Out of the Ordinary - Spectacular Craft at the V&A: Naomi Filmer 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.

Naomi Filmer studied jewellery design and is based in Milan and London. She is preoccupied with the body, fascinated by its shapes, sounds and movements. By capturing a facial gesture on film, or the sound of someone clearing their throat, she abstracts the familiar and makes it strange. With her three-dimensional pieces Filmer chooses not to adorn but to celebrate the human form. By casting an elbow or the back of a knee, and magnifying and isolating them inside glass lenses, she is setting the jewels of the body.

In Filmer's practice she is both hands-on and hands-off: sketching and casting metal, and also working like a producer by collaborating closely with sound designers, glassblowers and cameramen.

'The work I make focuses on ordinary parts of the body that we never really celebrate, but actually there is nothing ordinary about them at all, they are unique to every individual. By isolating them, and making a spectacle out of them, they are made extraordinary. I am interested in recognisable sounds like breathing - there is nothing more familiar than the sound of your own breath. If you capture those sounds, amplify and repeat them, they become unfamiliar.'

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