Beccy Ridsdel is an artist from York, United Kingdom. Known for her ceramics, Ridsdel creates fun, playful artworks using bone china, clay and various objects like surgical instruments(!)
In her series, Art/Craft, Ridsdel opens a discussion regarding one of the most important questions of the art world. What is art? Trying to combine art with craft, meaning with technical skills and beauty with comfort, the artist doesn’t hope to answer to this question, but to make us think. “This work was based on the (age-old) art/craft debate. I know we all have our own opinions, but I think craft is technical and art is meaningful (or a reason for being made, beyond the thing itself) Overly simplistic? Probably, but for ceramicists this can be a big issue as ceramics is almost universally seen as craft regardless.I chose to make a series of definitely craft objects – bone china plates, mugs, jugs – and ‘dissect’ them to see what was beneath. Turns out, they are craft through and through. This work was an installation, set up as a lab experiment in progress, complete with scalpels, lab coats, needles and a microscope. Piles of dicarded, cut-up craft objects lay about the desk, some with their innards seeping out, others rearranged, Frankenstein-style.By doing this, I was turning a table full of craft objects into an artwork in its own right, it had a point beyond the technique, beyond the things themselves,” explains the artist.