ART·HAND·WORK: An Exhibition for Studio Craft Artists

The ambitious traveling exhibition, ART·HAND·WORK, known for its initial outing in the spacious “light hall” at the top of the Oslo museum, offers a persuasive corrective to this critical direction. Organized by six specialist “studio craft” curators from the collaborating institutions, it showcases a wide range of work, loosely defined as craft, in a variety of media largely from their own collections. The curators argue that we lose something valuable when we simply fold craft into art. 

The show honors the 1974 “Artists’ Action,” when studio craft artists (those who make one-off art pieces) cut themselves off from the National Association of Applied Arts and set up the Norske Kunsthåndvekere (Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts) in 1975. With government funding, for over 50 years, these makers were able to forge a space within the professionalized arts, alongside art and design, with their own specific shared values, perspectives, and traditions. It was this, rather than the actual objects they produced, that defined them, and it was through their different material disciplines that they both approached the world and communicated their visions. 

Hanne Friis, for instance, represented by the 2018 work Light Ornament, creates visceral, compelling textile artworks embedded in traditions of stitching and manipulating cloth and thread. Torbjørn Kvasbø’s sophisticated constructions, created from accumulations of gorgeously colored, thickly glazed extruded earthenware, represented by Stack, Tube Forms, Red, 2009, have one foot in the long 20th century history of abstract sculpture and another in the technical practicalities of industrial ceramic production. 

Dutch-born, UK-based Bouke de Vries’s 2019 installation War and Pieces, which hauntingly reflects human barbarity through his use of recycled fragments of old porcelain with cast and gilded steel, draws on de Vries’s experience as an expert ceramics conservator, intimate with the history and qualities of this medium.

All three makers are feted in an art world that has become increasingly fascinated by materials and processes– traditionally, the preserve of craft specialists. In turn, craftspeople have enjoyed the heightened prestige of their artworks and the opportunities to exhibit in previously exclusive fine art spaces. These curators fear, however, that we may miss the multiple resonances of these works if we see them only through the lens of fine art: that to liaise too closely with the art world is dangerous.

Thus, this spectacular show– which ranges from Konrad Mehus’s glinting Litter Brooch made from tin cans, buttons, porcelain shards, and coins to Marit Justine Huagen’s moving memorial, Kull/Coal, 2014, a floor-scale installation of ashes gathered from the remains of a burnt-down asylum seeker’s reception center, sifted over stencils made from the debris, such as cycle cog-wheels and flattened radiator components– is offered in six sections. Each provides a distinctive studio craft lens, through which to appreciate the work: Materiality, Recycling, Craft Traditions, Ornament, Post-Industrialisation, and Everyday Life. These are themes and debates which have animated the discussion of craft for the past 50 years, not just in Norway, but also in Britain, the United States, and beyond.

To complement the Norwegian holdings, there are salient contributions from the UK: Yinka Shonibare’s Venus de Milo (after Alexandros), 2016, a fiber glass copy of an emblem of Western art, hand-painted in a pattern derived from West African fabrics inspired by Dutch cloths, wonderfully complicating issues of art, craft, colonialism, and cultural exchange; and Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui’s monumental tapestry of recycled metals, Breaking News, 2015. Together, the exhibits testify to the continuing vitality of studio craft as a distinctive way of seeing and a unique approach to making, even as (or maybe because) its status remains embattled.