Out of the Ordinary - Spectacular Craft at the V&A: Annie Cattrell Installation

This joint V&A and Crafts Council exhibition featured eight international artists who place meticulous craftsmanship at the heart of their work. On display were unusual and beautifully crafted installations. The artists take inspiration from the everyday, transforming their subjects using traditional techniques in unexpected ways.

Annie Cattrell trained as a sculptor and has a studio in London. Her work captures moments in time, fleeting things, clouds on a particular day, a breath inside a human lung. Her subjects stem from her interest in areas such as neuroscience, anatomy and meteorology, and she is drawn to the fusion between science and art.

Cattrell works with a variety of materials and skills. She is drawn to working with glass because of its transparency and ability to reveal. Using different techniques she pushes the boundaries of can be achieved with glass, both physically and conceptually. Making the invisible visible and the ethereal solid, Cattrell offers a view of what is inside us and around us.

'I choose the familiar, for example a cloud, so whatever language you speak there is a kind of universal understanding. It is the transformation and freezing into three-dimensions of this iconographic subject matter that interests me: what happens when you contemplate something you think you know but shouldn't really be seeing this way. This three-dimensional vantage point allows the viewer to examine the subtle shifts and rhythms which ceaselessly occur in the natural world and within the body.'

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Entertainment

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• V&A
• victoria
• albert
• museum
• craft
• annie
• cattrell
• design
• contemporary
• art
• installation
• exhibition
• spectacular
• human
• form
• blown
• glass
• artists
• craftmanship
• lungs
• clouds