Title: ‘13′
This show draws upon work made by students and staff who have worked within the University of Brighton ‘Crafts’ courses taught at Hastings College over the past thirteen years. This includes Glass, Metals, Ceramics, and Textiles, etc, interpreted in very diverse ways, from traditional ‘crafts’ to ‘design arts’, and ‘installation’, etc.. Revealed is a glimpse of the quality and diversity of professional practice that ‘Contemporary Crafts’ encompasses, and the enthusiasm and tenacity of inspirational ‘makers’.
Curated by Alastair Knights.
The show will comprise work by past, present students and members of staff, who have been involved in this exciting craft programme”.
Freya Stark writing about her travels in the Yemen in the 1930s
‘We drove out after a time, by the sail-bed full of stones and grey-leaved bushes, called ya’būr, which are used in faggots to hold up the mud of roofs, and are the Sultan’s monopoly and a good source of income: they had a red pea flower, like a small flame.
Beyond them was the new house and garden of Sayyid Abu Bekr al-Kaf, which we visited as soon as I was able. It was still being built. The garden, the first in Hadhramaut to be copied from Europe, was still an emptiness of round beds with stone borders, a tree in the middle of each: a hedge of clipped henna bushes beside them; a fountain in the middle. The house was the first in Sewun to be built with concrete, “so that the rooms need have no pillars”: the old Hadhramaut woodwork, with its leaded nails, was discarded, and there were to be European moulded doors and windows, expensively ornate. Everything was expensive: even the bathroom – otherwise a delightful place with sunken floor filled with water – had a gilt centre to its ceiling; and the hall was to have a glass roof like hotels in Singapore. What more terrible punishment could one imagine for mid-Victorian decorators than to place them – their hearts now purified by the contemplation of heavenly Beauty – in such a position that merely by glancing down from the eternal parapets they must see their own inventions spreading like a cancer over the uncorrupted world?
And what is wrong with the human race, that, having bought at so high a price the fruit of the tree of knowledge, it cannot even use it to tell what it likes from what it doesn’t? Not ignorance, but laziness and cowardice prevent us from knowing what we like. Left to themselves, the untaught make lovely things, but when the devil gets loose in the minds of manufacturers in the Midlands, and we accept the things they give us wholesale, as the East accepts the West; we think the thoughts of other people, too indolent or too fearful to discover our own: and the dear old Sayyid, who loves his carved doors when he looks at them, and finds happiness in his ancient town – the only city I have ever seen whose dignity and beauty no jarring note distracts – considers himself bound to bring our Western ugliness to spoil it for ever.
I tried to say this: but what is the voice of a woman? Merely a noise, pleasant or otherwise according to time and place…..’
From “The Southern Gates of Arabia” by Freya Stark
