Age of Experience
Ruthin Craft Centre
SIXTY, as we are often told, is the new 40, which is certainly appears to be the case for the 15 artists featured in Age of Experience. In our youth-orientated culture, age may carry respect, but is rarely seen as the time for new ideas, inventive thinking or for new or challenging work. In which case they should visit this exhibition that brings together the work of 15 “senior” makers. It is bursting with ideas, affirming that age need not be a reassuring comfort zone, but one where knowledge of material and process can be used sensitively to explore new ideas.
The youngest, Caroline Broadhead, is a relative youngster at 59, but most are in their 60s or early 70s – a time when, in most other professions, they would have retired. Of course, age can be a distraction. It can be where safety and caution score over invention and risk. Fortunately, that is not the position here. Although some are natural risk-takers, such as the metalworker Michael Rowe, who had created two beguiling table-top installations, all push at the boundaries of their chosen craft.
Age of Experience has been chosen by Mary La Trobe-Bateman, whose life-long involvement in the crafts gives her a unique qualification to produce a show that acknowledges both the traditions of the crafts – be it throwing on the potter’s wheel, weaving, blowing glass or working wood – along with the establishment of a new identity, one that does not hark back or rely on the vernacular, folk tradition, but one that reflects all the complexities of life today.
All 15 artists are pioneers in their fields, introducing new techniques, including ikat weaving, studio blown-glass, the creative use of computer design or refining and adapting such age-old processes as hand-built ceramics or weaving. In many ways, Age of Experience is a mapping of the history of the crafts in the past 40-odd years, as makers moved from workshops into studios and defined themselves as artists rather than makers. Meanwhile, many abandoned function in favour of museum-sized objects that could no longer find a place within the domestic setting of the home.
Here the objects are seen at their best. The airy gallery allows space that shows them at their strongest, although often we need to look closely to see the detail. For example, Richard Slee, a master of quiet, subversive humour, has appropriated brooms and brushes from hardware shops and buried tiny, toy-like figures in the bristles. These may be soldiers, helicopters or, in one piece, a figure who might be the gardener.
By contrast, the blown-glass vessels by Annette Meech and Christopher Williams, the garden pots and storage jars by Svend Bayer and the woven trug-like baskets by David Drew are reassuringly familiar and will enhance any domestic environment. These makers push gently at the boundaries of craft, refining and honing material, process and idea into a pleasing unity.
At one level, Age of Experience is a reassuring anthology of 15 highly gifted and able makers that make creative use of age and experience. However, a closer look reveals questions as well as answers, because, despite the tame image of craft, artists – even senior artists – working within the “craft” area can provoke and astound as well as please and soothe.
Emmanuel Cooper
Age of Experience continues until March 29 and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue
