Exhibition Statement

The craft and art distinction has been ongoing since the Eurocentric art canon came to be. The practices of needle felting and fresco painting both create aesthetic forms, but one is proud on the walls of the most renowned buildings on the planet, and the other is humbly on the people who visit it. In the modern age, craft takes on a stereotypically feminine identity. Viewed as ‘women’s work’, its crucial everyday achievements are diminished as unassuming and unimportant. Despite this, fibre crafts have the spectral ability to carry embodied memory through a commons, gifting warmth to those it embraces, creating connections and relationships that can span across generations. Many crafters would not consider themselves artists; why is this? What is the role of the artist? And what does it mean to say one is an artist as opposed to a crafter? This project, spotlighting crafters from Devon or with ties to the curatorial team, will be an investigation into the interaction between the grandeur of the art world and the needle-wielding, yarn-untangling, cross-stitching crafty women that society takes for granted.

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