This Country exhibition at Crafts Council Gallery

Exhibition open 14 – 18 May 2024, 11am – 5pm, at Crafts Council Gallery. Free to visit, no booking required. Private view: Monday 13 May, 6 - 9pm. RSVP here.

Crafts Council is excited is host This Country, an artist-led exhibition curated by studio collective Forest + Found, supported by Korea Craft and Design Foundation, in partnership with London Craft Week. The exhibition presents pieces by seven artists, working in the UK, who demonstrate deep commitment to their understanding of material traditions within contemporary and conceptual art practice. Featuring artists Max Bainbridge, Abigail Booth, Sayan Chanda, Nancy Fuller, Jonathan Michael-Ray, Frances Pinnock and Lotte Scott.

The exhibition coincides with a new programme of the same name, presented by Crafts focusing on craft's role in English identity and culture. Both the exhibition and programme are curated and presented independently of each other: yet their shared name reflects a common urge to explore identity through contemporary art and craft practice.

Bringing together artists whose work engages in conversations dealing with shifting cultural identities - bound up in their relationship to place and selfhood - the exhibition draws on an unbroken history of making, re-interpreted through the hand and mind of each artist. Interrogating these evolving narratives through physical entanglements with the body and object, each artist unravels traditions of making as they explore shared histories of memory and material. Some engage in the specificity of time and place, while others seek the more ambiguous space that occupies the inner self, dreams and memory.

Often informed by a multiplicity of cultural references or past experiences, the works in This Country seek to question traditional ideas of place and belonging. Instead, they draw on collective cultural re-imaginings to examine the origin of things, where layered identifies shift and are remade. Drawing on folklore, memory, rural traditions and subjective experiences, the works collide in a rich materiality driven by personal encounters with objects, mythologies and landscapes. The materiality of the works themselves becomes the collective carrier of meaning, as each artist is in a continual dialogue between the body, mind and object within the making of their work.

This exhibition has been generously funded by Korea Craft and Design Foundation as part of their ongoing collaboration with London Craft Week.

Forest + Found is a UK-based studio collective established by artists Max Bainbridge and Abigail Booth. Living and working together since 2014, the studio gives them a space for material experimentation and collaboration, as well as a platform to pursue their individual art practices. Collectively, they work on public commissions, exhibitions and curatorial projects, to broaden the dialogue around material-based practice.