Friday, June 26, 2009

Catherine Bertola: "Out of the Ordinary" Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, UK



Out of the Ordinary in Sheffield

Crafts Council and V&A exhibtion Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft opens at Museums Sheffield: Millennium Gallery on 25 June.

Time-honoured techniques. Exquisite craft. Spectacular contemporary art. This summer, Museums Sheffield will reveal the extraordinary in the everyday with a new free exhibition featuring meticulous workmanship and skill at the heart of every work. Presented by the V&A and Crafts Council, Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft will bring together the work of artists from the UK, America, Nigeria, China and Japan. Taking inspiration from the familiar and the forgotten, each of these artists has used traditional craft techniques to produce stunning contemporary works. Out of the Ordinary will feature a series of unusual and beautifully crafted installations, where each artist transforms their subject by using conventional techniques in the most unexpected of ways. Employing traditional craft skills, including embroidery, wood carving, lace-making and marquetry, the artists play with extremes of scale or re-work precious, ephemeral or everyday materials to create new and striking effects. The exhibition will feature work by Olu Amoda, Catherine Bertola, Annie Cattrell, Susan Collis, Naomi Filmer, Lu Shengzhong, Yoshihiro Suda and Anne Wilson. Scottish artist Annie Cattrell laser etches clouds inside solid blocks of glass and uses traditional lamp-work techniques to create a fragile glass sculpture representing the breath trapped inside a human lung. Lu Shengzhong, Professor of Folk Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, uses traditional paper-cutting techniques to create large scale installations of cascading red paper, consisting of thousands of tiny hand-cut figures, evoking the imagery of traditional Chinese folk art. Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda makes precise carvings of life-like weeds and plants, revealing the stark beauty in simple, often overlooked things. In a new commission for Museums Sheffield, Catherine Bertola will create a floor-based work in response to objects found in our metalwork collection. Finding inspiration in the Parish pattern cutlery designed in Sheffield, Bertola will create an intricate carpet of metal pins which carefully recreates these familiar designs in a playful new context. This commission will go on display alongside Bertola’s series of drawings, Bluestockings, and work produced especially for Out of the Ordinary by Olu Amoda, Susan Collis, Naomi Filmer and Anne Wilson.