“Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft”, a new exhibition at the V&A, might have been dreamed up as a Venn diagram. Its subject, explored through the work of a number of contemporary artists from the United Kingdom, America, Nigeria, China and Japan, is the shaded area where the world of the fine arts and the world of crafts intersect. Thoughtfully curated by the V&A’s own head of Contemporary Programmes, Laurie Britton Newell, and organised in collaboration with the Crafts Council, this is a refreshingly tactile show. It offers a diverse cornucopia of intriguing creations, linked by the common thread of a shared commitment to the painstakingly crafted object.

 

Chicago-based artist Anne Wilson actually works with thread itself, as well as fragments of lace, wool and crochet, using such traditional craft materials to shape eccentric landscapes. Her principal installation at the V&A is a miniature panorama formed from webs and skeins of lace and black netting, pinned into place on a long white table. The result is a surreal version of a sampler, a textile aspiring to the condition of an abstract drawing. Its forms evoke mountains and valleys, the whorls and contours of an Ordnance Survey map, as well as the ramshackle settlements of some imaginary tribe – a whole world conjured from the contents of a needlework box. Wilson is also showing a pair of playful 3-D animated movies, in which pins and threads take on a life of their own, mock-heroically enacting miniature sagas of triumph and disaster.

 

Naomi Filmer, who originally studied jewellery design, and who now works from studios in London and Milan, also explores the hinterland between fashion and fine art. She creates jewellery that cannot easily be worn, much of it in glass, for parts of the...

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