Marion Marshall,craft practitioner from Victoria, and active in the Craft Council within her State, writes her prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.
There seems to be a consensus that craft is in a state of crisis. But consensus or not, the observation of this alleged crisis is sterile if we do not place it against its background. Is this crisis unique to craft, or is it a manifestation of a more general crisis which extends across other cognate areas? If it is more general, does it nevertheless have special implications for craft?
One need not restrict this semiotic approach to an analysis of the objects of fashion given that the major role adopted by craftspeople in contemporary times is that of drawing attention to otherwise ordinary objects and processes by remaking them in a mode other than mass production.
Looks at the Jewellery Co-operative Fingers formed in 1976 in Auckland New Zealand. Fingers sells the work of 30 New Zealand jewellers with a managment partnership of 6 to 8 practising jewellers. The rest sell on consignment basis.
Now as a much older woman with another career as an artist I have been reconsidering my experience in Museums, reconsidering the structures of archaeology which grid and measure the chaotic site.
Exhibition review Contemporary Gippsland Artists
A touring exhibition initiated by the LaTrobe Valley Arts Centre
Morwell Victoria
University of South Australia Art Museum
9 April - 8 May 1992
Looks at the ceramic practice of Jill Smith. It often happens when people with different views and areas of expertise are brought together to solve a problem that something new emerges.
It turned out that 95% of the symposiasts were blissfully unaware that, starting with the TAFEs, they are already in the era of funding allocation on the basis of conceptually incoherent doctrines of an 'arts industry' with about as much relevance to their interests as atonal music has to the board of BHP.
Will the computers, mobile or immobile, take over craft work in the near or medium future? Are craftspeople doomed to the fate of the Indian hand loom weavers of the last century-- will their bones bleach the plains? The answer is........