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...

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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.