Art reviews: Hag - Knowledge, Power and Alchemy through Craft | Steve McQueen: Grenfell

An illuminating group show takes a fresh, thought-provoking look at the remarkable nature of craft, writes Susan Mansfield

Hag: Knowledge, Power and Alchemy through Craft, Dumfermline Carnegie Library & Galleries ★★★★

Steve McQueen: Grenfell, Tramway, Glasgow ★★★★★

The campaign to pardon women persecuted as witches in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland has become something of a movement in recent years, bringing with it the reclaiming of words like “witch” and “hag” as terms of female empowerment.

This highly original exhibition which opened in Dunfermline on International Women’s Day, brings together 13 women makers from all over Scotland and applies that language, perhaps for the first time, to the world of craft: craft, one might say, as witchcraft.

Curator Kate Pickering and Fife Contemporary director Kate Grenyer began by asking who would fall under suspicion of witchcraft in today’s world. Independent women, perhaps, who tend to live outside the urban mainstream, women who perform a certain alchemy with materials, who have, through long experience, become masters of their craft.

Sea Stone, by Judith Davies | Shannon Tofts / courtesy of the artist

Crucially, the concept also casts a new light on their work. Exhibitions of craft can sometimes feel inert: beautiful, well-made things so complete in themselves we can only admire them from a distance. Add a touch of magic, though, and the imagination is kindled.

Lise Bech’s woven basket vessels, Dancing Sisters, are more than halfway to being anthropomorphic: the curve and sway of them, their posture towards one another. Susie Redman’s pieces look like they stand up by magic, made of woven linen and Japanese paper with just a handful of willow rods to give them rigidity. Caroline Dear’s impossibly delicate hangings - or garments - of woven grasses barely need imagination at all to reach their full witchiness.

Ruth Elizabeth Jones’ smoke-fired vessels make use of techniques from ancient matriarchal societies and have titles like Mother Vessel 2 and Female Ancestor. Judith Davies’ ceramics are shaped to look like stones and patterned to look like the sea; she has even included a hag stone.

Detail of Light Reflected by Emma Wilson | Shannon Tofts / courtesy of the artist

Patricia Shone’s stoneware and raku pots are rich and earthy looking, wearing their flaws and irregularities with pride. Emma Louise Wilson’s seven silver bowls have inlays of vitreous enamel and gold which mimic clouds and water. Jo McDonald’s sculptures made using the paper from old books seems to hold the power of memories and stories, while Amanda Simmons’ kiln-fired glass panels are inspired by one of Ted Hughes’ crow poems.

Some of the makers engage with more contemporary themes: Fiona Hutchison weaves threads together with recycled ocean plastics to make Sea Knots and a large-scale hanging, Turning the Tide, which laps on the floor like surf. Clare Heminsley presents five oversize aprons, made using paper, gouache, cloth and stitching, inspired by the workers’ takeover at the Lee Jeans factory in Greenock in 1981, and celebrating activism and general “hag-dom”.

Detail from Short Stories, by Jo MacDonald | Courtesy of the Artist

Work which has a modern, or modernist, aesthetic doesn’t sit quite so easily with the theme: Gilly Langton’s bold, colourful jewellery made from metal and hand-dyed elastic, or Carol Sinclair’s porcelain sculptures - though the latter surely has a bit of magic in her process, hand building in porcelain slab with inlay details.

The women themselves are key to the show’s argument, present in a series of new photographs by Lydia Smith. It would be good to have a sense of their voices, too. But these are small complaints when Hag is a show full of accomplishment, and not a little daring, celebrating women (particularly, dare I say it?, women over 50), and positing a new way to appreciate the remarkable nature of craft.

A still from Grenfell by Steve McQueen | Steve McQueen

It’s now nearly eight years since the fire in Grenfell Tower claimed 72 lives. The ruined tower still stands, wrapped in hoarding, and a recent announcement by the Government about its demolition provoked an angry reaction from some of the survivors and bereaved. The pain at the disaster is still raw, the anger at the lack of resolution still palpable.

Steve McQueen grew up in West London, and his film is a personal project which he has financed himself, shot in December 2017 before the blackened shell of the tower was covered up. After an extensive programme of engagement with survivors, the bereaved and the surrounding community, it was shown at the Serpentine in 2023, and will spend the next three years touring to other UK cities under the umbrella of Tate. It starts in Glasgow, where it is a co-production of Glasgow Life and The Common Guild.

The concept of the film is both simple and devastating. A camera (on a drone or a helicopter?) glides towards London from the west, green fields and suburbs gradually giving way to urban sprawl. Wembley Stadium passes by on the right. As the soundscape builds ever so gradually, we become aware that the shape in the centre of the screen is the wreckage of Grenfell Tower.

Close to the tower, the sound crescendos and cuts. Eerily silent, the camera starts to circle the tower, closer, higher, lower. Sometimes, through the glassless metal window frames, we see the sunlight fall on the interior supports shoring up the building, or a worker in a white protective suit. On some floors there are neat piles of pink plastic sacks; no trace of domesticity remains.

The camera keeps circling, longer than is comfortable. We don’t want to look; we can’t look away. When will be there be a voice to fill in the background, describe the fight for justice or the lessons which need to be learned? There won’t be. There is just the tower.

Sometimes, as the camera circles, we glimpse the life of London going on: the cars on the Westway, a train pulling up at Latimer Road Station. The tower starts to look like an abstract structure, with shapes, textures, geometry. Is it even beautiful? Is it acceptable to think a building in which 72 people died is beautiful?

McQueen’s 24-minute film is a memorial in the original sense of the word: something that makes us remember. It is accompanied by a passionate, angry essay by sociologist Paul Gilroy, reminding us that the fire was no accident, that warnings had been ignored. The lessons identified at the long-running inquiry have still not been implemented, in London or anywhere else.

With screenings hourly on a big screen in Tramway 1, it needs to be seen in its entirety. It’s unflinching, and it intends to be. It honours the dead, and the anger of the living. There are many reasons why we need to remember Grenfell.

Hag: Knowledge, Power and Alchemy through Craft runs until 8 June. Steve McQueen: Grenfell is at Tramway until 23 March, with screenings on the hour, daily from 12-4pm, (free). Tickets can be booked at www.tramway.org

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