With These Hands: Laing Art Gallery

Explore the representation of craft in paintings, drawings, and prints with Laing Art Gallery's new exhibition With These Hands.

Featuring works produced in Britain and Europe from the 1750s onwards - including works from painters including Mary Cassatt, Ralph Hedley and Evelyn Dunbar and makers like potter Bernard Leach and local quilter Amy Emms - the exhibition examines the act of making as a symbol of personal and communal identity, leisure and work, tradition and progress at a time of great change. 

Taking guests on a journey from refined reading rooms and weaving sheds to country blacksmiths and industrial forges, With These Hands focuses in particular on the changing role of making in women’s lives, the relationship between craft and community, and its impact on our landscape. 

Image: Shaping of the Keel Plate of a Corvette by Leslie Cole (1942). Laing Art Gallery