Art & Craft

Over the last 400 years, thinking about Craft and the Decorative Arts has been determined by hierarchical distinctions reflecting tensions between artistocratic and industrial factions of Western society. Only by the eighteenth-century were painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry sifted out from crafts, but then the Arts and Crafts and, later, the Bauhaus Movements used non-Western artifacts to liberate craft from derogatory comparisons both with ‘High’ art and the soulless manufactures of the industrialised West. 

Today, craft inspired by indigenous societies has threaded itself into the international art world, conveying different meanings across class, gender and geography. Leanne Bray’s craft-art on show at Tresillian during the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial partakes of this eclectic complexity. After a short introduction, the lecturer is joined by the artist on a walking tour of the exhibition to explore how African and Indian culture contributes to her work.

Richard Read is Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He wrote the first book on the British psychoanalytic art critic Adrian Stokes and has published extensively on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, nineteenth and twentieth-century art, film, art theory and complex images in global contexts. His anthology of essays on Colonization, Wilderness and Other Spaces: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting, co-edited with Kenneth Haltman, was published in 2020 and The Heritage of Molyneux’s Question in Landscape Painting and Aesthetic Thought was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. In 2019 he had Visiting Fellowships at Yale Centre for British Art, The British School at Rome and NES Artists Residency at Skagaströnd, Iceland, while later this year he will be a Visiting Fellow at King’s College, Cambrdige. He has also lectured extensively in Australia and internationally, particularly on his long-term book project, The Reversed Canvas in Western Culture.

Hosted by Tresillian Arts Centre. 

Image: Leanne Bray