There's widespread agreement that the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for the arts. A show at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen offers hope that it may have at least provided some creative inspiration for individual artists.
The Guild's shop in Bovey Tracey has been a favourite of mine since I first fell in love with Dartmoor in the early 2000s. It's always featured an approachable range of hand-crafted masterpieces from its members, from inexpensive greeting cards and small gifts up to significant investments in painting and sculpture. The gallery's ceramics, jewellery and textiles have been favourites and I've accumulated some of each over the visits.
It had been eight years since my last trip this way, and I was delighted to discover that my old favourite had expanded significantly. Not only is the shop probably double its former size, but there's now a large and well-lit exhibition space that shows off the best of its members' work.
Under normal circumstances the space hosts a juried "Summer Exhibition". This year, it's simply called "2020" and focuses on how recent traumas have inspired and changed the artists and their work. Fittingly, visitors have to figure out and follow a one-way system to take it all in. Even our viewing patterns have had to change to cope with these strange times.
Each exhibiting artist has space to explain the impact of the year. Though COVID-19 doesn't show up obviously in all the work, a clear theme appears across their experiences. In story after story, artists dealt with difficulty and depression by trying new things. For some, it was a slight twist on existing styles. Others leapt to entirely new media. Across the board, the results were fascinating and often very beautiful.
Jewellery-maker Anne Farag challenged herself to mix metal elements without heat, coming up with a new range that looks part clockwork and part Arts and Crafts movement. Stoneware sculptor Malcolm Law credits his lockdown survival to his work "Skimbleshanks", an intricate melange of an egg, steam trains, machinery and an oversized moggie taken from one of T.S. Eliot's cat poems. Paper artist Megan Stallworthy got closer to nature in her isolation, pressing tiny flowers into more of her work. Glass artist Penny Carter, freed from a busy schedule of craft fairs and exhibitions, felt released to be totally self indulgent and started designing what she thought of as jewellery for the garden ... the closest I came to buying one of the exhibition pieces.
Wood carver Sarah Viggars started lockdown in intense distress, as circumstances found her shut out of her studio space. Not unlike many office workers, she had to figure out how to fashion a viable working space out of her home, getting by with much less room than usual. The trauma sparked her to expand her interest in puppetry and launch a range of woodcarving craft kits. Her new puppets ... exquisitely realised birds ... were both functional and real works of art, not only to look at in themselves but in the shadows they cast behind them.
The most striking evocation of current times, and the item easiest to see moving from "craft" to proper "art" worthy of a museum, was Isabella Whitworth's Doctor Denim - The Plague Doctor. Unsurprisingly, the fabric artist had started lockdown making face masks. That piqued her curiosity about masks as medical protection, which led her to research the history of the plague doctor's distinctive, long-nosed version. She's created a plague doctor for the modern world, mask repurposed from blue jeans and hung about with charms and amulets capturing the protections of the modern world. Twitter and Instagram logos jostle with medieval remedies, bubble packs of pills and Donald Trump's remedy book.
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