Gail-Nina Anderson checks out “With These Hands” at the Laing Art Gallery, the new exhibition that explores the representation of craft in paintings, drawings and prints.

In the days before Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry, there was a time when “Craft” and “Art” required different categories, different implications and even different museums (the National Gallery was definitely for Art with a capital A, while the V&A was founded specifically as a museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, intended to improve by example the level of design in Victorian Britain). Given that there’s bound to be an overlap, where exactly does the difference lie? You could say that High Art exists purely to be looked at, as objects (traditionally, paintings and sculpture) that denote taste, meaning and visual delight, while standing apart from any more everyday function. Craft or Applied Art relates to work of decoration and/or utility, something designed and made in ways that call on a variety of manual skills, but don’t necessarily require an intellectual concept from their maker. The term “craftsman” (I’ll get onto the gender issue in a moment) suggests someone trained in the application of specific techniques to particular materials, using hands more than ideas. By contrast an artist, of course, works with that magic ingredient, Inspiration (hah!).

Retreating into our artistic past (Middle Ages, say) the person who painted the picture would have been considered a workman, trained in a workshop, like any other skilled artisan, and a fancy frame could cost as much as the image it was framing. The coming of art academies and galleries helped raise the status of the painter/sculptor, but it did leave a lot of highly skilful, imaginative and innovative makers working at what came to be considered a lower level of creativity, with their work often unattributed and names unrecorded. Ironically, their unsung activity could provide visual stimulus for depiction in “proper” art, and The Laing Art Gallery’s new exhibition, “With These Hands”, explores the representation of craft in paintings, drawings, and prints. While the process of making and mending by hand, whether domestic pastime, rural and semi-industrial labour, or essential war effort, is a persistent theme to which artists return, their artworks are rarely straightforward observations of everyday activity. Instead, the act of making encodes narratives of personal and communal identity, leisure and work, tradition and progress. Such paintings and prints help us to understand our complex attitudes towards craft at a time when we are reassessing the importance of hand making, for mental health and environmental benefits.

These observations of craftwork are counterbalanced in the show by a display of crafted objects themselves – quilts, embroidery, metalwork, wood carvings, ceramics and basketry – encouraging connections across time and material. While some of these objects carry the resonance of traditions lovingly passed on (as illustrated in Mary Cassatt’s wonderfully observed, informal Impressionist print of a mother teaching her child to crochet) others deliberately acknowledge changing tastes and materials. Lizzie Farey’s “Catkin Ball” reflects the maker’s fascination with living things and natural form, whereby willow becomes the medium for her deeply personal interaction with nature. By contrast, Michael Eden’s “Wedgwoodn’t Tureen” reveals a different attitude, using computer technology to fuse classical shape with modern non-fired materials.

In some of the paintings it is utilitarian activities that reveal underlying cultural patterns of working together to fulfil the task. In Ralph Hedley’s “The Sail Loft” the men of the community work doggedly together stitching a great breadth of canvas in an open, airy space, while official War Artist Lesley Cole’s “Shaping of the Keel Plate of a Corvette” (1942) dramatically changes pace and atmosphere by showing metal workers radiating concentration under the pressure of intense heat as they manipulate a vital component of a battleship under conditions that bring the whole concept of Health and Safety into question.

Unexpectedly, Victorian painter G.F. Watts’ “The Window Seat” (1861 - pictured) raises more poignant and problematic issues. Offering a charming glimpse of a well-dressed woman comfortably seated in the good light of an open window as she stitches at a piece of fabric (perhaps hemming a handkerchief), it also suggests the way that certain crafts (most notably needlework) were belittled by classification as “women’s work”. These, the term implies, didn’t require formal training or conceptual engagement, but were trivial tasks, sometimes undertaken out of domestic necessity, but in more privileged circumstances, mere time-fillers for idle feminine hands obsessed with unnecessary embellishment. Well, quite apart from all those women who made a living working professionally with needlework, ceramics etc, domestic crafts can reveal a world of transformative delight in the sheer possibilities of materials and techniques, while changing attitudes to women in the workplace have proven that dexterity and precision aren’t just the province of the working man. Look at Nevinson’s WWI (1917) Art Deco-style print of  “Acetylene Welding” and note the enigmatic smile of the (female) craftsperson who enjoys knowing just how to get the job done.

With These Hands, 17 May – 27 September, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, laingartgallery.org.uk