Though staged in the grand entrance of the V&A and sponsored by the Crafts Council, Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft is an artists’ exhibition through and through. There is not a functional object in sight among the six white-walled spaces that guide the visitor through a wide range of media. Cut paper, bent nails, metal casts and crocheted doilies are all elements that these artists use to craft objects of beauty and surprise.
Surprise, in fact, is a key element of the display and good part of its impact. The white dividers serve to hide the next bit of the show and at least on one occasion turning the corner provoked a genuine gasp of amazement. This is undoubtedly the effect that the curators hoped to invoke, and it mirrors the work of the artists themselves. Every carefully made item in this show surprises – either with elements out of place in a museum, or with a layer of meaning not evident at first glance.
In the first case, the artists’ craft lies in creating installations of high visual impact through attention to form and material. Anne Wilson builds up a tactile landscape using small pieces of black lace and crocheted forms. Yoshihiro Suda’s extremely realistic, carved wood plant life pokes curiously out of the white walls, in the dedicated space and throughout the museum – in effect creating a V&A invaded by weeds. Lu Shengzhong produces a jaw-dropping red waterfall of meticulously hand-cut humanoid paper figures, both sad in their fragility and overwhelming in their numbers.
In the second case, the artists’ work is fully appreciated only when examined in detail, or captions reveal the hidden meaning. Catherine Bertola’s floral pattern, based on wallpaper patterns in early V&A exhibitions, is merely a pretty background until you realise that it is made out of dust, dead bugs and other detritus that museum curators routinely work hard to remove. The caption for Susan Collis’s work tries hard to convince us that a paint-splattered table and a few half-embedded screws deserve a place in an exhibition on craft; it is only on closer view that the ‘paint’ shows itself to be carefully inlaid mother-of-pearl, and the screws are gold-plated. Here, the craft involved is deception – the art of making us look twice at what seems everyday, through the dedicated application of skill. And that is really the point of this artists’ exhibition, and why it fits in so perfectly at the V&A.
Out of the Ordinary runs until 17 February 2008 at the V&A in London.
