Tate Britain's 'British Folk Art' exhibition explores unsung creators, native traditions and plenty of oddities
Tate Britain in London is exploring the world of unsung artisans and traditions with its fascinating show on British vernacular crafts, writes Kathryn Hughes
One of the glories of Tate Britain's on-going summer show is a single, massive leather boot, almost one metre long and officially sized at 74. It looks exactly like something a giant would wear. Gnarled and bulbous, yet finely detailed too, each stitch is exactly right, the sole solidly finished, the high ankle cuff almost delicate. It is moulded out of good strong leather and polished to perfection.
The first question is: why does such a smart giant need only one boot? And the second is: what is it doing here? This is Tate Britain not Tate Modern, and hardly the obvious home for conceptual art.
Folk art is usually assumed to be anonymous, expressive of a whole culture rather than one person's intention and design. But ... it is impossible to imagine that you can discern a collective consciousness behind a body of work that just happens tobe unsigned.
Even when you learn that the title of this summer's exhibition is "British Folk Art", the monstrous boot doesn't make immediate sense. "Folk art", if it conjures anything more than blank stares, is assumed to denote samplers (embroidery), corn dollies and quilts, the products of an emphatically rural culture. This boot by contrast comes from somewhere smokier: for decades it hung outside a Northampton cobbler, a sign to the unlettered that here was a place to get your footwear fixed. In the Tate's exhibition it sits alongside other flotsam from the industrialised world: pub signs, toby jugs, ships' figureheads, all made by artisans and workers who may be accounted at least semi-skilled. It is a world away from stick-whittling and patchwork.
Very sensible for, once you start, where do you end? Every time Myrone ventured out socially during the genesis of the exhibition, he found himself fielding a barrage of questions: "Will you be including tattoos, traveller art, my nan's knitting?"
Instead of attempting answers, Myrone and his colleagues Ruth Kenny and Jeff McMillan embarked on a country-wide rummage in museum vaults for objects that had already been labelled as "folk" by local curators. In practice, this often meant items that had arrived decades earlier that no one had ever quite known what to do with. The curators also rifled the Tate's own store-cupboard for items that appeared not to fit into the canonical categories by which we normally make sense of "art" (even the Tate has acquired its fair share of oddities over the decades).
An obvious example here is The Cholmondeley Ladies (1600-10), a painting of two gentlewomen executed not by a professional artist but by an artisan whose lack of formal technique results in a piece of work that is as vivid as it is puzzling. Are the women sisters, even twins? Why do they each have a baby? And why is the perspective so flat? Is it simply because the artist didn't know how to do depth?