Exhibition 

The seven lamps of artisanal beauty

10/09/2019


Until 8 September the Museo Centro Gaiás in Santiago de Compostela’s Cidade da Cultura de Galicia hosted ‘Thinking With Your Hands: Basketry, Pottery, and Jewelry of Galicia,’ for which the curator, Verónica Santos Farto, selected 250 objects made by 65 craftspeople, and the Madrid architect Izaskun Chinchilla did an exhibition design based on The Seven Lamps of Architecture. This book, published in 1849, is the magnum opus of John Ruskin, one of the all-time advocates of artisanship in the Arts & Crafts movement. Seven lamps – three represented graphically and four with structures – were each presided by two words that were food for thought. Links were thus established between sacrifice and sustainability, truth and transparency, power and equity, beauty and culture, life and ecology, memory and identity, and obedience and innovation. The first word of every pair of terms was the one used by Ruskin to name a lamp, and the second referred to a more contemporary values that have replaced or given a nuance to Ruskin’s positions.



Included Tags: