Handmade: the New Labour

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What place remains in a fast, digital world for the slow, painstaking work of making things? Many artists still spend long hours working by hand on unique objects whether sculpture, furniture, drawing, fibre, even photography. In the light of increasing use of hands-off production the work of Ricky Swallow, Patrick Hall, Jan Nelson, David Trubridge, Christian Capurro, Bernhard Sachs, Robert Foster, Rosemary O'Rourke and many others take on a special significance. Writers Robert Cook and Mark Thomson give us their take on the consumer heaven of ever-newer digital and power tools and the purgatory of obsolete junk. Exhibition reviews, columns and obituaries. Guest Editor Kevin Murray.

Topic list: community, craft, cultural policy, design, indigenous culture, new technology, theory & philosophy.

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Articles in Vol 25 no 1, 2005

The Return of Labour?

Editorial by Kevin Murray

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Australian Drawing Now: Labouring Lightly

Feature by Kit Wise

The on again/off again love affair between drawing and contemporary art practice seems to have been going on ad nauseam. From the sixties through to the present day, ongoing tensions between the apparent values of traditional and conceptual art have resulted in much of today's appreciation for the reworking of both aesthetics in what has become a new labour of love. — More »

Bush TV's: Piliyi - Good One

Feature by Alison Alder

Nyinkka Nyunyu is an art and culture centre located on Warumungu land in Tennant Creek, right in the middle of the Northern Territory. From the time the idea came up to build something alongside the sacred site of Nyinkka Nyunya, art was always going to be an integral part of the project. The result of many brainstorming sessions amongst traditional owners of the land on which Tennant Creek stands was the idea of dioramas, or Bush TV's to provide the means to present history and contemporary life through art to a diverse audience. — More »

Domestic Arts in the White Cube

Feature by Sue Green

There exists an increasing number of artists - mostly women - creating art using what have been known, somewhat disparagingly, as domestic arts: knitting, crochet, sewing, tatting, embroidery. For many of these artists the choice of method is integral to what the work is saying, the making - the journey - as important as the result, even if that journey is not immediately obvious to the viewer. — More »

Getting Off Your Face With a Destructive Character

Feature by Justin Clemens

Christian Capurro's 'Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette' documents the act of erasure over a period of five years, with the artist asking family, friends, artists and others to each erase a page from the male fashion rag Vogue Hommes. Each 'rubber' was asked to record how long it took them to rub out their page, the results were then tallied. — More »

Hand to Mouse: Design and the Handmade

Feature by Grace Cochrane

There have always been cycles in the making of what we describe as art, crafts and design, where surges of new ideas have been followed by revivals of earlier values or reform movements that challenge both. The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, is working on an exhibition for late 2006, on the interface between art, design, industry and the values of the handmade. Cochrane's hope is that it will challenge audiences to look closely at some of the exciting working relationships that are possible. — More »

I Came to Japan Because of the Chopstick

Feature by Peter Timms

Timms' account of a personal journey through Japan and South Korea and the traditional history of fine pottery crafts that accounts for a large degree of Eastern culture. He here explores the distinctions and connections between Eastern and Western material culture as exemplified through the life and role of the chopstick. — More »

In the Wake of Gesture: Architecture and the Handmade

Feature by Ainslie Murray

Architecture has long since surrendered the tactile in favour of grander visions. Through an examination of Sandra Selig's recent work Synthetic Infinite at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the unique responses to architecture and the handmade that this work displays, Murray attempts to question how we might then consider architecture and our relationship with built matter to restore a direct connection with human experience. — More »

It's Not You, It's Me - I Just Don't, You Know, Think We're Compatible

Feature by Robert Cook

"It should go without saying that our responses to the handmade, the mass-produced and techno gadgetry are principally structured within and by fantasy worlds". Cook explores people's relationships to objects in a world that is perpetually developing and enhancing itself materially, or so it seems. — More »

Nurturing the Handmade

Feature by Rigel Sorzano

In interacting with an object, its physical properties are paramount; as a result, the power of objects to affect us becomes identified with their physical attributes, leading to an emphasis on making, and so linking making with authorship. Sorzano explores the process of object-making as "the work in our minds, the work in our hands, and the work as a result...". — More »

Parallel Universe: The Gray St. Workshops @ 20

Feature by Margot Osborne

Gray Street Workshop, which is this year celebrating its twentieth anniversary, has pursued a creative work ethic closely aligned to values of the handmade, not as an end per se but as a means to evolve a creative language grounded in the interplay between ideas and practice. — More »

Patrick Hall's Cabinets of Everyday Curiosities

Feature by Peter Hughes

For Hughes, Patrick Hall's cabinets recall the great elaborately decorated cabinets of the 17th century. Rather than mere decoration, Hall's cabinets express a poetry of the everyday that is neither a condescending celebration nor a critical analysis but a deeply personal response to his materiel. — More »

Pixel Perfect: The Craft of Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction.

Feature by Les Walkling

Walkling proclaims that 'something is being mourned that has to do with the physical object and its associated labour', in the meantime the distinction between amateur and professional photographer is lessening as this particular creative niche is becoming more automated. — More »

The Art of Outsourcing

Feature by Nicola Harvey

While our romantic inheritance imagines artists working in isolation, this is changing. Increasingly, successful artists are working with teams of technicians who contribute precious amounts of skill, time and experience to the final work. Harvey looks at the relationships between artists, apprentices and their creations within the realm of tactile, three-dimensional art and some of the apparent concerns associated. — More »

The Darkroom in the Age of Post-Film Photography

Feature by Martyn Jolly

In both amateur and professional photography the few multinational corporations that control the industry have collectively marshalled their marketing strategies to capitalise on recent advances in digital technology. Jolly looks at the shifting photographic trends, their viability and the increasing loss of intimate image-making. — More »

The Hand in Making

Feature by Suzi Attiwill

The Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial began in 1975 and every two years a collection of contemporary fibre textile work tours nationally to metropolitan and regional audiences. For Attiwill, guest curator of the 16th Biennial, the spark for the exhibition A Matter of Time came from Sue Rowley's wisdom: 'it is useful to think of craft in terms of multiple temporalities', A Matter of Time is an exploration of this usefulness. — More »

The Sounds of Silence

Feature by Damiano Bertoli

Through traditional method, an explicit residue of manual labour, and a constructed subject, Ricky Swallow's wooden work suggests a past tense, which leads the viewer backwards through the material history of the work. The Defining aspects of Swallow's approach are distinctly framed in the western tradition of the artisan and the language of figuration. — More »

Unpacking 'Il Cretino Veloci' or 'The Fast Idiot'

Feature by Mark Thomson

Thomson pays tribute to an increasing minority of Australians devalued for getting their hands in the 'mucky stuff''. As he proclaims '...people who make things with their hands for a living are seen as a hopeless anachronism rooted to the ground'. In an age where the majority of the Australian population now work in what are termed the service industries, the ability to apply ones motor skills are making for a society who rarely needs to use those 'funny slabs of flesh at the end of our arms'. — More »

Ian Chandler 1942 - 2004

Obituary by John Neylon

Ian Chandler 1942 – 2004 — More »

Artifically Reconstructed Habitats: Finola Jones

Review by Anna Zagala

Canberra Contemporary Art Space 13 August - 25 September 2004 Gertrude Contemporary Spaces, Melbourne 29 October - 20 November 2004 — More »

Batik and Kris: Duality of the Javanese Cosmos

Review by Joanna Barrkman

Perc Tucker Regional Gallery 10 September - 7 November 2004 — More »

Calling all Anti-Capitalist Pashtivists, fluxus reincarnators and Crafty Billboard Operators: Documenting the Uncollectable

Review by Royce W. Smith

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Issue Index