Making Connections - Notions of Beauty

The exhibition, Making Connection – Notions of Beauty, marked the opening of the BR Gallery at the Dali Intangible Cultural Heritage Station, in Yunnan province, China in October 2019, and coincided with the ‘Dialogue’ symposium funded by China’s National Art Fund. The exhibition and symposium was attended by government ministers, craft-makers, museum curators and academics from across China. Curated by Maria Hanson it brought together a group of seven internationally recognised artists from the United Kingdom working at the forefront of metalwork and jewellery, exploring diversity and connectivity within design, creative making practices and craftsmanship. This exhibition provided the platform to explore and discuss craft making within the contexts of Chinese and British cultures, allowing Hanson to expand on the series of presentations delivered at the 2018 Art Talent Training project: (Yunnan traditional metal technology and innovation) hosted by Yunnan Arts University in Kunming. Within hand crafted objects many elements of craft making processes are implicit. In China, this is often described through the use of the term ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’, whereas in the UK the term ‘Tacit Knowledge’ is commonly used. In ‘The Tacit Dimension’, Michael Polanyi states “I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.” (Polanyi 1966) This exhibition and the ‘Dialogue’ symposium focused on exploring ways to articulate what craft-made objects embody, in order to reveal the complexity of thought and action beyond a simplistic material and process description. Hanson’s Keynote presentation, situated the discussion within Tim Ingold’s proposition that “To know things you have to grow into them, and let them grow in you, so that they become part of who you are.” (Ingold 2013) She discussed how this sense of knowing can only come through experience and time doing, and the importance of critical thinking and reflection through making. This was illustrated with her own artefacts shown in the exhibition which explore material values and consumption, and how through the application of fine craft skills the intrinsic qualities of reclaimed materials can be elevated to re-present notions of beauty.