Harewood Exhibition ‘Create/Elevate’: The Power of Craft

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Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate

Exhibition Dates: Friday 28 June to Sunday 20 October 2024

The Harewood House Trust presents the Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate – showcasing the power of craft knowledge to unite people and inspire a new world.

Event Highlights

• Celebrates craft and elevates artisanal heritage across generations and continents
• Features significant and large-scale works from 16 international contemporary artists, designers, and craft collectives
• Includes four major new commissions from artists Mani Kambo, Arabeschi di Latte, Kusheda Mensa, and Lucia Pizzani

This third edition of the Harewood Biennial, presented by the Harewood House Trust in Yorkshire, explores the potency of craft through three interwoven themes:

• New Narratives: Highlights works that interrogate Harewood’s collections and history
• The Use of Land: Foregrounds local and global ecologies
• Nourish: Explores the convivial effects of sharing food and knowledge

Craft and Heritage

Craft is deeply rooted in the art and heritage of Harewood House. The selection of narrative-rich contemporary objects will open histories and inspire new stories within the house and gardens. These works, embedded throughout the house and landscape, encourage new ways to engage with the environment of a historic house – actively, playfully, and multi-sensorially.

Societal Impact

Create/Elevate foregrounds how artists and designers working with craft self-organise to affect societal change and promote social equity. Craft is shared as a continuum, collaboration, and cross-generational knowledge sharing that is generous, and the foundation of most things we know, use, and value.

Four New Commissions

• Social Kitchen by Arabeschi di Latte: Inspired by communal dining and socialising, this work rethinks the function of food-related objects in the Harewood collection. It enhances the experience of conviviality through a series of designed objects.
• Layered Legacies by Mani Kambo: A hand block wallpaper installation focusing on the human essence within each mark and pattern, responding to the untold stories of the craftspeople and designers behind Harewood’s historic decorative interiors.
• Onipa ye de by Kusheda Mensa: A furniture installation acting as an alternative library within Harewood House, creating a space for the transfer of new knowledge and enabling diverse communities to come together.
• Cultivo y Memoria (Crop and Memory) by Lucia Pizzani: A sculptural commission in the Walled Vegetable Garden, exploring spirituality in the vegetal world and ancient knowledge through ceramic sculptures, live plants, and fallen arboreal fragments.

Event Highlights

• BEIT Collective: Elevates and preserves traditional handicrafts in Lebanon, exploring the multifunctional essence of a Corinthian-shaped heirloom.
• Britto Arts Trust: Presents ‘Rasad’, a full-scale Bangladeshi street market exploring connections between the global food trade, colonial legacies, and economic exploitation.
• Common Threads: A women’s collaborative embroidery project connecting depictions of shared experiences of family and home across diverse communities.
• Jakup Ferri: Adapts an installation of paintings, carpets, and textiles, focusing on coherence and community building through craft techniques.

Additional Artists and Collectives

• Botanique Studios (Antigua and Barbuda)
• Rebecca Chesney (Preston)
• Emefa Cole (London)
• Rosa Harradine (Carmarthenshire, Wales)
• Jan Hendzel (London)
• Hew Locke (London)
• Temitayo Ogunbiyi (Lagos, Nigeria)
• Xanthe Somers (Zimbabwe and London)

Curatorial Insight

Ligaya Salazer, co-curator, stated: “Create/Elevate is about the role of craft and the intangible ecological and societal knowledge it carries, bringing people together across generations. We celebrate how craft connects us and helps us learn from one another because it is accessible, sociable, and tactile.”

Exhibition Details

Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate will be accompanied by an accessible summer programme of educational workshops and courses, as well as the Make-it-Harewood festival of craft. Additional programming includes talks as part of London Craft Week (13-19 May) in collaboration with the Crafts Council and a seminar series in collaboration with Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Curated by Chief Curator & Artistic Director Darren Pih and independent curator Ligaya Salazar, the Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate is at Harewood House from Friday 28 June – 20 October 2024. For more information, visit harewood.org.

Top image: Leonit Ibrahim
Below image: Simon Warner & Harewood House Trust