With These Hands: Craft in Art at the Laing Art Gallery
What do we see when we look at an image of someone making by hand? Is it simply a record of labour, or something deeper – a symbol of who we are, what we value, and how we live together?
The Laing Art Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition With These Hands (17 May – 27 September 2025) delves into this very question. Bringing together paintings, drawings, prints, and finely crafted objects, it explores how artists from the 1750s onwards have represented the act of making and mending. Far from straightforward depictions of everyday life, these works show how handwork has long stood for personal identity, social change, and cultural continuity.
A Knitting Party by Evelyn Dunbar (1940) © Crown copyright, Imperial War Museums.
Visitors are guided from genteel 18th-century drawing rooms to the grit of 19th-century workshops, from the rhythmic hammering of blacksmiths’ forges to the hum of wartime factories. Along the way, we see how the shifting contexts of industrialisation, the reorganisation of labour, the changing role of women, and the upheavals of two World Wars transformed both the practice and the perception of craft.
The Window Seat by George Frederick Watts (1861) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
One of the exhibition’s strongest threads is the role of women’s making. Silent stitching, once painted as a marker of domestic confinement, also emerges as a tool of expression and resilience. Portraits of needlewomen from the 18th to early 20th centuries reflect the tension between leisure, duty, and creativity, serving as a reminder that busy hands often concealed an active mind.
The Sail Loft by Ralph Hedley (1908). Laing Art Gallery.
The exhibition also captures the communal side of craft. Images of forges, carpenters’ shops, and sail lofts celebrate collective labour as both a necessity and an ideal. In times of upheaval, such images offered reassurance: proof that hand skills carried communities forward, whether in utopian visions of the 19th century or in the national effort of the World Wars.
With These Hands is as much about the present as the past. At a moment when making by hand is once again celebrated and valued for its environmental responsibility and its power to restore wellbeing, these historical works speak with fresh urgency. The inclusion of objects such as quilts, ceramics, embroidery, and basketry alongside paintings and prints underscores a central point: craft is never static. It adapts, evolves, and persists.
La Leçon de Crochet (The Crochet Lesson) by Mary Cassat (1901) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Featuring works by Mary Cassatt, Stanhope Forbes, Harold Knight, Evelyn Dunbar, and Ralph Hedley, alongside makers such as Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew, and local quilter Amy Emms, this exhibition draws on major loans from Tate, V&A, the Royal Academy of Arts, and regional collections.
Ultimately, With These Hands is both a reflection on craft’s past and a meditation on its enduring relevance – a reminder that the simple act of making continues to shape who we are.
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Further Information:
With These Hands is on now until 27 September 2025. For further details, please visit the following:
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Image Credits:
Lead: Henry Lamb (1883 - 1960), Girl Knitting (Portrait of Felicia, the Artist’s younger Daughter), (Detail), 1949 © estate of Henry Lamb / Bridgeman Images.
All other images as credited in photo captions.