Setting the scene: New landscapes in craft

Roberts, Sara (2013) Setting the scene: New landscapes in craft. Setting the Scene: New Landscapes in Craft, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham, United Kingdom.

Record type: Art Design Item

Abstract

Exhibition, Symposium and Education programme
8 October – 14 December 2013

Setting the Scene considers configuration of self-contained objects as a means of expression, and examines the influence of landscape, rural and urban, general and particular, on the construction and arrangement of craft objects.
The exhibition identifies and examines a particular engagement of craft with the landscape, based on the configuration of objects to evoke place. It explores new perspectives on the landscape genre in a craft context, aiming to reach new audiences through the breadth of appeal of this contemporary combination of craft skill and traditional subject matter. Its focus on configuration is intended to both identify a current impulse in craft practice and provide a framework for the examination and evaluation of the motives of practitioners and curators in other contexts.
Landscape is an artifice, it is a framing device; it is not the land itself – for that is without limit. It is about viewpoint and parameter, scale and relative scale. What are those framing devices – are they physical and perceptual, such as the periphery of our vision, the extent of our focus? Are they also cultural, experiential and historical? What happens when these devices are deployed in the service of craft? The project identifies and examines a particular engagement of craft with landscape, based on the configuration of objects to evoke place. It includes artists and makers who work in a range of disciplines, but who variously manipulate, find, fabricate and craft, objects, and arrange them in a manner that refers to landscape and the Landscape tradition. This raises questions of perception and of intention, of environment and of aesthetics.
We can trace a rather eccentric line through the recent history of representation to justify this particular strand of current practice. Over the last thirty years or so in the exhibition of craft, there has been enduring interest in the area where craft and fine art meet. This has reflected, and - arguably - to some extent led, the establishment of a crossover territory of conceptual craft, with the deployment by certain contemporary visual artists of traditional craft media, and the adoption by certain craft makers of the vocabulary of installation art.

Over a similar time period, the landscape, a traditional preoccupation of art, has shifted from being largely the preserve of painting, to being recognisably also a concern of sculpture, in the work of prominent artists such as Richard Long, David Nash, and Tony Cragg. The idea that landscape might be captured by - or conjured out of - an arrangement of objects has gained considerable currency, thanks in large part to these and other contemporary fine artists.
These two developments - the installation tendency in craft, and the recognition of a non-pictorial representation of landscape in fine art – have given rise to the conditions in which certain craft makers now feel able to engage with landscape as a subject, in a responsive, non-decorative way, without necessarily abandoning their concern for the discrete, functional object as the material outcome of design, labour and making. Collectively, it seems, such objects can now perform as art, as representation, as components of expression for a larger concept.
This is the moment when an abstract collagist impulse has given way to an ease with notions of representation, with direct reference to subject and to the broader traditions of visual expression. In terms of these artists’ relations to landscape, they demonstrate awareness of precedent and a highly original take on how to evoke environment – sometimes through incorporating found elements drawn directly from the environment in question.

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