*Ash Basket.* Photograph by Murray Orr. Copyright © Alice Dudgeon 2021. All rights reserved.

By Imogen Hayes

14 April, 2022

Artful Craft is the latest exhibition to launch in our Jubilee Gallery. Curated by MAKE Southwest president and artist Peter Randall-Page, the exhibition features Evolution V, XV, XVI, and XIX, his Rorschach-style ink blots, alongside works from 12 artists who straddle the boundary between fine art and craft-making. Each of these artists combines conceptual thinking with a scientific knowledge of their craft. Peter invited globally recognised artists to share their work in Artful Craft: David Nash RA OBE, Susan Derges, Halima Cassell MBE, David Mach RA, Tavs Jørgensen, Sarah Gillespie, and Marcus Vergette. Each artist was then invited to nominate another artist whose work illustrates the porous boundary between art and craft.

Artful Craft is a celebration of artists who are embracing technological innovation, as well as those breathing new life into traditional practices. Tavs Jørgensen and Jonathan Keep are at the cutting edge of glass and ceramic technology respectively, using 3D printing and digital fabrication tools to articulate their visions with great sensitivity. Marcus Vergette’s work is a hybrid of the old and the new, as he combines traditional bell foundry casting techniques with digital software to create harmonically structured monumental bronze bells. At the other end of the spectrum, Andrea Liu and Alice Dudgeon are preserving heritage crafts while imagining new possibilities. Andrea Liu turns discarded salmon skins into fish leather, dyes them with her own natural dyes, and weaves them into ‘Gansey’ pattern quilts; while Alice Dudgeon adopts steam bending and hand carving techniques used traditionally in boatbuilding and furniture-making to craft her wooden sculptures.

Contemporary fine artist David Nash, who works with wood in a highly innovative way, nominated Alice, with whom he shares a tremendous understanding and respect for the material. David met Alice when she visited his studio four years ago, and has admired the confidence and sophistication she evidences in her sculpture ever since.

Alice travelled over eight hours from Edinburgh to ensure Winnowing and Ash Basket arrived safely. As she unboxed her sculptures, it was clear why she was reluctant to entrust them to an art courier. Both pieces, though structurally robust, are exceedingly delicate, composed of tapering wooden spines individually steam bent into smooth curves with an exacting eye, and held in tension with dowel pins and linen thread that suspends small grain-like sections.

Winnowing is named after the process by which chaff is separated from grain. While winnowing is used across cultures, Alice looks to the Amish and Shaker communities for inspiration.

“The Shakers use shallow baskets to collect all the grain, and then they wait for a certain wind to come,” Alice explained. “Then they toss the grain up in the air, and the wind refines the grain from the husk. It's very beautiful to watch the process of the grain being tossed up in the wind and then falling into these amazing shallow baskets. It’s a very slow process.”

*Winnowing*. Photograph by Samuel Young. Copyright © Alice Dudgeon 2021. All rights reserved.

A happy accident resulted in Winnowing taking on new dimensions:

“I had always intended on fixing these hand carved grain-like pieces in place, but one day the skylight was open in my studio, and the breeze came in and they all started spinning.”

As the basket rocks gently in the breeze, the grains flicker and spin, and the process of winnowing is brought vividly into the mind’s eye, dynamic and vital in its life-sustaining role.

For Alice, there is something transcendental about provision, agricultural labour and working directly with the land. There is something sublime in her craftmanship too: her sculpture Avodah, from the Hebrew for work, worship and service, is one of her most contemplative pieces, earning her the FEUVA Award for Sculpture in 2018. The sculpture, constructed from 136 parts each turned by hand on a lathe, invites the viewer to step inside for a moment of silent reflection. “Avodah was really the start,” Alice said. “All the pieces I've made since Avodah have been focused around the idea of what it means to make as worship or what it means to make and give of yourself physically in your work.”

*Avodah.* Photograph by Samuel Young. Copyright © Alice Dudgeon 2021. All rights reserved.

I had the opportunity to talk with Alice when she delivered her work ahead of Artful Craft’s opening.

Artful Craft interrogates the perceived binary between art and craft, celebrating artists whose practice straddles this binary. So how do you think your work straddles or subverts the art/craft binary?

Well, in the last three years my focus has become more about process. And, in particular, the process of steam bending and carving, and I think, more and more, it's important for me that everything is manipulated by hand, that there's a lot of physical labour and time involved. The steam bending has just really taken over in the studio, and I’ve been led and directed so much by material. And what I love about working with natural material is that you can try and tame it as much as you like but, ultimately, it's going to have irregularities, it's got a mind of its own, it's going to do its own thing. And so I think that has very much dictated the direction I've gone in. And the irregularities in the movement I get from steam bending with material has led me on that kind of trajectory. And it's a very traditional craft process, obviously, in itself, boatbuilding. I would say, that's really why I straddle the art and craft binary. I mean, obviously, I trained in sculpture, in fine art. So we were very much taught to, at least at my art school, we were taught to make work that was ideas-based and concept-driven. And in my final year, I just spent so much time in the wood workshops. And that has led me, since graduating, to push into the material more than the concepts. But I mean, I'm very much interested in both; everything comes out of my drawings, which obviously come from research and ideas. It’s all ideas-driven but ultimately, the wood is just making sense of the ideas. It’s the material that makes sense of my drawings.

Avodah is one of your most contemplative pieces, and your work is concerned with labour intensive, repetitive processes, and working directly with the land. So can you talk to me about craft as a means of worship, or worship as a means of craftsmanship, and what Avodah means to you?

I found the process of making Avodah very meditative. I felt in a strange way that I was almost aligning myself with people from the past who were using these processes for purely functional reasons; they were creating these functional objects that had an innate beauty to them. I was essentially turning these broom handles on the lathe again, and again, again, to make Avodah. But I think there’s something to be said about slowing down, you know, the actual strength that you build up in your hands and in your limbs, and that feeling of building up strength with this repetitive physical process, and slowing down. As a Christian, I suppose I was aligning myself with communities like the Shakers and the Amish, who obviously, in practice, are very different to me, in terms of their lifestyles, but I was really interested in their belief that making with excellence, especially in the realms of craft, and furniture, in particular, was an act of worship, or the greatest act of worship. So I think that definitely dictated the processes that I then used working on the lathe: they were all very traditional historical craft processes that they use to create functional objects. And I was slightly subverting that obviously, by then making something that really didn't have much of a function. But again, I think people were double-taking when they were inside the structure because they were walking into what they thought had maybe initially been manufactured en masse, like broom handles manufactured en masse in factories. And then as they got closer, they saw that there were nicks in the wood, or tapered-in joints, and they suddenly realised that there were a lot of irregularities that could only have come by hand manipulation, though Avodah was actually very polished in comparison to my work since then. Now, I actually try and evidence my hand more and more. So I'm sanding a lot less, even between Winnowing and Basket, the two pieces, there's about a year and a half time difference. And you can see that one is quite polished. It's not polished, but you know, there was a lot of sanding involved in Winnowing. And in Basket, you can see the chisel marks, so I used the same processes as in Avodah, but just practised revealing what I've done more and more to the audience, and allowing the eye to bounce along the work’s surface rather than hiding it.

Can you tell me a bit more about Winnowing and Ash Basket?

So I was looking at the process of winnowing in my research for quite a long time, because I've been looking at these communities in the past, Shakers in particular, and how they don’t use machines in the process of harvesting. There are mechanics, but they’re all very traditional and hand driven. And winnowing is a very old process of refining grain. It was that imagery that really informed me introducing grain, or grain-like hand carved sections, and these shallow steamed curves for the baskets. Those were obviously things that I became quite interested in reflecting, and then I started to introduce this linen thread because it was a way to suspend and to add an element of movement to the work, because I really wanted that to come out and almost be a surprise. I wanted to keep that sense of movement that I'm really interested in from these processes, and the way things can change and adapt. I like that curators or whoever's installing the work can change the way the moving components of Winnowing are laid out, so it’s always moving. Then, with Basket, those grain shapes have been carried through into that work, and there’s quite a lot more of them, again, steam bending, but evidencing the chisel a lot more, and creating these curved edges. Also, as a result of Covid, I was thinking more and more about the idea of storing up, and how these communities and these people who are working in tandem with the seasons are always prepared, because they're providing for communities, not just providing for the self. And so I think the image of grain contained in shallow baskets or in taller baskets in my work was inspired by this notion of storing up and provision.

So you've already spoken a little bit about how your faith and your fascination with the Shakers and Amish communities inform your work, but how did you become fascinated with tools and labour and the processes you find in agriculture?

Well, I grew up in a rural village and I think having had access to fields and spending a lot of time just out in the fields, naturally like a sponge I soaked up a lot of what I was looking at. I think a lot of my drawings just look like lots of lines, like flat two dimensional drawings to most people, but I've always viewed them from a bird's eye perspective. And I realised not long after I graduated that especially when it came to looking at fields for example, if you were looking at bird's eye view you would see plough lines like drawings in the land. So I became interested in this idea that ploughs were drawing in the land, and then obviously the shape of the plough is what’s removed from the ground. And from there, I became more and more fascinated by these purely functional objects that are being used to serve a purpose, and yet they have something beautiful about them, whether that's in traditional ploughs, when the metal has been manipulated into these beautiful soft curves; or, for example, I was looking at a really old piece of mine, Plough, which was very influenced by the Egyptian section in the National Museum in Edinburgh. They brought all these Egyptian objects in, and five or so years ago I went in when the exhibition had just opened, and I saw these combs and functional objects that had been carved with flints, and they looked like ploughed land from above. And so it was just, I think, a fascination with these objects and for functional things. But so beautifully made, and so much time being taken. There were no shortcuts, and there was no mass production involved.

Alice Dudgeon and Peter Randall-Page at the Artful Craft opening event. Photograph by Emma Booth.

Each of the Artful Craft exhibitors has a really interesting relationship between resisting and embracing the mechanisation and computerisation of craft processes. How do you feel your work embraces, resists, or responds to the mechanisation of art and craft practices?

I suppose my work resists it. It's not that I’m in any way opposed to mechanisation, because I use machines to take wood from tree form down to these small sections that I'm using. And you can see in the work that I've used all kinds of really tiny drills. I do use machines, but I'm not sure I'm as excited by the possibilities of mechanisation and technology as I am the possibilities of adopting traditional craft processes. I think my method is all about using processes that make sense of my drawings. So up until this point, steam bending and carving have made sense of my drawings: they’ve been a means to bring them off the page and into space. I'm not averse to using machinery, but I think the processes that I'm spending so much time adopting and exploring are kind of… I’m kind of going back.

Your work has a really interesting place in that conversation because you're inspired by ploughs and objects for mechanisation, and yet responding with hand driven processes.

So, it is interesting because most people I speak to who are using the process of steam bending are using it for functional reasons, so it could be for chairs, or it could be Gaze Burvill, who are steam bending huge bits of furniture for the outdoors. So these processes are making sense for them for design reasons, and yet, for me, my use of these processes doesn't really make any sense. Because I'm steaming tiny, really, really narrow sections. And most furniture makers would say to me, why are you bothering? Because the sections are so thin and steam bending takes so much time. So I'm really pushing material to its limits, and yet not really using it in a functional way. So it’s a bit strange! And again, like with carving, spending all the time, but again, not for functional reason… but my interest is in these functional objects. I haven't quite worked out why yet. I think people look at my work, and they don't necessarily know about the process of steam bending. But then they're fascinated that the grain runs through, they can see that it hasn't been cut on a machine. I am interested in people knowing about these processes, knowing that the material has been pushed to its limits.

Your sculpture Billow is made from a fallen sycamore tree found on the Scottish Borders. How often do you work with found material, and how does it inform your concepts?

Yeah, well, all my material is from the Scottish Borders. I try to work with materials that haven’t travelled too far at all, sourced as locally as possible. I do work with fallen trees, and if not, everything has been sustainably grown, and I know how and when it’s been felled, and it's become really fascinating to me to work with a tool that I know has lived and grown nearby, because I then have an understanding of the landscape that I'm living in. And I think I then understand more about my place within Scotland, and I find myself walking past trees and thinking, ‘Oh, that's what I worked with.’ That is really fascinating to me. And also, obviously, there is the sustainable element. I work a lot with ash, and there’s a problem with ash dieback, which David Nash is concerned with too. As a result of ash dieback, there are a lot fewer trees because of the disease they've got. And so in terms of working with it, because ash is the best to work with for steam bending, it's important that I know that it's fallen, or I've sourced it sustainably. I also think really carefully about using all of the wood when I get it, and I can do that with steam bending because I'm able to get curves from very small sections, and I'm not cutting great shapes out and getting waste. My studio is filled with these tiny little offcuts and everything gets used, whether that's in models or for carving. There's also no metal in any of my sculptures, everything is pinned with wood, so often with these fallen trees I get little sections left over that will become pins to connect sections together. I hope, wherever I live, that I can work with what's around me. I feel as if I'm only scratching the surface of wood as a material, and also the processes I'm using, but I feel like I'm getting more and more of an understanding of how the trees around me operate in terms of steaming. And also, with steam bending, you really want to work with air dried material. And that often has to have been dried out for six to nine years before I work with it. So I'm also reliant on sourcing material locally, from people that I know have either been given trees that have fallen, because they’ve been a bit of a nuisance to a landowner. So that helps in terms of knowing where a tree has come from, because it has to be stored somewhere for such a long time, and the traceability is very clear, where it's come from and how long it's been there. And it's been great because I've formed these amazing relationships with other makers that are also using the same material, but in completely different ways. And we're always emailing back and forth, ‘I can’t believe you managed to curve this!’ or, you know, ‘What do I do with this?’, or ‘how is this material working for you?’, because we will often be working from the same tree.

Artful Craft opening event. Photograph by Emma Booth.

On that note of sustainability, how do you want people to feel about their relationship to the natural world after seeing your work?

I think I would just like them to look again, and maybe to look for a bit longer. And for me one of the greatest outcomes, at least from my work, is if someone stands still in front of it and just pauses for a while. And I think that's what I find I love to do when I'm outdoors, and I think we all need to just take a bit of a breather. I think becoming more curious is a great outcome as well. But I don't really make with any particular intention, or thinking this is what I want the audience to do, or to feel. But I think pausing and being curious are great outcomes. I see the works as structures, so to me I want them to be experienced, or I think about people moving around them. In Avodah obviously people were moving through. I want people to be able to move around and for the sculptures to be in conversation with people, not so small that you have to get up really close, but so that you can move around and see it from different angles. People can navigate around the works and be in conversation with them, rather than viewing these really distant, static things. I think I’ve become a lot more gestural and revealing with my processes, leaving chisel marks and knowing when to stop, and not to endlessly perfect or over-embellish or mask the processes. I had a studio at a furniture maker’s and, having just graduated I was definitely influenced by the fact that all their furniture was so beautifully polished and smoothed. Then I moved out into a sculptor’s building, and I think I then decided I didn’t want to finish my surfaces perfectly, but just leave them raw. So if there are finger marks or dust because I’ve worked it in the studio in a certain way, then that’s okay - it doesn’t have to be removed or covered. I think people are fascinated with how things are made, so if people see that, if they see the process that’s also good. I’m still learning about what it is that’s important in terms of response, and what it is that I want to push more and more, or hold back a bit more. I’m still learning these things myself.

You can see Winnowing and Ash Basket in our Artful Craft exhibition in the Jubilee Gallery until 2 July, 2022.