Crafted Selves: The Unfinished Conversation - modern Scottish identity at the St Andrews Museum

By Lucien Willey

When it comes to art institutions, the St. Andrews Museum seems to punch well above its weight in terms of the art it can bring in and the curatorial flair with which the collections are assembled. Their latest exhibition, Crafted Selves: The Unfinished Conversation, is a thoughtful, relevant, and contemporary look at identity through art. The thirteen artists hung within the exhibition have diverse personal stories and genealogical backgrounds. The overlapping themes within the artwork are brilliantly curated to address the exhibition’s focus on hybridity, origins, and multiple homes; a tribute to the excellent work of both the teams at the St. Andrews Museum and Fife Contemporary, which has organized this exhibition.

Curated by the Bajan-Scottish artist turned curator, Cat Dunn offers a perspective upon hybridity within Scotland, asking questions about personal identity alongside wider discussions about nationality, gender, sexuality and disability. Reflecting upon the exhibition, Dunn muses that:

“For everyone who has embraced the term dual-identity, we do so with pride as we prefer to embrace the term than have it used against us … Each artist becomes stronger. The artworks become more dynamic. There is true joy within the artworks, along with sorrow and pain. So, the works must have all of these elements to speak.
Scotland is undergoing a cultural shift as it repositions itself in the wider world, with Scottish art at the center of the current discourse about Scottish social Identity. Art and craft can express aspirations, values, and national character.”

Where many St Andrews students will attach an identity to their home-away-from-home, all the artists in the exhibition similarly count Scotland among their homes and incorporate some measure of Scottishness into their work, but perhaps none more so than Viv Lee. Born in Hong Kong, she studied at the Glasgow School of Art, embracing the Scottish part of her identity in her stoneware and terracotta ceramics, influenced by prehistoric craft cultures. This tribute to her adopted homeland is found through her materials, with all her work on display being made from wild clay found around Scotland. Each handmade ceramic displays the unique soil characteristics of the clay deposit from which it was made, be it from a Shetland field or a Glasgow construction site. While these pieces may appear simple at first, their appearances can be deceiving, and the story behind each makes them a subtly brilliant tribute to Scotland.

Throughout the exhibition, simplicity of design does not equate with subtlety, especially within the artworks’ relevance. Sara Pakdel-Cherry’s installation Six Feet Under is formed from a magnificent pair of silk prints of black and white photographs that depict Pakdel-Cherry attempting to gnaw away heavy ropes that bind her wrists. This striking imagery, of both bindings and the desperate attempt to be free of them, is part of the artist’s message about the poor treatment of women in Islam, both by the government of Iran and conservative families here in the UK. The silk itself is semi-transparent, adding an additional layer of meaning about the way these issues are often ignored. This is not a piece you can easily ignore, and I believe that it deserves an even more prominent place in the exhibition.

For a somewhat lighter set of artworks, we can turn to Adil Iqbal and his project Twilling Tweeds. The two pieces from this series on display, Washroom Chapals (Slippers) and Weaving Songs have a similar approach to Viv Lee’s ceramics, speaking to a Scottish heritage through its material, Harris Tweed. Iqbal’s cross-cultural project has the tweed made in Scotland but woven by Chitrali weavers in Pakistan to create a unique fusion of the two cultures. Instead of positioning parts of his background in opposition to one another, Iqbal has them fused together to create a mesmerizingly complex weave that you almost want to reach out and touch.

Not everything in the exhibition, however, is a slam dunk. Eden Dodd’s installation Conversations with my Father takes the form of a boiler, a handmade mirror, and fresh flowers that are intended to slowly wilt over the course of the exhibition. Concerning her identity as a transfeminine artist, her work gives voice to her ‘personal demons, the transfeminine experience, and persona mythologies and narratives acting as ‘lenses’ of self-analysis and actualisation’. While addressing her identity through ‘vessels influenced and informed by memory’, her work offers a more haphazard, modern style that felt somewhat displaced in comparison with the rest of the exhibition. It’s good art, and the commentary on it is thought-provoking, but it fails to mesh in the way the rest of the exhibition seems to.

With Dunn’s position as an artist-come-curator, the exhibition collectively felt like a large installation, with audio recordings of conversation played throughout the exhibition. The director of Fife Contemporary described how Dunn’s curation:

“brought a thoughtful, personally reflexive, and powerful voice to the creation of this exhibition. It speaks to the deeply personal resonance that crafted work can have, as a carrier of wider cultural identities, and as a way to intercept these through personal expression. The audio recordings featured in the exhibition will have a particular resonance with many visitors as the artists share their own experiences.”

Ashanti Harris, *Emi Ori Cse*, part of *The Skeleton of a Name.* Photo by Matthew Arthur Williams

Overall, Crafted Selves offers a rich conversation on the modern question of dual identity in Scotland. Open to all as a free exhibition, it has a quality to it that you would expect from a major-city contemporary art museum. Again, the calibre of this exhibition is a tribute to the curators and the work they put in, creating what, in my opinion, is St Andrews Museum’s best show yet.

Crafted Selves: The Unfinished Conversion runs until 29th February 2024, transferring to Kirkcaldy Galleries from 23rd March until 12th May.