British Folk Art | Tate Britain Book

'This publication...traces a number of interesting thresholds

between the worlds of 'fine' and 'folk' art' (pg 6)

still from The House That Jack Built, 1958, British Pathé

• 'Every man is an artist' - Joseph Beuys

• Jeff McMillan's essay 'The House that Jack Built'

          pg 11 - 'British visual culture today draws from its own rich history of folk art. With artists like Tracey Emin making quilts and embroideries, Grayson Perry producing tapestries and pots, and Bob and Roberta Smith painting signs, what were once traditional approaches have been updated and embraced by contemporary art.

• Folk Archive (2005) - exhibition by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane

          pg 12 - 'Broadly speaking, outsider art involves a self-taught artist working in a particularly idiosyncratic, highly individual manner, often driven by compulsion, desire, or religious fervour'

          'A generalisation about folk art might be to say that it has its origin in tradition. It has been passed down and therefore is representative of a collective'

          The word folk 'works like an umbrella to cover many other terms such as 'vernacular', 'popular', 'rural', 'traditional' and is a second cousin to labels like 'self-taught', 'naive', and 'outsider'.

          'The exhibition spans some 300 years from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century - an end date that reflects the period before folk art arguably became a commodity or too self-conscious'

Crimean War quilt c.1850 - 1900

          pg 13 - 'In 1769 when the Royal Academy was established, there was a desire to distinguish the fine arts from crafts, so that 'no needlework, artificial flowers, cut paper, shell work, or any such baubles should be admitted'...'

          'A great quality to be found in many works of folk art is the inventive use of waste or excess materials...This is an art mostly by, and for, the working class'

          'Many of these works represent a kind of condensation: a thing boiled down to its essence. The sense of time, the sheer labour involved, along with the at times intimate, miniaturised scale, suggest an interior (or internalised) work...

          For sailors working at sea, this is evidence of killing time. For young girls, long hours spent embroidering alphabets and maps demonstrating that they had learnt useful skills, knowledge, commitment and maturity'