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The art of making things
Francis McKee describes a cross-pollination between art, craft, design and architecture.
The Hayward Gallery’s recent exhibition, ‘Material Culture’, has prompted a steady stream of articles on the place of the object and its production in contemporary art practices. Lucy Lippard’s The Dematerialisation of the Object has also been republished at a time when younger artists are acknowledging their debt to the generation she records in her book. The relationship between art and architecture has likewise been reanimated as the impact of lottery capital funding permeates the art world. In Scotland, these issues have always had a life of their own. The nation’s long history of industrial production, allied to a native craft tradition and a ferocious work ethic, have marked most of the artists who have lived there, Scottish or not. As recently as the 80s, several dominant figurative painters – such as Ken Currie, Stephen Conroy, Adrian Wizniewski and Stephen Campbell – could be heard citing shipbuilding draughtsmen or workers’ union iconography as forebears of their craft. Interestingly, this notion of craft was itself carried across from the more traditional rural practices to the newer urban, industrial context. More recently, a...
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