CAROL DUNBAR reflects on an exhibition of new and recent work by Lorraine Besant, and wider issues in the perception of ‘arts’ and ‘crafts’.

INTENDED USE was a moving and thought-provoking account of the situation faced by Betty Corrigall, a young Orkney woman of the 18th century. Pregnant, unmarried and abandoned, Betty Corrigall took her own life, and she was buried on the parish boundary, high on the moorland of her native Hoy. Her grave is still to be seen, and poems and songs tell the mournful story.

This latest interpretation makes use of textile and other craft-related materials to give an insight into the story that is evocative, subtle and assured, and at the same time raises interesting questions about the craft medium itself.

Boundaries of several kinds are at work in the story of Betty Corrigall, but I will begin by considering briefly a wider set of boundaries, one that provides a broad context for the kind of work that Lorraine Besant makes. The ongoing debate as to where the boundaries of art and craft lie is, after all, important not only to how we “place” Besant’s work, but also to how we share in its exploration of abandonment and isolation.

The topic has been much discussed since the 1960s when “the revival” of “the crafts” as something rural, traditional or recreational – particularly in the United States – placed them at the margins of importance, in mainstream artistic terms. Perhaps this wouldn’t matter if things would only stay where they are placed, but of course they do not – thankfully they do not – and time and again our assumptions about what is art and what is craft come up for scrutiny.

---

When the Scottish Executive speaks of traditional crafts, they seem to have in mind those traditional materials and skills that are readily appreciated in functional as well as aesthetic terms

---

To highlight the paradox inherent in the perception that there is an absolute dividing line, Rosemary Hill, in her 2001 Peter Dormer lecture, The Eye of the Beholder: Criticism and Crafts (Crafts Council, 44a Pentonville Road, London, N1 9BY, May/June 2002 and July/August 2002), highlighted two works by the artist Cornelia Parker.

These two works, “Thirty Pieces of Silver” and “Breathless”, are more or less indistinguishable in their appearance. What is significant is their location and the difference that makes to the way in which we read them. The former is hung in Tate Britain, a gallery renowned internationally for exhibiting all that is best in British visual art; the latter in the V&A, home to one of the world’s most revered collections of applied arts and crafts.

Hill observes that some of the most exciting work of recent times has come from the borderline between fine art and “traditional” craft. It often involves the creation of a new type of object, such as we see in the work of potter Richard Slee and knitter Freddie Robbins, where the work’s ability to “function” in a conventional manner ceases to have any real importance in judging its quality.

Clearly this sets up an interesting tension in the expectations we have of art and craft, considered as separate fields. However, in part on the basis of examples such as Slee and Robbins, Hill goes on to suggest that the sense of marginalisation that has stimulated innovative ways of working may no longer exist. Those without have been gathered in, or the frontiers have been extended.

I’m not so convinced – especially in this country, rich in “traditional” crafts, and with its Executive eager to support and “develop” skills that are “dying” – that the sense of marginalisation is not as fixed as ever. When the Scottish Executive speaks of traditional crafts, they seem to have in mind those traditional materials and skills that are readily appreciated in functional as well as aesthetic terms – boatbuilding, basketry, willow-weaving and so on. All very good.

But the key question here is where it leaves those of us who wish to use our craft skills to create work that is challenging, that pushes the boundaries of possibility, and that is above all a visual-expressive way of dealing with a wide range of ideas rather than to answer practical needs. It seems to me there’s still a huge gulf to cross in terms of credibility.

So much for that, but where does it take us with the work of Lorraine Besant and Intended Use? Essentially, I would suggest that it helps lead to a deeper understanding of isolation, the main theme explored in the exhibition. The work itself, inspired by those extreme feelings, is ambiguous and unsettling, and makes us as viewers also isolated.

The content is directly expressive of that feeling, but in my view it is in a wider reading of her work – one that she may still be unaware of herself – that the key to its success lies. While her work neatly and very eloquently takes the mythology surrounding the suicide of Betty Corrigall as its starting point, the bigger issue, of the way in which Besant has chosen to give visual expression to her ideas, is itself very much about isolation.

In Intended Use, our expectations of the materials and the techniques employed – wool, felting and knitting – as well as our expectations of the “objects” created and their end use – bags, tools and other implements – are unsettled. We know what we are looking at, yet we know nothing at all.

The work disturbs us not just in its dark and at times macabre content, but also in the way it leaves us perplexed and disorientated in our understanding of what we think we should know. A deliberately isolating act. The very title of the show confounds us. Paradoxically, it implies “function” and once again we are confused.

The creation of faux museums and artefacts is a familiar strategy, and the work of Will McLean and Susan Hillier provides good examples. That kind of approach can succeed or disappoint depending on how far the artist goes to create the illusion of the artefact. Personally, I find it unconvincing when the artist (or craftsperson) leaves it ambiguous as to whether we are looking at a real tool or totemic object.

---

The work plays on the uncertain status of textile skills used as a means of expression, and evokes the sense of marginalisation that involves.

---

Here, however, Besant has created a set of objects that are quite clearly non-functional. They “allude” to functional tools but quite obviously they are not and we are free to interpret them from whatever cultural perspective we please. These tool-like objects, beautifully crafted by the artist’s father, are miniature, aesthetically pleasing, and on closer examination, cold and sinister.

Womb-like bags, splayed and tethered across the gallery wall, and the tools already mentioned draw us into two complex worlds. Firstly, on the surface, they suggest the traditional role of women, and specifically the crisis faced by the young, stigmatised girl bearing a child out of wedlock. They are suggestive not only of domestic and what might be termed passive/female tasks, but have associations with more aggressive/male purposes – primitive, surgical, and in particular gynaecological.

Secondly, if we look deeper, these objects give a sense of the world in which the artist attempts to give expression to her own ideas and feelings, and the isolation this often involves.

In fact, Besant’s work makes reference to that struggle throughout. Work produced using traditional methods and materials is overlain with luminous, neon-bright synthetic yarns and with camouflage – this deliberate use of discordant materials creating a barrier against our conventional expectations.

The domestic environment depicted in archive photographs provides visual elements that Besant has “harnessed”. Nails used to pin things to the walls – in the photographs and in the gallery itself – suggests an uncertainty or a sense of contingency, as does the stuck pendulum. Is time standing still, or not?

Underlying it all, and paralleling the conflicts of the overt subject matter, is this implicit questioning of the medium itself. The work plays on the uncertain status of textile skills used as a means of expression, and evokes the sense of marginalisation that involves.

The earlier reference to the two works by Cornelia Parker quite clearly points out the absurdity that may follow from rigid and wrong-headed classification. Of course we are culturally conditioned to “pigeon-hole”, to label and define, in part to serve a need to reassure ourselves of who we are, individually and collectively. Thus the outcast, and thus the tragic heroine of story and song.

Contemporary art addresses difficult and uncomfortable questions for us. That, if you like, is its “purpose”. We may not like the answers it gives or the way it gives them, but if it does not serve to challenge us somehow, in terms that matter deeply, then it fails.

Besant’s work does challenge us. It makes us stop and think, question our situation and attitudes – our “intended use”. I believe as well that it provides a strong case that work of this kind should be recognised for its own sake rather than have our responses deflected by questions about which art form it might or might not belong to. We may be comfortable with the term artist to describe Besant, but where to place her work is still a question of considerable debate.

Lorraine Besant graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 2004 with a first class BDeg(Hons) in Textile Design. She was awarded The School of Design’s Interdisciplinary Award 2004. She is currently living in Orkney where she grew up and is hoping to study for an MA in the near future.

Carol Dunbar is a tapestry weaver, printmaker and teacher. Her work can be seen at www.caroldunbar.co.uk

© Carol Dunbar, 2005