lost in lace.

If I’m not attempting to survive in London, I can often be found at my family home in Warwickshire where I come to write in a clean, quiet environment with a well-stocked fridge. From here the completely underrated city of Birmingham is only twenty minutes away, and thus a trip to the city’s Museum and Art Gallery is always required.

Yesterday my parents and I did just this, and in the process stumbled upon a truly spectacular exhibition. Lost In Lace is a space where twenty contemporary artists have each interpreted the historical, material and aesthetic qualities of lace to produce twenty outstandingly original works with lace at their core. With Lesley Millar at the creative helm, each artist had played with the traditional definition of lace to create their own, modern, take and aesthetic.

Hosted in the cavernous setting of the Gas Hall, each work has ample space to relay its message and the aggregate impact is astonishing. Upstairs in the main gallery there is a useful potted history of the craft, and this acts as an informed precursor that the main exhibition builds upon. I was particularly drawn to the huge variety of materials used to emulate something, which, by definition, should be soft and delicate.

All of the works were commissioned specifically for the show. Among them, installations by Chiharu Shiota and Michael Brennand-Wood had the biggest impact on me due to their truly inspirational takes on the subject matter. Shiota positioned oversized white garments within an entangled environment of randomly placed yarns. This played successfully with the visual aesthetic by creating a sort-of reverse lace with the yarns casting new patterns over the garments as you moved around the installation.

Michael Brennan-Wood opted instead for a harder edge. He utilised traditionally tough materials, aluminum, acrylic and wood, to build what he christened as ‘military lace’. ‘Lace The Final Frontier’ was designed to combine images of weaponry with the Rorschach test to create a harsh, red metallic lace that departed swiftly from both the innocence of white lace and the sensual associations of black lace. 

With its new take on a traditional concept, this exhibition was utterly thought provoking, on a day when I was only expecting to potter around the pre-Raphaelites. It also begs many questions about the modern development of a craft, which, as Lesley Millar suggests, says a lot about ‘how we divide space, both physically and architecturally'.

In relation to the World of Fashion, It is my understanding that as a result of exhibitions such as these, lace is experiencing a bit of a Post-Modern moment. Far from the renaissance of seasons past, where bobbin, needle and crocheted lace have featured in all their classic glory, this spring is witnessing a much more innovative approach inspired by a merger of the traditional and the technical. You only have to flick through the collections of SS12 to see myriad designers engineering new takes on an age-old concept, including Dolce and Gabbana who are incorporating guipure lace into their plastic macs. I, for one, am not wholly convinced, if there’s one thing this lace epidemic has taught me, it’s that I am a traditional girl who will always and forever find nothing more exciting than a good quality bra in exceptional black Chantilly lace.