I visited the exhibition at the Waterhall in Birmingham for the last time on Saturday and was happy to see that Shane and Cheryl’s Garland had grown substantially again. For me it has been such an important object to think around and about during the show. The fact that you can engage with it in different ways… being involved in its growth and perhaps remembering something through doing has marked an important aspect of it. Some visitors have left thoughts on Amy Houghton’s typewriter installation, which was sited next to Garland, talking of memories of making and how through contributing to the piece these have surfaced . I think I will miss visiting the Waterhall space, it has become a bit of a special space to me and I am sure will now always conjure up images and thoughts of this project when I visit it in the future.
The exhibition is now on the move…having ended in Birmingham on Monday and now with packing in progress…it will open at IC at the Dovecot, Edinburgh on 15th January. Hope to see you there.
In the meantime we have had a review in Crafts Magazine by Emma Crichton-Miller which you can read online here.
The following is an extract from it.
‘In accord with its title, this exhibition has been two years in the making, accruing a great deal of explanatory writing, a veritable river of thought, behind it. By claiming shared values with the Slow Movement, it has become an ideological show; and the dramatically altered economic and political landscape even make it topical. Curated jointly by Helen Carnac and Andy Horn, a maker and academic and the former director of the publicly-funded educational charity Craftspace respectively, it’s vibrant with a shared excitement about what craft can be today, what it signifies and how
it can be displayed to suggest new and unexpected meanings, evident in all the writing and the interviews with the makers involved. The danger has been that the exhibition would somehow fall short of all these beautiful ideas – or, worse, would illustrate them with mind-numbing exactitude. Instead, what has been assembled somewhat chaotically, in this huge but rather unforgiving room, is by turns moving, impressive, gorgeous, curious, elusive and enchanting – and never less than thought-provoking. It complicates and enlivens the debate; indeed, at times it simply silences it, with beauty’
Making a Slow Re volution 