, it will become apparent whether in the 21st century craft is indeed less a noun than a verb. www.vam.ac.uk www.craftscouncil.org.uk EMILY HOWES IS A FREELANCE DESIGN WRITER CURRENTLY UNDERTAKING POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY.
OBJECT MAGAZINE STUDIO EDITION 55